Black Prophetic Fire

by Cornel West

  CHB: So often the argument is “But isn’t there progress? Not just that visual, symbolic progress, but the African American middle class is growing, after all, so what are you talking about?”

  CW: Yes, it’s true. And they could use that argument up until 2008, when the financial catastrophe took place owing to the greed of Wall Street bankers, when Black people lost 53 percent of their wealth.38 So we are seeing the relative vanishing of the Black middle class, most of whom had wealth in their homes; large numbers lost their homes. The predatory lending that was connected to the market bubble that burst—those bad loans were for the most part given to Black and brown lower-middle-class people. They’ve lost their homes, and so there is a transformation taking place. For example, even in the churches, they used to preach prosperity gospel, but now with the lack of prosperity, the material basis of their theology is called into question.

  CHB: Yes, I think, what you are talking about—the vanishing of the middle class—is a global development. But probably disproportionately so in the African American community, as always.

  CW: Absolutely. In America, whites lost 16 percent wealth, while brown people lost 66 percent wealth. It was worse among Latinos than among Blacks, who lost 53 percent. On a global scale, you do have the middle class contracting with oligarchic and plutocratic power expanding. Now, for the seven past months,39 75 percent of corporate profits were based on layoffs, so corporations are actually able to make big money by cutting costs, which are primarily labor costs. And then, of course, they are sitting on $2.1 trillion that they are hoarding because they are scared that the next collapse is going to leave them dry. So that what happens is that the Black middle class loses—a Black lumpenbourgeoisie under the American bourgeoisie. We never really had a solid Black bourgeoisie, E. Franklin Frazier says in ’57,40 and he is absolutely right. Even given the unprecedented opportunity the last forty years, the Oprah Winfreys, the Michael Jordans, and so on, once you shave off the entertainers who make big money, we are still beneath the American middle class in terms of wealth. And right now the white household in America has twenty times more wealth than the Black: $113,000 for the average white family, Black is $5,000, Hispanic is $6,000.41 And we are not even talking of the social neglect and economic abandonment of the poor, which is the kind of thing brother Tavis and I were accenting on the Poverty Tour. That has had no visibility since Martin was killed. Marian Wright Edelman has been heroic trying to make it visible, but she has had difficulty making it visible.42 Part of Tavis’s creative genius as a media figure is his ability to gain access to media sites to make things visible, so that even without a social movement you can go on a Poverty Tour and get the whole nation talking about poverty, from Nightline to CNN to C-SPAN to the New York Times, Washington Post. That’s unprecedented in so many ways. But in the absence of a social movement, that’s one of the best things you can do to try to shape the climate of opinion, try to have some impact on the public discourse in the country.

  CHB: And that influence is stronger, more powerful than in King’s days.

  CW: Yes. That’s true. Because King’s social movement was an attempt to dramatize issues of injustice, and the Poverty Tour, which is what brother Tavis and I did, really is an attempt to dramatize the issue of poverty without a social movement. Now, I think that the aim of putting a smile on Martin’s face in the grave is the highest criterion of a freedom fighter in America. And to put a smile on his face is to be willing to live and die and bear witness on behalf of those who are wrestling with all four of those issues: militarism, materialism, racism, and poverty. Now, I would include patriarchy and sexism—I would include homophobia as well—even though he didn’t talk about them, so that when we are talking about racism, we are talking about a species of xenophobia. We could really just say xenophobia as a whole, so it includes anti-Semitism; it includes anti-Arab racism, anti-Muslim sensibility, and so on. But my hunch is that’s probably the best we can do.

  I think Sheldon Wolin is probably right with his notion of fugitive democracy,43 where it is a matter of trying to generate and galvanize people to be organized and mobilized to bring power and pressure to bear, but know that the powers that be are going to either kill you, try to absorb you and incorporate you, or lie about you or try to undermine your movement by those weapons of mass distraction that we talked about before. It’s very difficult to conceive of how the kind of revolution that Martin really wanted can take place given current arrangements. Now, it could just be a matter of my limited imagination, but the Frankfurt School and Wolin and the others just make more sense to me. And I think that’s one reason why you have fewer persons who really want to put a smile on Martin’s face, because the possibilities of actualizing what he was calling for tend to be so small, and most people don’t want to fight for something that they don’t think can be actualized or realized—especially in America—rather quickly.

  CHB: It always impresses me that Noam Chomsky, an intellectual I appreciate very much, who is so marginalized—naturally—sharply analyzes the situation and sees the difficulties you were just talking about—of how change could come about—and yet always believes that people can do it. And I wonder how he sustains this belief, which seems to be based on some insight that it is possible.

  CW: We just had him at Princeton, and I had a chance to speak to him and introduce him, and brother Noam, deep down he is a Cartesian, he really is. So he believes in not just the power of reason but the power of transparency and the power of clarity as themselves fundamentally just agents of change. Beckett, Chekhov, Schopenhauer, they are not part of his world. I think he has a limited grasp of the role of the nonrational, and so he easily pushes it aside, so he really believes that once people are exposed to the clear analysis that he has, somehow they will catch on.

  CHB: That’s what Du Bois believed.

  CW: For a while, that’s right. He really believed that it is ignorance standing in the way.

  CHB: I think it’s, on the one hand, rationality versus irrationality, but on the other hand, it’s also about the interrelation of mind and body, because so much of how we look at the world, our perceptions, our orientations, are deeply ingrained in our bodies, and as embodied dispositions, they are persistent. Thus, according to Pierre Bourdieu, a change of habitus occurs only under certain conditions, mainly in moments of crisis.44 So that is something that one has to address.

  CW: You’ve got to come to terms with that. What happens is that the Cartesian element has its place because reason does have a role to play, but it can become a fetish; it can become an idol; it can become a form of false religiosity in order to sustain your optimism, and in some ways I think that’s true for Noam. You know who I think is a better example is my dear brother Howard Zinn. I just wrote an introduction to his writings on race that was recently published.45 Because Howard—like Noam—really believed in the power of reason, clarity, transparency, and analysis. But he also had a deep sensitivity to body, to nonrationality—or maybe nonrationality is not a good word—to trans-rationality—what culture is about—and so Howard had such a long view of things. Reminds me a little of Raymond Williams’s wonderful book The Long Revolution,46 which needs to be read and reread over and over again. And in that sense he is a little closer to reality in a way, whereas I think people like Wolin, they understand all the things that go into social transformation, and it’s always messy, always.

  CHB: What about King in that respect? What do you think?

  CW: I think King always understood the mess, and I think once he hit those issues of class in Chicago and empire in Vietnam, the mess became more and more Beckett-like, which means all you can do is try to lay bare illuminating analysis and try to live a life committed to justice and love and truth. That’s all you could do at that point. It’s just a matter of integrity, because what you are up against is such a mess, in a very technical sense—which is a term which Beckett uses,47 rather than Being in Heidegger—and King understood that, he really did.
And you wonder though—I mean, he died at thirty-nine—if he had lived to be sixty, what would Martin have done? That’s still a question. Some say he would have been a professor in Union Theological Seminary. So he would have been an activist but would be teaching as well, because you have to be able to sustain yourself with something; you can’t be an intense activist every week of your life the way he had done this from twenty-six to thirty-nine—thirteen years—you just can’t do that, you know, especially if you had kids and grandkids and things. But you never know. I know Martin would have been fundamentally in solidarity with the struggles of poor people. I really do. And I think that he would have been a countervailing voice and a countervailing force against the Obama administration, and he would have spoken out very loudly. Now, he spoke out very loudly among Black politicians of his day, when he said that the US Congress was turning “the war on poverty into a war against the poor.”48 And when he supported Carl Stokes as mayor, and Stokes refused to invite Martin on the stage when he won,49 Martin was very hurt. Martin was too radical. He had come out against Vietnam already. He was very hurt, and he would say over and over again, “These Black politicians kind of sell out just as quickly as any white politician. It’s about the people!”

  Now you see, Huey Newton and company, they loved that about Martin; even Amiri Baraka,50 who Martin met before he died. Baraka was just telling me about that wonderful encounter that he and Martin had in ’68 in March prior to the death in April, and they loved that about Martin, because they knew that his critique of Black bourgeois politicians was a powerful one. Though he supported these folks, they used him; they used his prowess, his charisma for their campaign, and then they win and they won’t touch him with a ten-foot pole. Martin said: “What the hell is going on here?” They know what they do, you know. They know what they do. They got the big business community, the permanent government, to relate to and so forth.

  I think if Martin had lived, he would have been critical of the later rule of Mandela as president of South Africa, given his complicity with the business class and given his willingness to in some ways downplay the plight of the poor of South Africa as he moved into the mainstream. You can see the same kind of Santaclausification, the same kind of complicity with the business elites in South Africa, the embrace by Bill Clinton, the embrace by Richard Stengel, the managing editor of Time magazine, so that any time now you talk about Mandela, Clinton and Stengel pop up rather than Sisulu and Slovo,51 who were revolutionary comrades of the revolutionary Mandela, who spent twenty-seven and a half years in prison, you see. Martin would understand the ways that people’s names are promoted and sustained by corporate money and elites who protect their names, but he would resist that kind of sanitizing, which is to say he would be critical of the way that he has been sanitized, too. In some ways it’s probably an inevitable process, but even given its inevitability, it has to be criticized, because it is a shift away from the truth. And there’s a distancing from the truth. He would still have great respect for Mandela, don’t get me wrong, but he would be critical of that process. I think Mandela was critical of this process himself. He told me that when we met, when I gave that Mandela lecture and talked about the Santaclausification of Mandela himself in Africa. I think Martin would resonate with that. No doubt. There is no doubt that the great Nelson Mandela was the most courageous of men and most genuine of revolutionaries—yet as president of South Africa he ruled in a neoliberal manner.

  Ella Baker, 1964

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Heat of Democratic Existentialism

  ELLA BAKER

  Our project gained momentum, and so did the Occupy movement. The demonstration camp in New York City’s Zuccotti Park triggered the vital question of all political movements—and especially grassroots movements—how to organize and mobilize. No figure embodies more convincingly than Ella Baker the genius of grassroots organizing in the civil rights movement. Her deep commitment to democratic decision making turned her into an ideal choice for our next conversation, which took place in summer 2012, when the Occupy movement was at its height. With Ella Baker we opened up the field of the female voices within the Black prophetic tradition. The women, in contrast to their charismatic male companions, had not just been sanitized but, worse, marginalized.

  CHRISTA BUSCHENDORF: In our three previous conversations we talked about Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr. Even when we consider the tremendously rich tradition of African American intellectuals and activists, these were obvious choices. After all, all three were considered towering figures, if not the most towering intellectuals of their time, by their contemporaries as well as by posterity. To many, our choice to speak about Ella Baker will be much less evident, although she clearly belongs to the exclusive group of long-distance runners, i.e., freedom fighters who devote their whole lives to the struggle for freedom and justice. However, her life’s work is more difficult both to access and to assess. First, as a highly skillful organizer, she often became an indispensible member of the organization for which she chose to work, but she never stood in the limelight of the movement. Second, while she held concise theories of social change and political action, she never put them down in writing. There is no memoir; there is no collection of essays. There are just speeches, a few newspaper articles, and interviews, but apart from that, we rely on biographers who consulted her papers and spoke to the people who knew her personally. Third, her very theory of political action is decidedly group-centered in that she firmly believed in a kind of grassroots organizing that would allow the poor and oppressed to get actively involved in the fighting. To Baker, the ideal activist was not the charismatic figure of the prophet who mobilizes the masses by mesmerizing speeches but an unassuming person who helps the suppressed to help themselves. As she put it in 1947, “The Negro must quit looking for a savior, and work to save himself.”1 And twenty years later, with regard to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which she cofounded, she maintained, “One of the major emphases of SNCC, from the beginning, was that of working with indigenous people, not working for them, but trying to develop their capacity for leadership.”2

  If, then, Ella Baker may not be as obvious a choice as Douglass, Du Bois, and King, she nevertheless is, I think, a very obvious choice for you. So could you just start by giving us an assessment of why you cherish her personality and her work in the civil rights movement?

  CORNEL WEST: I think in many ways Ella Baker is the most relevant of our historic figures when it comes to democratic forms of leadership, when it comes to a deep and abiding love for not just Black people in the abstract or poor people in the abstract, but a deep commitment to their capacities and their abilities to think critically, to organize themselves, and to think systemically, in terms of opposition to and transformation of a system. When we think of the Occupy movement—we do now live in the age of Occupy in this regard—and Ella Baker’s fundamental commitment to what Romand Coles calls “receptivity”—Coles’s work also was quite powerful in terms of Ella Baker’s legacy3—learning to receive from the people, not just guide, not just counsel, not just push the people in a certain direction, but to receive from the people the kinds of insight that the people themselves have created and forged in light of a tradition of ordinary people generating insights and generating various visions. And so it’s grassroots in the most fundamental sense of grassroots. And I don’t think that even Douglass, in all of his glory, and Du Bois, in all of his intellectual genius, and King, in all of his rhetorical genius, have that kind of commitment to the grassroots, everyday, ordinary people’s genius in this sense. And of course, there is a gender question as well: her powerful critique of patriarchal models of leadership, including especially messianic models of leadership, which ought to be a starting point for any serious talk about organizing and mobilizing and social change in the twenty-first century.

  In addition, I was just in dialogue with my dear brother Bob Moses.4 He spent a whole year at
Princeton, and his office was right across the hall from mine. Of course, for him, Ella Baker is the grandest figure in radical democratic praxis, and he is very much a disciple of Ella Baker. He is quite explicit about that, very explicit that charismatic leadership, messianic leadership is something that he rejects across the board. But I think what comes through is that Ella Baker has a sensitivity to the existential dimension of organizing and mobilizing, and what I mean by that is that for her political change is not primarily politically motivated. This goes back to her early years in the Black Baptist women’s missionary movement. When she talks about humility with the people, not even for the people but with the people, when she talks about service alongside the people, and when she talks about everyday people, everyday people’s capacities becoming more and more manifest at the center of the movement, not something that is just used and manipulated by messianic leaders, but at the center of the movement, that’s a kind of democratic existentialism of a sort that I see in her work—and I see in Bob Moses’s. But you see it in very few people’s works.