Brother West

by Cornel West

  “That’s part of the problem, Professor West. The Emperor’s throne is in that very sanctuary where your ceremony will take place. The throne cannot and will not be desecrated by a marriage that is not sanctioned by the church. I strongly suggest that you formally convert.”

  “I already said that’s out of the question,” I said.

  “I don’t see why. You’re a sophisticated scholar. You must understand that Christianity in America means nothing. It’s shallow. It’s little more than a commercial on television, a superficial non-theology espoused by preachers looking for fame and wealth. You become an Ethiopian Orthodox, Professor West, and you’ll have the most glorious wedding in the history of modern Ethiopia.”

  “I’m afraid, my good brother, that you have a misunderstanding. I’m very serious about being a black Baptist. Fact is, I’m as serious about being a black Baptist as you are about being an Ethiopian Orthodox.”

  “But surely you see that in America, Professor West, Christianity is just another consumer choice. I saw it in the seminary. I saw black seminarians switch back and forth from one denomination to another like children trading candy. It meant nothing. It was a whimsical and thoughtless process.”

  “Yes,” I said, “there’s more denominational mobility in America because we have more choice than, say, you have in Ethiopia. And in many parts of the country religion doesn’t cut as deeply as I would like. No argument there. I could critique American Christianity all day long—and I have. But your description of the folks you encountered in seminary does not fit this Negro at all. This Negro is a believing Baptist. And this Negro, with or without your help, will marry Elleni Gebre Amlak in that grand church in Addis Ababa.”

  My man backed down a bit. “I won’t do it, but if you can find a priest who will, then I’ll drop my objections.”

  So I went on a hunt to find the righteous priest to do the job. It was something like locating a Philip Berrigan, the left-wing Roman Catholic renegade. In Ethiopia, though, such rugged individualists within the church do not have the public profile that they do in the U.S. No matter. I found such a priest, and the wedding was on.

  THE WEDDING WAS SOMETHING TO BEHOLD. Blessings, blessings, blessings. Blessing surrounded me. My brother Cliff, my best man. My precious mom. My precious dad. Elleni’s magnificent mother. And in the center of it all, my radiant bride. The grand Coptic cathedral, which had been closed tight during that most brutal of communist regimes, was recently reopened. It was a time of celebration and gladness. The wedding itself was organized by a committee of leading Ethiopian citizens. The throne of Haile Selassie was brought out. Crowns were placed on our heads. I was given an honorary Amharic name: Ficre Selassie, “Spirit of Love.”

  The blessed event, though, was not without tension. Within Elleni’s family, there were a group of rebellious cousins who violently opposed our union. We were never clear about the reasons behind their opposition, only that they considered my marriage to Elleni an outrage. Then came alarming reports: the rebels were set on assassinating the newlyweds. I had to send Mom and Dad home early. Cliff stayed by our side. Elleni and I slept with guns by our pillows, a militia guarding the house. Then we had to go underground. It was a serious situation. Our lives were on the line, even as our lives turned impossibly and extravagantly beautiful. Catastrophe shadowed joy, fear fought with faith. Finally, the threats subsided. We came back to the United States, determined to spend at least two months a year in Ethiopia. Despite everything, Africa had become my second home.

  What I saw in Ethiopia was a people who have never been colonized by Europeans with the exception of Eritrea. They’re free of the mind manipulations engineered by white supremacists. They’ve never been fooled into believing that they’re less than human. The result is a feeling of self-assurance. They understand the value of their deep culture and unique civilization. Their history is one of epic struggle—against every conceivable kind of negative power and corrosive force, from soil erosion to corrupt tyrants. Yet their humanity persists, strong, steady, clear of the self-doubting notion implanted by cultures that considered themselves superior.

  Ethiopia nourished me. Ethiopia changed me. It gave me a new and compelling point of view of what it means to be both African and American. I crossed back and forth between two cultures, and in doing so found myself immersed deeper in both.

  I particularly enjoyed trying to reform the humanities curriculum at Addis Ababa University after the collapse of communism. In my deliberations and my lectures I suggested large doses of Plato, Dewey, Chekhov, Du Bois, and Morrison.

  A year after our wedding, Elleni and I were in Addis Ababa for another ceremony, one in which Elleni’s mother transferred her house to us. Another amazing ritual, this one lasted five hours. Elleni’s family told stories about their own struggles—and the struggles of their nation—that had split them apart and brought them together. The narratives were riveting, epic tales of an ancient line of patriarchs and matriarchs who had fallen and risen, only to fall and rise again. We laughed uproariously, we wept openly, we exposed our hearts and, at the end, we kissed the feet of Harigewain Mola, Elleni’s brave and steadfast mother.

  In the preface to Keeping Faith, written two days after this ritual, I reflected upon my divisiveness at this juncture of my life. I was bequeathed a home in Ethiopia. I had an excellent job at Princeton University. Where did I really want to live?

  I wrote, “After nine generations of family roots in America, I feel an urge to leave. This urge rests on neither a romantic attachment to Africa nor a paternalistic commitment to uplift Ethiopians. Yet Africa does have a special appeal to me that Asia or Antarctica lack. And my project of prophetic criticism does commit me to promote the wise expansion of democratic practices in Ethiopia— as elsewhere. My thoughts of making Ethiopia my ‘home’ are not based on brutal experiences of being black in America, or the relative paucity of enjoyable relations with Americans of all hues and colors. But, in all honesty, the extent to which race still so fundamentally matters in nearly every sphere of American life is—in the long run—depressing and debilitating. And my good fortune to have such fine friends across the racial divide is certainly not sufficient reason to be naïvely optimistic about America.

  “To put my cards on the table, the decline and decay in American life appears, at the moment, to be irreversible. Yet it may not be. This slight possibility—the historic chance that a window of opportunity can be opened by our prophetic thought or action— is, in part, what keeping faith is all about.”

  I went on to say that “I do not harbor vulgar anti-American feelings—I’m too much of a radical democrat to overlook how difficult it is to hammer out democratic practices over time and space.” I tried to express the agony of my ambivalence: “Loving family and friends, the pleasures of American popular music and humor, the opportunities to pursue the life of the mind and the chance to help make America more democratic and free are major impediments to leaving the country. Yet … the idea that the deferred dream of black freedom may, out of pessimism, dry up like a raisin in the sun or, out of nihilism, simply explode is too much to entertain. The only options are to stay ‘at home’ in exile in America and fight what may be a losing battle, or go to my ‘house’ as an exile in Ethiopia and fight on a different front the same battle—a battle that holds up the bloodstained banner of the best of Euro-American and New World African modernities. I am sure that Ethiopia and Old World African modernity have much to teach me. Maybe I am simply too busy fighting in America to shift terrain as I approach forty.”

  In fact, I didn’t shift terrains. I remained in America. Several significant events—sudden shifts that I could have never anticipated—reshaped my life.

  RACE MATTERS

  I AM MORE A NATURAL READER than natural writer. If I were told I could never read another book again, I’m not sure I could survive. I read a minimum of three hours a day, regardless of my schedule. If I were told I could never write again, I have no doubt that
I’d be fine. That isn’t to say that my writing isn’t born out of passion. It is. But my writing requires a concerted effort and forced discipline. Conversely, I read as easily as I breathe.

  After stalling in the ’70s, by the late’80s I had a found a good writing groove. I felt that I had something to say. Lectures, talks, and other forms of teaching had become a strong outlet, but my desire to reach more people moved me to write in what I hoped might be a popular vein. At the same time, I had low expectations for the commercial prospects of my books. They were, after all, the books of an Ivy League professor. The books began appearing at regular intervals and brought me some attention, but mostly in academia. In 1993, I published Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America, and two other volumes, Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism: Volume One: Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times; Volume Two: Prophetic Reflections: Notes on Race and Power in America. These volumes would go on to win the American Book Award that year.

  Nothing, however, prepared me for the success of a relatively short volume of connected essays published on the issue that never ceased tugging at my heart and hammering inside my head. The idea for the book came from my dear sister Deborah Chasman of Beacon Press. She brought together essays of mine lying around my office at Princeton. In 1993, Race Matters would bring me to the attention of the general public—and, for that matter, the president of the United States—in a manner I had never before experienced.

  It was the right book at the right time. In response to the brutal police beating of Rodney King, L.A. had exploded in rebellion. At the request of my dear brother Mark Ridley-Thomas, a highly respected black civic leader, I immediately flew out and engaged in marathon radio dialogue with prominent Korean intellectuals and politicians. It reminded me of my dialogues in Boston with my dear brother Reverend Raymond Kim and my dear sister Professor Ivy George on black-Asian relations.

  In the early ’90s, America’s rawest nerve—race—had been exposed again. I was asked to speak everywhere. Race Matters appeared on bestseller lists. It was used in classrooms around the world. President Clinton read it and gave it to his daughter and wife to read. Then he invited me to the White House. Bill and Chelsea engaged me in spirited conversation. Hillary, on the other hand, simply said, “I can’t understand why blacks don’t take advantage of all these opportunities they have.” I said to myself, Man, I’m not sure my dear sister has read Race Matters. Rather than confront the first lady, though, I explained that the opportunities she was referencing were earmarked for the black upper-middle class. My book was about the working poor and abjectly poor, people who simply do not have an abundance of high-quality educational opportunities. Since that first encounter, I came to respect Hillary, but not enough to support her in her historic 2008 race for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

  The evening when I first met the Clintons ended with Bill inviting me to the Oval Office after his wife and daughter had retired. He was eager to engage in serious intellectual conversation about culture and politics. The brother was absolutely brilliant and I was having a ball. When I looked at my watch, though, I saw it was far into the middle of the night. We had been at it for hours. I realized I had an early morning flight back to New Jersey to teach at Princeton and needed just a little nod of sleep. But he was as fresh as ever. I remember thinking to myself—Does this brother have a job?—when I realized—He’s the president of the United States! I did leave, but only after another hour of conversation.

  Race Matters, the book that got me invited to the White House, has a simple thesis: black people count and black suffering matters in how we think and act in the world. Black folk in the United States are different from all other modern folk because of the horrific violence that has been leveled against them. That violence is both psychological as well as physical. To control and exploit blacks, white supremacists have taught blacks an insidious and corrosive form of self-hatred. No other black people have had to endure the terrorism of Jim Crow after the nightmare of slavery.

  I discuss nihilism in black America and how both liberal structuralists and conservative behaviorists ignore the core issue—the nihilistic threat to blacks’ very existence. The liberal doesn’t want to talk about culture because it takes attention away from government programs. The conservative focuses on values, ignores political-economic realities, and denies victimization. How, then, do we cope with depression, low self-worth, social despair? I discuss the cultural buffers that black forbears created against nihilism, how they valued service, and built churches that reached out to comfort and care for the community. I discuss the consumer-crazed, market-driven, hyper-materialistic, oversexed, overstimulated society that defines American culture and fuels nihilism, especially among poor blacks. I discuss how the defenses against suicide— the loss of mind, of hope, of spiritual health—have fallen. I point out that suicides among blacks have risen. In short, unregulated capitalism was literally killing the souls, minds, and bodies of some black folk.

  In Race Matters, I point out what I call the pitfalls of racial reasons. I show how, during the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings, blacks got trapped by “racial reasoning.” No black leader was willing to say in public that a black Supreme Court nominee was unqualified. This notion of black authenticity led to a black mentality of closing ranks that led to a subordination of black women in the interest of the black community within the racist nation.

  I try to break down the reasons for the crisis in black leadership. I say that black leaders lack real righteous indignation and humility that arise from inner security. I point to three kinds of black leaders—the race-effacing managerial types who thrive on political savvy; the race-identifying types who stay on black turf and become power brokers with non-blacks; and the race-transcending prophetic leaders, like Jesse Jackson in 1988, who demonstrate genuine vision and courage.

  There’s a section I call “Demystifying the New Black Conservatism” and a discussion that attempts to throw light on where we must go “Beyond Affirmative Action.” I revisit the subject of black-Jewish relations, calling for more compassion and understanding on everyone’s part. A disproportionate amount of attention is given to black sexuality. I put it plainly—that Americans are obsessed with sex and fearful of black sexuality. I point to that most baffling of paradoxes—behind closed doors, kinky and funky sex associated with blacks is often seen as intriguing by whites, but in public that’s something that can never be discussed. Any way you look at it, you can’t talk about race without introducing the red-hot topic of sex. I argue for the demythologizing of black sexuality and extend special empathy for black women who are subject to racism from white men and scorn from black men, as well as black lesbians and gay men, whom the black community so coldly ostracizes.

  The fact is this: fear of black sexuality often drives white racism and is, alongside the attempt to control black labor and bodies, at the very core of racist viewpoints.

  There is a long look at Malcolm X and the meaning of black rage. I state what may be obvious to blacks but news for whites: Malcolm X was the prophet of black rage primarily because of his indisputable love for black people. I describe how Malcolm X crystallized the interlinking of black self-affirmation, desire for freedom, and rage against American society, and the disturbing likelihood of early black death. I examine the relationship between Malcolm X’s idea of psychic conversion as an implicit critique of the double-consciousness idea expressed by W.E.B. Du Bois—an idea that says, in essence, we’re looking at ourselves through the eyes of others who devalue us. Malcolm X believed we can escape the double consciousness through psychic conversion, but never tells us how. I discuss at length the problems of black nationalism and black separatism, recognizing that the basic aim of black Muslim theology was to oppose white supremacy. In doing so, though, white people are still the main reference point. I go on to look at Malcolm X’s indifference, or at least lack of attention, to what is unique about black religion and black music. That’s because he l
ooked away from the hybrid nature of those phenomena. Black music and black religion, influenced so deeply by African, European, and even Amerindian elements, are new phenomena in the modern world. Malcolm X wasn’t comfortable with that mix.

  And in that sense, Malcolm X wasn’t comfortable being what I term a jazzman—until the last months of his short life. By that, I mean someone who can deal with the world as an improviser, maintaining a fluid and flexible outlook while realizing that the either/or, absolutist, and supremacist mindsets lead to spiritual dead-ends. At the same time, I express deep and abiding respect for Brother Malcolm who was, after all, one of the most profound of all truth-tellers in the face of white racism. His courage was contagious and his inspiration lives on. In Race Matters, I am his student who, following his example, must question the teacher, no matter how revered the teacher might be.

  Race Matters is filled with such questions. In trying to spark a provocative public dialogue about race, I put everything I had into this small book. If I shed some light on these dark issues, I was gratified. If a small but serious audience of readers responded with questions of their own, I felt satisfied. When, in fact, the audience turned out to be massive, I was surprised and thrilled. The publication of Race Matters changed up my game. As far as my life went, I was still making it up as I went along. But living in the spotlight proved tricky.

  It was far easier enjoying my dear sister Toni Morrison’s time in the spotlight. In December 1993, Elleni and I traveled with her to Stockholm, where she received the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was a glorious event. We were joined by Nelson Mandela, who had just won the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, and Wole Soyinka, who was the first African to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature back in 1986. We partied all night. My dear brother Skip Gates, the acclaimed black intellectual; Errol McDonald, the renowned editor; Ford Morrison, the superb architect and Toni’s oldest son and I performed a Delfonics medley in the middle of a Swedish club. We killed with “La La Means I Love You.”