CORNEL WEST Mary Mahoney Carlson - PHIL 901 - 12/1/21 BIOGRAPHY Cornel West is a contemporary American scholar, philosopher, and political activist. He is also a best-selling author, and a prominent social critic, and is considered to be a leading voice on issues of race in America. He has held professorships at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale and is currently the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at Union Theological Seminary as well as being Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. Dr. West is a powerful orator, and can frequently be found on television or on social media. He also has an active schedule of speaking engagements and is personally involved in many progressive causes. He seems too learned to be embraced by popular culture and too popular to have sway in academia, and yet he manages both. - Hugh Muir, The Guardian, Oct., 2020 EARLY LIFE West was born on June 2, 1953, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and grew up in Sacramento, California, in a predominantly Black community. His family was close-knit and was active in their church, the Shiloh Baptist Church, founded in 1856. During West’s childhood, the church was led by the mesmerizing orator, Rev. Willie P. Cooke. Cornel became a self-professed Christian at 7 years old. From his parents, siblings and community, young Cornel derived “ideals and images of dignity, integrity, majesty and humility.” These values, he has written, provided him “existential and ethical equipment to confront the crises, terrors and horrors of life.” “I was a gangster when I was young. I had a Robin Hood mentality and tended to always want to support the weak against the strong, but sometimes it was cohesive and I really needed to fall in love with the power of education to find the right venue to express my rage. I still have a righteous indignation at injustice, no matter what form it takes.” - Cornel West FAMILY Cornel West’s mother, Irene Rayshell (Bias), was a teacher and principal, and his father, Clifton Louis West Jr., was a general contractor for the Department of Defense. His grandfather, Clifton L. West Sr., was pastor of the Tulsa Metropolitan Baptist Church. Irene B. West was the first African American teacher at Elk Grove Unified Elementary School, which is now named the Irene B. West Elementary School after her. I am who I am because somebody loved me, somebody cared for me, and somebody attended to me. I'll never, ever forget it. - Cornel West EDUCATION As a young man, West marched in civil rights demonstrations and organized protests demanding Black studies courses at John F. Kennedy High School, where he was student body president. He later wrote that, in his youth, he admired "the sincere Black militancy of Malcolm X, the defiant rage of the Black Panther Party, and the livid black theology of James Cone." In 1970, after graduation from high school, he enrolled at Harvard College and took classes from the philosophers Robert Nozick and Stanley Cavell. In 1973, He received a B.A. in Near Eastern languages and civilization. West then enrolled at Princeton University where he received a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in 1980, completing a dissertation under the supervision of Raymond Geuss and Sheldon Wolin, becoming the first African American to graduate from Princeton with a PhD degree in philosophy. “I think Sheldon Wolin is very important (especially his idea that) democracy is always a matter of ordinary people taking back their powers and targeting consolidated elite power. “ - Cornel West INFLUENCES Dr. West acknowledges many influences, from philosophers of the the ancient world to the modern, theologians from many traditions, African-American leaders from across the spectrum from the Black Panthers to civil rights leaders, the Transcendentalists, writers, playwrights and musicians, particularly Blues artists, and most especially, his mother Irene. Some of the most significant influences on Dr. West include: Rev. Dr. James Cone, Paulo Freire, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Plato, Malcolm X, Anton Chekov, John Dewey, John Coltrane, Friedrich Schiller, Abraham Joshua Heschel, St. Augustine, the Apostle Paul, and Reinhold Niebuhr. “James Cone was the theological giant in our midst who had a love affair with oppressed people, especially black people.” - Cornel West WRITING Dr. West has written 20 books and has edited 13. He has authored best-sellers, including: Race Matters, which was originally published in 1993 and became an instant classic, selling over 500,000 copies. Some of his other well-known works include: Democracy Matters, and his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. His most recent book, Black Prophetic Fire, offers a critique of nineteenth and twentieth-century African American leaders and their legacies. None of us alone can save the nation or world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so.” ― Cornel West, Race Matters PHILOSOPHY Dr. West’s philosophy can be described as Christian Socialist or Neopragmatist. He often references the Greek concept of paideia, which is the idea that a quality education should be focused on producing a whole, enlightened member of society. In the tradition of John Dewey, Dr. West believes that students need a “deep education, not schooling,” and calls on students to distinguish between material success and the social good. He calls himself a Chekhovian Christian and often makes Biblical references in his speaking and writing. He often writes about mortality and rebirth. He regularly quotes the Apostle Paul, saying that “we need to learn to die daily.” This fits with Dr. West’s admiration for Plato: one of his other frequent references is to the “turning of the soul” in Plato’s Republic. This is a poetic description of a shift from superficial things to the eternal. To be dogmatic is to be fearful of Socratic interrogation. - Cornel West SOCIAL JUSTICE Dr. West is also part of the tradition of Liberation Theology, and follows in the footsteps of Rev. Dr. James Cone and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King in that he believes in practicing his beliefs and creating good in the world. He is involved in many progressive causes and has contributed his time and his voice to those causes. One of the most important causes for Dr. West is that of police brutality. He has been an outspoken critic of the justice system. He has been taken into custody several times, from the 80’s, when he participated in anti-Apartheid protests, to the protests following the murder by police of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. During his time at Harvard, he advocated for the University to divest itself from for-profit incarceration and prison-related investments. “Some of the greatest freedom fighters have come through prisons” - Cornel West TEACHING Dr. West’s first teaching position was as an assistant professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. In 1984, he accepted a position at Yale Divinity School that eventually became a joint appointment in American studies. While at Yale, he participated in campus protests for a clerical labor union and divestment from apartheid South Africa. One of the protests resulted in his being arrested and jailed. As punishment, the University administration canceled his leave for spring 1987. As a result, he had to commute between Yale, in New Haven, Conn., and the University of Paris, where he was also scheduled to teach. “There are wonderful people at Harvard, we know that. It has a great tradition of Du Bois and so many others, but I discovered that I can only take so much hypocrisy,” - Cornel West TEACHING Dr. West returned to Union for one year (1987-88) before joining Princeton as a professor of religion and the director of the Program in African American Studies (1988-94). He left Princeton for Harvard in 1994 and taught jointly in the African American studies department and at the Divinity School. West returned to the Princeton Department of Religion in 2002, after a well-publicized falling-out with Harvard President Lawrence Summers. In 2012, West left Princeton for Union Theological Seminary. He continued to teach occasional courses at Princeton in an emeritus capacity. West returned to Harvard in November 2016, taking a non-tenured position as Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy, jointly appointed at the Harvard Divinity School and the Graduate school faculty of African and African-American Studies. West left Harvard in early 2021, after the University dismissed his request to be considered for tenure because, according to him, administrators’ thought his work “too risky” and “too fraught.” Dr. West is currently the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at Union Theological Seminary, his “perennial home”, as well as being Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. “Dr. West’s esteemed legacy of engaging the most pressing problems facing our world — including racism, poverty, sexism, and so much more — is an inspiration to all,” - Union Theological Seminary President Serene Jones PUBLIC SPEAKING Dr. West travels the country delivering lectures, being, in his own West ha words, “a bluesman in the life of the mind, a jazzman in the world of ideas, forever on the move.” “I’ve never spent a weekend at home. My calling beckons me. I’ve got places to go, from schools to community centers to prisons to churches to mosques to universities to trade unions. There’s academic lectures, political lectures, religious lectures. It’s just my regular weekly travel. The aim is to touch minds and settle souls; so you instruct as well as delight.” POLITICS Dr. West is a Socialist and has been a strong supporter of many progressive causes including proper funding for public education, fair labor practices, and anti-militarism. Dr. West describes “the structures and institutions of our present moment of predatory capitalism (which) pose such tremendous burdens. Spiritual burden, economic burden, political burden.” He has supported Democratic Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders in both of Sanders’ Presidential campaigns. Dr. West has had sharp words for the white supremacist movement in the United States and its allies, and has referred to former President Trump as “a gangster. . . everybody knows he is a pathological liar and a xenophobe.” “If only the war on poverty was a real war, then we would actually be putting money into it.” Cornel West DEBATE Dr. West has not shied away from controversy and has made his opinions known, even when it was not easy to do so. He has been a vocal critic of former President Barack Obama, who he has accused of supporting militarism in the same vein as the Bushes and Clintons and He felt that Pres. Obama was too close to Wall St. interests and did not attempt to improve the plight of those living in poverty in America. He also had a well-publicized debate with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. West has long characterized Coates as a protector of “neoliberalism,” a term commonly used by the left to describe the market-friendly, globalist policies of the Democratic Party, including Obama, over the past few decades. “The disagreement between Coates (and Obama) and me is clear: any analysis or vision of our world that omits the centrality of Wall Street power, US military policies, and the complex dynamics of class, gender, and sexuality in black America is too narrow and dangerously misleading. “ - Cornel West “Justice is what love looks like in public.” “There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price to pay for living a lie.” “If your success is defined as being well adjusted to injustice and well-adapted to indifference then we don’t want successful leaders. We want great leaders – who love the people enough and respect the people enough to be unbought, unbound, unafraid, and unintimidated to tell the truth.”
