Brother West

by Cornel West

  They resented Ewart Guinier, Jr., who had been appointed the first head of Harvard’s Department of Afro–American Studies. Guinier was certainly not a scholar—he didn’t even have a Ph.D.— but he had forged a distinguished career as a trade unionist and political activist. He’d gone to Harvard as an undergraduate where he’d been spit on by white students and barred from the dorms. He’d gone through discriminatory hell and had little use for the Harvard administration. That, of course, made him a favorite of many student radicals. With his enormous white Afro and toughminded anti-establishment attitude, Guinier was beloved by the students.

  I could understand why the old guard reacted so strongly against Guinier. Their scholastic structure was under attack. Despite my love for many of those venerable professors, I opposed the old guard. I stood with my fellow students, convinced then— as I am now—of the need to break down the old paradigm that tended to marginalize black humanity.

  “CLIFF,” I SAID, “YOU AIN’T GONNA believe this, man.”

  “What’s wrong, Corn?”

  Cliff knew something was wrong because I hardly ever called from college. We couldn’t afford it.

  “Calling you from jail, bro.”

  “Jail!”

  “The Cambridge police took us. We down here now, right across the street from the City Hall.”

  “What happened?”

  “Accused of rape.”

  “Rape!”

  “Me and my two roommates. They hauled all three of us down here.”

  “Corn, I can’t believe it.”

  “Girl down the hallway got raped. Said it was a black dude. So they just came by and arrested us.”

  “I’ll get a plane right now,” said Cliff. “I’ll be there in the morning.”

  “Don’t do that, man. Let me see if I can get it worked out first. None of us touched the lady, so there’s no evidence of any kind.”

  “Is she white?”

  “She’s white.”

  “Then the police don’t need no evidence. I’m catching a plane.”

  “Stay put for a day or two, Cliff. And don’t say anything to Mom or Dad. I don’t want them worrying.”

  “You know a lawyer?”

  “We’ll get someone to help us. But if you don’t hear from me in a couple of days, then head on out here.”

  I had good reason to worry. This was the first year the Harvard dorms were coed. The idea of men and women living on the same floor was worrisome to some. The idea of black men being close to white women was even more worrisome to others.

  My roommates and I, all black brothers, found ourselves in the lockup, no questions asked. We demanded a lawyer, but the lawyer didn’t come around in time to spring us for the night. We were given no information except that we were suspects in a rape charge. Didn’t matter that the woman said she was raped by one man. All three of us were being held.

  We each could account for our whereabouts when the rape happened. Our innocence was absolutely provable, but when you’re sitting in a cold jail cell, you start thinking about the jacked-up cases involving so-called sexual assaults by black men on white women. You start worrying that, no matter the facts, the system is designed to hang you. You work your head off in high school; you get good grades. Against all odds, you make it into Harvard and then, just like that, you wind up spending your young life in prison for something you didn’t do.

  “They can rig this thing anyway they wanna,” said my roommate, Brother Paul.

  “They probably already have,” said my roommate, Brother Lenny.

  “This is some funky stuff,” I said.

  I hardly slept that night, and when I did, nothing but nightmares.

  In the morning, we were called into an office to face the girl. We knew her and she knew us. She looked frightened and confused. As terrified as I was about what could happen to me and my friends, my heart went out to her.

  The white detective doing the interrogation was strong-minded and insistent. His questioning was harsh.

  “You sure you were raped?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re sure it was a black man?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it these men?”

  “It was only one man.”

  “Well,” said the detective, “was it one of these three?”

  She swallowed hard before answering. Only a few seconds passed, but, man, it felt like a lifetime.

  “No,” said the lady.

  We exhaled.

  “You sure?” asked the detective.

  “I’m sure.”

  “I’m not sure you’re sure,” said the man. “I think you’re afraid. These guys can’t hurt you anymore.”

  “They never did hurt me.”

  “I want you to close your eyes now,” said the detective, “count to ten and then open them again.”

  She closed her eyes, counted to ten, and opened them.

  “Okay,” he said. “Take a deep breath and look around. These guys live right down the hall from you. They’ve been watching you. They’ve been studying you. They have access to you. I know these kinda guys all look alike, but study them, study them good.”

  She studied us. Again we held our breath. Again, this woman spoke the truth. “They didn’t do it,” she said.

  Yet the more she exonerated us, the more the detective pushed her. For a third time he asked her to reconsider her assessment, and for a third time she held fast. Much to the chagrin of the Cambridge Police Department, we were released. And we were so glad that the white sister told the truth. Her example convinced me even more how sublime the courage to bear witness to truth and justice can be.

  WHAT’S GOING ON:

  LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

  AND/OR AL GREEN?

  EDUCATION AT HARVARD HAD TO do with learning the masters. My masters were the world’s leading philosophers who wrestled with the questions of how to live. I devoured books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Though I read voraciously, I like to think I also read critically. In the great Socratic mode, I was taught to question, question, question. But if the thinker was astute, if his ideas were original and his explanations eloquent, I could vigorously question and still remain fascinated.

  Early on, I didn’t embrace a Cartesian tradition or dream of transparency. That’s the thinking that says reasoning leads to indubitable certainty. I embraced a sense of history, like Hegel or Marx, so that all reasoning is contextual—yet truth does exist even if we never fully reach it.

  Now thinkers like Hegel and Marx had subtle minds. Their critiques demand careful study. And naturally I believe that critical energy, applied to any body of information, can unearth some truth. But for every unearthing, you don’t find absolute truth— you find another fallible truth, and then still another. That’s because each revelation is tied to another concealment. You reveal what’s been concealed, only to repeat the process into infinity. Enlightenment has no end. The paradoxes are never resolved.

  In 1971, at age eighteen, my paradoxes went unresolved. At age fifty-six, the same is still true. I was excited about discovering my calling. I had to teach. I still have to teach—teaching as I had been taught—with loving passion for uncovering and recovering vital knowledge and wise insights that lead to intellectual clarity and moral growth.

  The knowledge and insights could be found in textbooks, but they were also just as powerfully present in music. The music contained the paradoxes, expressed the paradoxes, and exploded the paradoxes with such a sense of heightened joy and rhythmic wonder that all we could do was dance the night away.

  It was in 1971, working and studying and dealing with an America in the throes of massive confusion, that I heard Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. It was everything I wanted, everything I needed. It was the ideological/theological feast of funk that got me—and countless others, black and white, yellow and brown— through these years of uncertainty and fear. Marvin worked with uncertainty and fear. They were his emotional clay. He molded the
m into things of lyrical beauty. His answer to the profound question “What’s going on?” was in the imagery of his songs. Police brutality. Ghettoes ravaged by drugs. Boys going off to die in an unconscionable war. A planet ravaged by greed and waste. A political landscape of hopelessness. Yet hope comes. Hope emerges from his gut-bucket black Christian faith, a faith powerful enough to transcend the sins of his own Christian father and have Marvin believe—believe to the very end of his life—in the transformational miracle of love seen from the cross. Like Marvin’s ethereal suite of songs, that love does not deny calamity or scandal. It sees injustice, just as Jesus saw injustice, as a worldly reality to be transcended through a funky faith. Marvin calls this faith the “Wholy Holy.” It’s nothing more or less than the love ethos, the love that lasts forever, the love that leads us from darkness to light.

  So I was listening to Marvin, I was listening to Stevie telling us Where I’m Coming From, and then, at the start of my junior year at Harvard, I was listening to the Spinners singing about “How could I let you get away?” when I spotted this brown-eyed angel. I had to ask her to dance. We took off—mind, body, and spirit—and the Spinners were working it out, the Spinners were saying it for me: “Girl, I’m kinda glad you walked into my life.” The Spinners were bringing us closer together, Philippe Wynne whispering in this girl’s ear, “It takes a fool to learn that love don’t love nobody.” The Spinners breaking into “Mighty Love.”

  This sister had style. Beauty. Brilliance. She was a knockout. I was smitten and smitten bad. One dance led to another. She was a freshman at Radcliffe and her name was Mary Johnson. Years later she’d become the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard. But on that night of nights, when fate smiled and the planet tilted in my direction, she was just a young thing, filled with promise and boundless energy. Soon she’d become the most important woman in this stage of my life.

  That night, after the dance, I walked her back to her dorm. She asked me what courses I was going to take in this, my junior year.

  “I’m going to take eight courses each semester so I can graduate a year early.”

  “That’s crazy,” she said. “I’ve never heard of that.”

  “Harvard hasn’t either, but I’ve got to do it. My sister’s going off to college and Mom and Dad are running out of money. If I graduate early with high grades, I can get a full scholarship to graduate school. That way next year will be free.”

  “And Harvard is letting you do this?” asked Mary.

  “At first they said no. As a philosophy major, I’d be required to take a year-long junior colloquial and a year-long senior colloquial. Those couldn’t be squeezed into two semesters. But as it turns out, I’ve taken most of the courses required for a major in Near Eastern Languages and Literature—Hebrew, Aramaic, Mesopotamian thought. So I’ve switched majors. This year all I have to do is take sixteen courses and write a thesis in Near Eastern Languages and Literature.”

  “That’s all?” Mary laughed.

  “That’s all,” I assured her. “In my heart, I’m a philosophy major. That’s my fundamental intellectual identity.”

  “How can you be accepted into a graduate philosophy program if you’re not a philosophy major?”

  “That worries me, but maybe they’ll take me anyway.”

  “Just because you’re cute?” she asked slyly.

  “No, but by then I’ll have a cute girlfriend, and she’ll be able to convince them of my worth.”

  “Really, Cornel, how are you going to pull it off?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  “So you’re making it up as you go along,” said Mary.

  “A bluesman in training,” I said. “We’re moving through any way we can.”

  THAT WAS THE YEAR I FELL for Mary Johnson, fell in love so completely I hardly knew what hit me. I loved falling in love and the feelings it gave me. I loved loving a woman as strong and determined as Mary, loved seeing her absorb everything Harvard had to offer, loved having an intellectual companion and a lover who liked James Brown almost as much I did. Life reached a new level of happiness. I took the sixteen courses in those two semesters and passed with flying colors. I knew I had to keep moving so I applied to Princeton’s Ph.D. program in philosophy—then considered the best in the world—and was accepted on a full scholarship.

  There’s one moment in that final undergraduate year that I’ll never forget: I was all set to go out and see Al Green at a nightclub in downtown Boston. He was hot as he could be with “Tired of Being Alone” and “Let’s Stay Together.” There’s no way I was going to miss my favorite soul balladeer. On my way out of the door, though, I just happened to flip open the first page of a book I’d picked up earlier in the day. It was Wittgenstein’s Vienna by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, a depiction of the cultural world of Ludwig Wittgenstein that included classical composers Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler, and historical sociologist Max Weber. It wasn’t that I forgot about Brother Al—no one could ever forget Brother Al—but this dang book was absolutely riveting. I tried to stop reading, but couldn’t. Wittgenstein’s courage and genius got to the core of who I was and wanted to be. I never did get to Al Green’s show, but Wittgenstein’s performance in the text was astounding.

  WHEN I GRADUATED MAGNA CUM LAUDE in three years, the Sacramento paper ran a long article on me with a big picture. They went over to interview Dad. They told him they needed thirty minutes to ask a battery of questions about how he had raised his children. But Dad being Dad broke it down beautifully. He said, “I don’t need thirty minutes. Fact is, I don’t even need one minute. I can give you the answer in four words. Be there for them. Give your children all the time they need.”

  “That’s it?” asked the reporter.

  “That’s it,” said Dad. “Be there for them.”

  And he was. He always was.

  DAVID HUME AND

  ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER IN

  THE BROOKLYN NAVY YARD

  I WAS KNEE-DEEP SURE-ENOUGH all-the-way in love. Mary Johnson had won my heart. I had won hers. We were so tight that the summer after ’d graduated, she invited me to live in her family house in Springfield Gardens, a quiet section of Queens. Her Dad, who had traveled the world, liked me. He saw me as his potential son-in-law and hooked me up with a desk job at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I did the clerical work assigned to me each day in a hurry, giving me enough time to study and concentrate on the two figures who were saying the most to me: Schopenhauer and Hume. The two men were linked: Schopenhauer, the only great German philosopher who could read English, actually wrote a long introduction to Hume’s philosophy. Of course I’d been reading Schopenhauer since childhood—Schopenhauer who put will over reason and mystery over fact; Schopenhauer who dealt so profoundly with the questions of sadness and sorrow. I kept his essays and aphorisms under my pillow.

  That summer I found myself writing little Schopenhauer-styled notes to myself. “What’s the point of living?” “Why not see what nonexistence is all about?” “When this consciousness ends, what does the new consciousness look like?” “Do I dare step into the void?” “Is there a void?” I didn’t fall into depression. I was happy with Mary and eager to get to graduate school. There was no reason to be depressed. And yet these thoughts of nonexistence rattled through my daily thoughts.

  These were not suicidal thoughts as is normally understood— the usual despair that accompanies that state of mind was not present. No, it was nothing on par with the mental health crises that others have faced. Rather, I was curious to see whether, when these lights go out, other lights come on. I’d been entertaining these thoughts since I was a kid back in Sacramento. But the thoughts never turned into action because of a singular insight: The thoughts were narcissistic. They involved only me and my philosophical query. I thought of the people I would hurt—Mom and Dad, Cliff and Cynthia and Cheryl. Mary would be devastated. So would my friends. So I stopped the notes and put away Schopenhauer. But not for long. To t
his day, Schopenhauer remains one of my closest companions.

  David Hume became an even closer companion. Hume’s still my man. Gotta teach a course on him at least once every two years. Gotta have his books by my bedside. Gotta keep reading the brother. He is the finest philosophic mind in the English language. Back in the summer of 1973, I was preparing for an oral exam at Princeton in September. Even though they had admitted fourteen of us to the graduate program, they reserved the right to weed out four or five if we didn’t do our summer preparation. That meant choosing one legendary philosopher and not only absorbing his entire work, but all the scholarship on him as well. Hume was my choice cause there’s no one like him.

  Hume was a Scottish genius who lived in the eighteenth century. I started out with his A Treatise of Human Nature, written when he was in his late twenties. At twenty-seven, he had a nervous breakdown. I related to his intensity and eagerness to know. He put down religion. He even put down conventional knowledge. He said, “Reason is, and only ought to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” He was an iconoclast who questioned fearlessly. His book, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published after his death, is the most profound critique of any religious faith. His atheism challenged my faith but never destroyed it. He understood dread—he himself had experienced the death shudder. David Hume was a soul brother.

  Mary Johnson was a soul sister. I was so head-over-heels that one Sunday afternoon I invited her to ride the subway into Manhattan with me.

  “Where we going?” she asked.

  “You’ll see, baby,” I said.

  I waltzed her into St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, dropped to my knees, presented her with a ring and said the words for the first time in my life (though, I hasten to add, not the last): “Will you marry me?”