Cornel West: Embrace an 'unapologetic love of justice'

In a soaring, often poetic 90-minute talk to an overflow crowd in Baker Hall, activist, educator and prominent public intellectual Cornel West challenged his audience to resist dominant forces of greed, moral weakness and the “immense impact of commodification” and stand for justice. Much like the generations of activists and fighters who came before them, today’s younger generation must honor the struggle and seize their power to effect change and embrace an “unapologetic love of justice.”

Too much is at stake to stay on the sidelines, he said. “This is the age of Ferguson,” said West, referring to the shooting of unarmed young African American Michael Brown by a white Ferguson, Mo., police officer, which set off a series of citizen protests that are broadly credited with inspiring the Black Lives Matter protest movement.

It is time, he said, “for a moral and spiritual awakening” where a focused commitment on social justice is a driving, strengthening influence. “You have to be morally fortified and spiritually intact to be a long-distance runner in this political realm….in this age of venality, when everything is for sale, and everybody is for sale.”

West said he had the privilege to grow up in a world not tainted by the pervasive, destructive influence of commodification. “I come from a tradition of people who often put a high value on the moral and spiritual dimension of being human,” he said. “I am who I am because I was loved. I was cared for. I grew up in a ghetto but it was a neighborhood – not a hood.”

It was that kind of background, he said, fortified by love, moral grounding, spirituality and a sense of purpose that produced generations of African Americans who have resisted the temptation to use the injustice and suffering inflicted upon them as an instrument against others.

“Yes, we’ve been terrorized, but we want liberty for everybody,” he said. “We haven’t given in to terrorism to get the freedom we’re after. We begin in our community, and we embrace each other and we embrace the world and our humanity. That’s integrity in the face of oppression. And you don’t learn that by osmosis.”

West framed his talk with the four questions posed by activist, scholar and prolific writer W.E.B. DuBois in The Black Flame Trilogy.

DuBois, he said, wanted the younger generation to have a Sankofa sensibility, drawn from the Akan tribe in Ghana that celebrates the quest for wisdom and cautions that the lessons and knowledge of the past should never be forgotten. “It’s important,” he said, “to always look back at what came before in order to produce a better future.”

Asked DuBois: What does integrity do in the face of adversity and oppression? What does honesty do in the face of lies and deception? What does decency do in the face of insult? How does virtue meet brute force?

West responded by heralding the courage of many who were prominent in the fight for equality: the mother of Emmitt Till, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglas, civil rights student leader Diane Nash, educator and activist James Lawson and “the progressive white brothers and sisters who showed up that grand summer before the Voting Rights Act and came together, straightened their backs up and took a stand. Integrity – what Jane Austen called ‘constancy.’ That’s what DuBois was trying to say.

“So we move from 1965 to 2016 and what do we see,” he asked. “Read the business papers. Scandal after scandal after scandal. Big money in politics, and we wonder why we end up with such mediocre candidates. I mean, it’s embarrassing. But that’s what commodification can do. That what corruption can do. We saw it in the Roman Empire. And now we’re seeing it in the American Empire.”

It’s not, he said, a question of skin pigmentation – it’s a question of character. “The color of your skin doesn’t mean you have moral integrity,” he said. “You have to make a choice.”

Despite the fact that West has been most recently in the news for his harsh criticisms of President Barack Obama – a man he enthusiastically embraced prior to the 2008 election—and what he generally described as a disappointing presidency, he devoted relatively little time to the current political landscape in his talk.

He did, however, disparage Republican contender Donald Trump as a “neo-fascist in the making” who is “bad for America but good for the corporate media,” and was sharply critical of Democratic contender and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the impact of neo-liberal policies on the world’s most vulnerable.

“Forty seven percent of black children live in poverty in the richest nation in the world,” he said. “That’s morally insane. The neo-liberals’ answer is to just turn their back and flatten the world, as Brother Thomas Friedman [New York Times columnist] would say. We don’t want a flat earth. We want an earth that’s preserved, not one that has all the life squeezed out of it for profit,” he said.

His clear preference is presidential candidate and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who, he said, embraces neo-populist principles.

“We have to allow the government to come to the rescue of people in dire circumstances,” he said. “Just like [George W.] Bush and Obama came to the rescue of big business. Because you can’t talk about race and class without being honest about where the money is going. It’s not as if they aren’t in the rescue business….It’s who they’re rescuing.”

His talk, which artfully wove together history, jazz, spirituality, literature, pop culture and politics, began and concluded with a standing ovation before West fielded several questions from the audience on the ineffectiveness and venality of the war on drugs, the prison-industrial complex, the importance of activism and the shortcomings of our educational system—including higher education.

“It’s a battle between market models and democratic models,” he said of the university system. “At an earlier level, it’s what they say: Rich kids get taught, poor kids get tested. At this level, colleges and universities require hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars to sustain. And where will it come from? On high. From big business and government. Now I have nothing against philanthropy. I just don’t confuse charity with justice.”

A university education, he said, should be about “the hearts and minds and souls of students—what it means to be a citizen who enters the public sphere….a citizen, not a consumer.”

A ‘keeper of black prophetic flame’

West was introduced by Tresolini Lecture organizer and University Distinguished Professor of Political Science Ted Morgan, who described him as a “powerful public educator and truly the keeper of the black prophetic flame.”

West returned the compliment, praising Morgan’s 39 years of exemplary teaching and research on the political movements of the 1960s and his tireless dedication to social justice. West also thanked the family of the late professor Rocco Tresolini, which has been supporting the Tresolini Lecture series on campus for decades and has been responsible for bringing a long line of legal luminaries to campus.

He recognized Saladin Ambar, associate professor of political science, and “long-distance brother” William Scott, professor emeritus of history and the first director of Lehigh’s Africana Studies program when it was launched in the fall of 1992.

“Now where’s James?” he asked, looking out over the audience to locate his former Princeton teaching assistant James Peterson, the associate professor of English who currently leads Lehigh’s Africana Studies program.

“Let me tell you, it went both ways. I learned as much from him as he did from me. Brother James, what a force for good you’ve been on this campus,” said West to resounding applause.

Noting that this is his third visit to Lehigh, West shared his understanding of the university, its founding, its rise during the heyday of steel production, and of local history, even applauding the pacifist character of early Moravians who settled in Bethlehem “There’s a sweet spirit in this place,” he said.

‘High-quality Socratic engagement’

Earlier in the day, West said he enjoyed an hour of “high-quality Socratic engagement” with a group of Lehigh students, where he spoke about the current political climate and the role they can play in an “intensely exciting and dangerous time to be alive.”

His advice for students included the following:

• “One should never, ever view oneself primarily through the lens of others. For black people, we should never view ourselves primarily through the white normative gaze.”
• “Education is itself an attempt to try to convince all of us to learn how to die. …We all have certain prejudices that need to die. Could be against Jewish brothers and sisters, could be Arab Muslims or whatever. History deposits inside of us things that are worthy to be killed. And how do you do that?

Critical reflection. How do you do that? Courageous engagement.”

• Photos by Christa Neu