Race Matters (1993)
Race Matters confirms Cornel West's
stature as the pre-eminent African-American intellectual of
our generation.
-Henry Louis Gates Jr.
We are living in one of the most frightening moments
in the history of this country.
-Cornel
West, Epilogue to the Vintage Edition (1994) of Race Matters
The fact that Henry Louis Gates Jr. could make that statement about a book which is premised on this ludicrous assertion by Cornel West must be profoundly depressing to anyone who cares about black America. No one can, or should, deny the long and horrible history of racial oppression in this country. Racism is still a reality and, though it can never be expunged entirely, we should vigilantly seek to limit its impact on the life of our nation. But, by any objective measure, you would have to say that the last fifty years have seen a tremendous amount of progress in the area of racial relations. It is simply ridiculous to compare the status of black Americans today to that of blacks fifty, a hundred or two hundred years ago. And to argue that this is a uniquely dangerous moment in the history of black America is to virtually beg to be dismissed, which Cornel West should be, as a kook and a crank.
Cornel West has built his entirely unjustified reputation as a serious philosopher on a bizarre blend of Christian rhetoric and Marxist doctrine. He is defined, for the most part, by his robust criticism of liberal and conservative approaches to the problems of the black community, his dismissal of the current crop of black political leaders and writers, and his own steadfast refusal to offer any ideas or solutions of his own beyond the most general platitudes and completely discredited Marxist cant. But there's a method to his lack of a constructive message : his willingness to lash out at everyone else (except Tony Morrison, for whatever reason), enables him to portray himself as an independent thinker and his simultaneous willingness to identify problems but not to propose remedies, enables him to exploit those maladies, even exacerbate them, for his own purposes.
You can get something of a feel for his modus operandi in his discussion of nihilism, which he identifies as a central threat to black America :
The proper starting point for the crucial debate
about the prospects for black America is an
examination of the nihilism that increasingly pervades
black communities. Nihilism is to be
understood here not as a philosophic doctrine that
there are no rational grounds for legitimate
standards or authority; it is, far more, the lived
experience of coping with a life of horrifying
meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important)
lovelessness. The frightening result is a
numbing detachment from others and a self-destructive
disposition toward the world. Life without
meaning, hope, and love breeds a coldhearted, mean-spirited
outlook that destroys both the
individual and others.
Nihilism is not new in black America. The first
African encounter with the New World was an
encounter with a distinctive form of the Absurd.
The initial black struggle against degradation and
devaluation in the enslaved circumstances of the
New World was, in part, a struggle against
nihilism. In fact, the major enemy of black
survival in America has been and is neither oppression
nor exploitation but rather the nihilistic threat--that
is, loss of hope and absence of meaning. For as
long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the
possibility of overcoming oppression stays
alive. The self-fulfilling prophecy of the
nihilistic threat is that without hope there can be no
future, that without meaning there can be no struggle.
The genius of our black foremothers and forefathers
was to create powerful buffers to ward off the
nihilistic threat, to equip black folk with cultural
armor to beat back the demons of hopelessness,
meaninglessness, and lovelessness. These buffers
consisted of cultural structures of meaning and
feeling that created and sustained communities;
this armor constituted ways of life and struggle that
embodied values of service and sacrifice, love and
care, discipline and excellence. In other words,
traditions for black surviving and thriving under
usually adverse New World conditions were major
barriers against the nihilistic threat. These
traditions consisted primarily of black religious and
communal networks of support. ...
What has changed ? What went wrong ? ... None of
us fully understands why the cultural structures
that once sustained black life in America are no
longer able to fend off the nihilistic threat. I
believe that two significant reasons why the threat
is more powerful now than ever before are the
saturation of market forces and market moralities
in black life and the present crisis in black
leadership.
Okay, I buy a certain amount of this analysis : yes, the biggest problems in urban black America are the decline of the church and the end of the nuclear family, the two institutions most responsible for providing community support to people. But what's this about no one understanding what happened to them ? The 60's happened. The Great Society, which West lauds elsewhere, happened. Government stepped in and tried to replace existing institutions, most disastrously by creating economic incentives for people not to work and to have children out of wedlock. At the same time, the cultural Left, of which West is now a part, sought to free morality from its religious tether, with the entirely predictable result that moral standards lost their validity.
Yet where does West place the blame ? He points at black leaders (we'll give him that one) and at free markets. But is there anywhere in the United States where capitalism was more restricted by government regulation than in America's major urban areas ? Mind that this book was written before the GOP took over Congress and passed Welfare Reform, and before Republican mayors took over several of America's biggest cities : as the past few years have demonstrated, it actually turns out that when you restore law and order and bring market forces to bear on black inner cities you can increase employment, reduce crime, and reduce teen pregnancy.
What West was doing was contributing to the problem, by suggesting that it was hopeless. He had no positive alternatives. Here he is describing the choice between liberal and conservative policies :
The liberal notion that more government programs
can solve racial problems is simplistic--precisely
because it focuses on the economic dimension. And
the conservative idea that what is needed is a
change in the moral behavior of poor black urban
dwellers (especially poor black men, who, they
say, should stay married, support their children,
and stop committing so much crime) highlights
immoral actions while ignoring public responsibility
for the immoral circumstances that haunt our
fellow citizens.
Yeah, okay, there is a moral dimension, not just an economic one, to the problem. Conservatives have identified some moral solutions. But at the point where West's analysis would lead a more open-minded person inexorably toward those solutions, he instead chooses to focus on blaming someone for the circumstances as they exist. It turns out he's quite right about the problem with black leadership, as his own failure shows. These leaders, like West, are so busy parceling out blame for the past, they have no time to work on solutions for the future.
Would that this were the only example of such willful backwardness in the book, but most of the essays are filled with similarly retrograde notions. There's a profoundly silly one called, "Black Sexuality : The Taboo Subject," which assumes that whites still view blacks like they did Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird : like it's just one easy step from breaking up a chifforobe to having their way with our poor, innocent women :
White fear of black sexuality is a basic ingredient
of white racism. And for whites to admit this
deep fear even as they try to instill and sustain
fear in blacks is to acknowledge a weakness -- a
weakness that goes down to the bone. Social scientists
have long acknowledged that interracial sex
and marriage is the most perceived source of white
fear of black people -- just as the repeated
castrations of lynched black men cries out for serious
psychocultural explanation.
Castrations of lynched black men ? We all recall the tragic murder of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, but we're not exactly in the midst of a castration epidemic.
Equally inane, though considerably more harmful, is his take on affirmative action. While acknowledging that such programs are counterproductive, because they make even worthy beneficiaries feel like they are cheating to get ahead, he advocates maintaining them simply as pay back for past discrimination.
What is it finally that West calls for as his solution to the problems of black America ? He wants a new kind of leader :
To be a serious black leader is to be a race-transcending
prophet who critiques the powers that be
(including the black component of the Establishment)
and who puts forward a vision of
fundamental social change for all who suffer from
socially induced misery.
In other words : Cornel West, a leader who has skipped right past the
unique problems of black America, dismissing all competitors along the
way, to arrive at Marxism for everybody. God forbid.
(Reviewed:01-Mar-01)
Grade: (F)
