THE REDEMPTION OF CORNEL WEST
At the end of Black Prophetic Fire (Boston: Beacon, 2014), Cornel West plants a
troubling seed. “The Black prophetic tradition,” he suggests, “has tried to
redeem the soul of our fragile democratic experiment. Is it redeemable” (165)? Should you
be persuaded by the visceral wit of Charles Simic’s November 26 New York Review of Books blog “ A
Thieves’(sic) Thanksgiving,” you hasten to say “No.” With tongue in cheek,
Simic, a Serbian American and our fifteenth Poet Laureate, intimates that Wall
Street crooks are admired by their peers, by politicians and presidents on the
take, and by students in elite universities.
These thieves are admired because
they have transcended the rule of law.
Simic believes such mega-criminality might lead America to ruin or into
becoming “a genuine police state…as the end result of that insatiable greed for
profit that has already affected every aspect of American life.” Simic misses the target, or maybe he never
aimed for it. It is not greed for profit
but greed for power and hegemony that is enshrined in the founding documents of
the United States that is killing America. The criminality is systemic. When that recognition is juxtaposed with the
question posed by Cornel West, it is clear that America has never had a soul to
be redeemed. Puritan lies notwithstanding, God did not create the nation . People who dared to think they were created
in God’s image created the nation. A prophetic tradition will not redeem
America, but the tradition can redeem Cornel West and a few other people.
Having had a fling with fame, West
seems prepared in Black Prophetic Fire
to journey home like a sensible prodigal son and to receive the blessings of
his intellectual fathers ----David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and W. E. B.
DuBois. West seems to have renounced the
antics of a populist and returned to speaking like the radical bourgeois
thinker he has been since the
publication of The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989), which may be his
most brilliant work. Black Prophetic Fire is a provocative
dialogue with Christa Buschendorf, who also edited the exchange.
Unlike a traditional Socratic
dialogue, this one is artfully innovative in its use of shared authority. Buschendorf’s portions of conversation are as
bracing as West’s masterful remarks. The
conversation is orchestrated to display West’s radical intelligence at its very
best as he expounds with specificity about the minds and deeds of Frederick
Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and
Ida B. Wells. The flaw that merits
trenchant critique, however, is his embracing the mythology that such an entity
as Black America exists. You, echoing
the words of Cross Damon in The Outsider,
must remind him that like the wind the myth men have gone; the real men, the
last men envisioned by Margaret Walker in “For My People” have arrived.
West, of course, has the last words about the
prophetic tradition in the Age of Obama.
Despite his dwelling a bit too long in the garden of defunct Black
American myth, he succeeds in redeeming himself. What he proclaims bravely will
not sit well with the majority of his fellow Americans. He shall be castigated, if not crucified, for
breathing a truth. West preaches like a Baptist minister who is without sin to
an Anglican congregation. If you think
of his language as poetry, you find he speaks more like Melvin B. Tolson than
like Langston Hughes. Indeed, you could
devise a series of seminars by jotting down the names of theorists and artists
who have shaped West’s intellect and then reading what these figures have
written. It would be especially
important to read Anton Chekhov, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, DuBois, and Ralph
Waldo Emerson.
Prophecy, as West clearly reminds
us, is not about foretelling a future.
Its job is detecting the effective motions of cosmic evil and how those
motions operate to destroy the moral elements of humanity. As has long been the
case with Black prophetic tradition, what burns in Black Prophetic Fire “has a universal message for all human beings
concerned about justice and freedom” (164).
West has the integrity to avoid
selling impossible dreams. He is fairly
honest about how his beliefs and prejudices are grounded in religion and
multiple ideologies. In the context of
the tragedy in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014 and the more dreadful
tragedies that will be birthed in 2015 and thereafter, West’s prophecies
regarding the Age of Obama are as chilling as Alpha Phi Alpha ice. It would spoil your reading of the book to
say more than that West has weighed the feathers and found the Obama presidency
to be wanting. And all of us in varying
degrees can be redeemed by a very critical but very compassionate reading of Black Prophetic Fire.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
November 29, 2014
