Cornel West in the Hour of Chaos: Culture and Politics in Race Matters
1994; Duke University Press; Issue: 40 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/466795
ISSN1527-1951
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoCornel West is a socialist. That he is also a black man, writing out of speEric Lott cial concern for African American lives, makes his project even more difficult than it would otherwise be in left-unfriendly North America. Anyone possessed of a passing acquaintance with Harold Cruse's history of black radicalism within the ranks of the American Communist Party, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, or with Jesse Jackson's dance with the Democrats in the 1980s, knows how inhospitable the white left has been to race matters.' West surely knows it, too, and has made political, intellectual, and institutional choices with this knowledge. In Race Matters, at least, these choices have had a low yield.2 I take this as not only cause for lament but reason for principled, rigorous, left self-scrutiny. Looking hard at Race Matters helps clarify certain matters of culture and politics in current left thinking about race. The temptation, of course, is to cut Race Matters some slack. Look at that beautiful cover photo-so much quality lavished on a socialist! If the text is more primer than premier, it's at least nominally leftist and stands a fighting chance to compete with Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh and Jerry Seinfeld for rule of the public sphere. But it may be worth remarking that Race Matters is not (or not simply) an intellectual toning down in order to reach a wide readership; its chapters constitute some of Cornel West's central work over the last few years and were first published in places like Dissent, Tikkun, Praxis International, The American Prospect, Z, Joe Wood's Malcolm X: In Our Own Image, and Toni Morrison's Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power. Indeed a couple of these chapters have seen such wide circulation that they have become representative of West's positions.3 Race Matters, therefore, ought to be taken on its own merits. What follows is an attempt to do so, not least because West is now in a position to do great good or general harm. With profiles splashed across the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, the New Yorker, BBC's Channel 4, PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, Bill Moyers's World of Ideas, and many others, and his frequent television appearances supplementing an estimated two hundred lectures a year, Cornel West has taken the Great Leap Forward into political celebrity made on the left by only a very few-Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Susan Sontag.4 This is quite a prospect for a demoralized left, one that deserves open, frank, and honest attention. I give it, mind, as a comrade.
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