A few days after I first spoke with Cornel West, one of the preëminent public philosophers in America for three decades now, he gave a short, impromptu interview to the gossip-and-celebrity-news outlet TMZ. West was in Los Angeles, at the Sunset Plaza mall, and a TMZ reporter, recognizing him, asked for his thoughts on a comment made by Kanye West, who had recently insisted that Black History Month should be forever changed to “Black Future Month.” Kanye’s notion was that we’ve talked enough about slavery and the sundry other horrors of the past. “Ohhh, Kanye’s wrong,” West—Cornel, that is—told TMZ. “Every performance is the authorizing of a future, in the midst of the present, trying to recover the best of the past,” he said, rattling off the tripartite thought quickly and with high animation, as if he’d practiced it many times before, waiting for just this moment. “You get that in Kanye’s music, but you don’t get it in his rhetoric. There’s a sense in which his artistry is much more profound than his rhetoric.” The second time he said “rhetoric,” West forced his voice into a half-melodic and fully ironic sigh that he sometimes uses to punctuate a funny phrase. In answer to Kanye, and to others who might harbor the fantasy of a purely futuristic Blackness, West said that “as long as white supremacy’s around, you’re going to have the need to stress Black love, Black dignity, Black history—those things that are being excluded and rendered silent!”
The quick tabloid-media encounter served as a neat encapsulation of what makes West’s career and comportment unique. He is a product, and a longtime inhabitant, of the academy, having taught in tenured positions at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Union Seminary. But he has made it a point of pride to apply his analysis to popular culture and, on occasion, to do so in popular forums. After writing academic manifestos such as “Prophesy Deliverance!: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity” (1982), he achieved a new degree of fame with “Race Matters,” from 1993, a collection of self-consciously populist essays addressing such hot-button topics as the Rodney King riots, affirmative action, and Black-Jewish relations. More recently, he joined the online adult-education behemoth MasterClass to teach a course on philosophy. In both 2016 and 2020, he served as a tireless surrogate for Bernie Sanders’s Presidential campaign, delivering stem-winders across the country.
When we spoke, he was in California, preparing to return to New York to resume teaching at Union Seminary, the place where he started his teaching career, in 1977. Last year, West got into a dispute with Harvard, where he had been a tenured professor more than a decade earlier, about receiving tenure again; he ultimately resigned, and used the occasion to comment on the “decline and decay” and “spiritual bankruptcy” in élite academia. The pointed note, addressed to his Harvard dean, opened in a cordial way: “I hope and pray you and your family are well! This summer is a scorcher!” It was characteristic of West, who often begins conversations that way, allowing them to radiate outward from the personal and the near at hand. He started our chat by asking after my family, and then about a book I’m writing, about R. & B. music—which I’d mentioned, over e-mail, in a brazen bit of brownnosing, since West, in his rollicking lectures, uses music (John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, Curtis Mayfield, and on and on) as a symbol and a model for his ruminations on religion, politics, and race. The rest of our conversation seemed to proceed under the awning of that warm familiarity, as we discussed the crisis in secular confidence, the meaning of public philosophy, the seeming convergence of radical and reactionary attitudes toward American interventionism, and many other things. We spoke twice: once, at length, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and once, briefly, afterward. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
cornel west: How’re your loved ones, man?
Everybody’s good, thank God. It’s just trying to keep track of everybody, you know?
No, I hear you. Brother, you’re writing a book on rhythm and blues, man?
Yes, sir.
Jesus.
Well, it’s still coming together. I’m finishing up a novel first. I’m just, right now, deep in research, and thinking about—I mean, a lot of the things that you talk about: how R. & B. is love music, that it’s about bringing together communities.
Absolutely, man. Oh, that’s beautiful. And what is your novel about?
Well, as a young man, I worked on the Obama campaign—I actually met you while I was doing that.
Is that right? Which city, which town?
In New York. I was on the fund-raising team, and you did an event for Obama at the Apollo.
Oh, I remember that.
I was backstage, and you greeted me very warmly. Of course, I was the youngest and meekest person around. But I’ve never forgotten that. The book is about a young man working on a Presidential campaign and thinking about his religion and his changing ideas about politics and the country—things like that.
And where were you born and raised and reared, my brother?
I was born in New York City. My parents met at a Baptist church. My dad was a musician. My mom was a singer in the choir, and he was a choir director and organ player.
Wow. Which church was it?
White Rock Baptist Church, on a Hundred and Twenty-seventh.
Oh, that’s Ashford and Simpson.
Ashford and Simpson, that’s right. A lot of my mom’s friends knew them very well.
Lord. You got so much nobility coming out of White Rock, man.
All the time, when I was a kid, somebody would show up on the TV and my mom would say, “You know they came to White Rock and sang.” Have you visited there a lot?
I mean, I’ve been there, but I just remember reading all of the works on Nickolas and Val. And, when we finally met, we did a special thing at—I think it was the Schomburg or the Apollo, I can’t remember. Both of them were working with Maya Angelou.
Working with her on what?
A big album together. And when I did an interview with Maya Angelou, she brought ’em there. And so I finally got a chance to meet ’em. We all went out, we went to a club, we danced. Matter of fact, I asked Nick, I said, “Man, I just want to be very respectful of things, but you think it’s all right to dance with Val? I know she’s a free woman and everything, but just want to let you know. It’s just a dance, man. She’s so beautiful.” “Oh, man. Go on out there and do your thing, brother. Go and do your thing.” Me and Val got out there, and, brother, it was a Baryshnikov kind of thing, you know?
She danced you off the floor?
We both danced, man. “I didn’t know you danced like that. You brought things out in Val.” I said, “Man, I was trying to just hang with it. Because Val got so much style, it just oozes out every second.”
It’s funny—during the Bernie campaign, there were several videos of you really getting it in on the dance floor.
Is that right? See, you got me—I didn’t even remember. I remember I was dancing with Sister Nina one time.
I think that might have been it.
Yeah. I remember. That’s true.
This is your second stint at Union. Does it feel different being in a specifically religious environment, as opposed to Harvard, a secular space? Does that change the way you approach not only your teaching but your public presentation?
In many ways, no doubt, because a sense of vocation is a given at Union—people have a deep sense of calling. Everybody’s not Christian: we got Buddhists, we got Jews, we’ve got Hindus, and so forth. But they do have a deep sense of vocation, whereas at Harvard you got a site of formation of professional managers. And so they’re tied to profession, but not as much the vocation—they’re tied to career, not as much to calling. But my sense of vocation and my sense of calling is the same no matter where and what I’m doing. It could be at Harvard, Union, White House, crack house, our mama’s house. You know what I mean?
But at Union, because it’s taken for granted, I’m able to be much more forthright. Because, when you’re in a liberal educational space, it’s good to let folk know where you’re coming from, but you don’t really have the kind of thick, prophetic Christian or revolutionary Christian orientation all the time. You’re one voice among a whole host of other voices in that secular space. And that makes a difference.
Do seminary students, in your observation, these days, feel cowed, or more embattled? They’re entering a world that might be less receptive to the fruits of their training.
I started teaching at Union in 1977. At that time, the secular was much more elevated, and was much more prominent. The secular has taken tremendous wounds and bruises in the last thirty years, because commodification is almost taking it over—and so, when you think of the secular, you don’t think right away of scientific authority, scientific breakthroughs. When you think of the secular these days, you think of careerism, opportunism, hedonism, egoism, individualism—and the ways in which science seems to be driven by corporate greed, seems to be moving toward the explosion of the planet or the collapse of the environment. So that the secular has a very different resonance now than it did in ’77. It’s almost as if everybody recognizes the spiritual decay and the moral decrepitude of the culture. And then the question becomes, Well, what blame do we give to religious institutions for accommodating to the empire, accommodating to capitalism, accommodating to white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, accommodating to anti-Jewish, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, or anti-Palestinian orientation?
But these days people are saying, What blame do we put at the feet of the scientists tied to technology, tied to a corporate, managerial orientation? Cell phones, Facebook, Google, Wall Street, Pentagon—all of these are tied to science and technology, but it’s under the aegis of a certain way of politically engaging in the world, right? A certain way of economically engaging in the world: profit maximizing, and so on. And so the category of the secular is viewed with great suspicion these days.
During this pandemic, people have been using the refrain “Believe in science.” Asking for faith in an authority that might not be there.
Exactly. I mean, the challenge for folk who are still tied to various religious traditions is to hold on through the best of the enlightenments of various sorts—it could be European enlightenments, it could be Asian enlightenments, African enlightenments, Indigenous people’s enlightenments—all of those deep insights that are predicated on critical reflection, on questioning and interrogation. There’s always a strong leaven in any enlightenment, including the Enlightenment that did give birth to modern science—what I’d call Socratic energy. That’s very important. But, on the other hand, all questioning is done against a certain backdrop. When you look at the history of science and its claims about—oh, Black people are less intelligent, women have smaller brains, gays and lesbians are less so-and-so. I mean, that was in the name of science that we got those vicious ideologies. And it was also the best of science that called it into question, because the best of science can be Socratic.
The role of public philosopher has been, it seems to me, badly denigrated over the years—you seem to be one of the singular people still trying to occupy that space. I was fascinated by your engagement with MasterClass. In the trailer for your class, you say, “What does it mean to be a human? A featherless, two-legged, linguistically conscious creature born between urine and feces, whose body will soon be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.” A beautiful formulation that is at once funnier and, in some ways, darker and more absurd than the way Americans are used to thinking about ourselves. What is it like to put that at the feet of a popular audience? How do you take it outside of the academy?
I mean, one, my brother, part of that formulation comes out of Augustine—a great African theologian, one of the power figures of the Christian tradition and all of its plurality and multiplicity. Some of it comes out of Freud, another towering figure—himself, also like Augustine, very public. Freud had no access to the universities, right? But he’s got the teaching of Jewish institutions, even given his deep suspicion of certain dominant conceptions of Jewishness, given his own wrestling with his Jewish identity in a complex way. And I think of someone like John Dewey, in the U.S. tradition, who was a great public philosopher whose work spilled over far beyond the academy.
See, when I got my Ph.D. in philosophy, at Princeton, in March of 1980, philosophy tended for the most part to abdicate its role in public life, and become highly specialized, so that to be a philosopher meant to be a professional who taught in the philosophy department, rather than a lover of wisdom who goes out into the public sphere and attempts to lay bare certain visions, certain analysis, interacting with fellow-citizens.
Now, Emerson, William James, Muriel Rukeyser, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Dewey—they were philosophers in that less professionalized way, whereas most philosophers in the university are just so specialized and professionalized that they talk in fascinating jargon with each other. And we can still learn some things from them, but it doesn’t spill over into public life. So my own tradition is one that’s much more tied to Augustine and Freud and Du Bois and Dewey and Emerson and Muriel Rukeyser and those lovers of wisdom, as opposed to those highly professionalized folk.
That’s why I’ve never taught one day in a philosophy department my whole life. I got my degree in philosophy from Princeton. I was glad I was very deeply shaped by Richard Rorty and Walter Kaufmann and Tom Nagel and Thomas Scanlon and Carl Hempel and Gregory Vlastos—those folk mean much to me. But I went straight to Union Seminary, then to Yale Divinity School, then back to Union, then department of religion and head of African American studies at Princeton, then African American studies at Harvard. Then, with the university professorship, I was not in any department at all. But I’ve never been in the philosophy department. Now I’ve been asked to give the Gifford Lectures in two years. That’s serious business, and I get a chance to lay bare my own philosophical vision.
Have you decided on a direction for those?
I’m talking about the various ways in which Black musicians, and Black intellectuals shaped by Black musicians, build on the best of the Socratic legacy of Athens and the prophetic legacy of Jerusalem, and the ways in which the moves from Erasmus—towering public intellectual in the West—become both sources as well as launching pads for Black writers. The relation of James Baldwin to Montaigne, for example, not enough people talk about. He is, in many ways, the twentieth-century American Montaigne, in terms of autobiographical starting points in his various reflections about self, soul, and society. He’s mediated by Emerson, who was also an American Montaigne, of the nineteenth century.
But, see, Baldwin has to be viewed in that broader sense. It’s not just his relation to Richard Wright and his concerns about gayness and Blackness and so forth. Those are crucial issues, but it’s the larger backdrop. And it happens at the very moment, of course, in which the decline and decay in the West manifests, and the decline and decay in the American empire of our own day makes space for certain kinds of voices, especially Black prophetic voices.
That’s just the beginning of it, though, bro.
That connection of Baldwin with Montaigne, and Emerson in between, reminds me of what you do with philosophical—and what people, I think, call high intellectual—material. I love the image of Montaigne opting out of public life and going to his room and saying, “And now I’m going to write.” This thing of, “I’m going to write about broad topics that you might think of as intellectual, but they’re going to ramify in how you think about yourself.”
Precisely. It’s going to proceed from my intellectual honesty as it relates to my self-formation—whatever wounds and scars and joys—as it connects to my institutional backdrop. It’s about passing, it’s about temporality, it’s about contingency. But it’s still as serious as a heart attack and as humorous as Richard Pryor.
It’s hard for me not to note that you and Emerson found your way out of favor at the same institution, Harvard. Emerson gives his Divinity School address, and they say—
You’re so right, my brother.
“You aren’t welcome for thirty years because you tell your truth.” It seems that part of your road, like Emerson’s, has involved a willingness to incur that kind of institutional penalty.
Ralph Emerson has always been a profound inspiration for me. Now, as you know, he ends up a member of the overseers at Harvard—he’s embraced at the very end of his life, and becomes part of the establishment.
Reinhold Niebuhr was another great example of that, who I love so dearly. And he ends up very much a part of the liberal establishment, the Cold War anti-Communist establishment. I like to think of myself as getting more radical, the closer I get to the worms and the grave.
I’ve always been interested in your relationship to electoral politics. You helped Obama get elected and later were very disillusioned with his Presidency. I wonder what makes you still dip your toe into that water. Was it Bernie Sanders as a person that made you get back in, or do you think that the Presidential campaign, as a form, is a place in which to do some of this philosophical working out in public?
Well, one is that, as a human being and Black man in the American empire, I wrestle with desperation. And so, like a bluesman or a jazzwoman, I got to be flexible, fluid, and improvisational, looking for whatever sources and resources I can, to try to be a force for good. So, politically, that means that you got a decrepit electoral political system that is colonized by big money, but you still have to be able to intervene and try to stay in contact with those few politicians who are concerned about poor and working people.
So, when you see them, you fuse with them, but you’re very honest. Now, even with brother Barack Obama, I’ve been very honest and up front with him. Our first conversation was “What is your relation to the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Fannie Lou Hamer?” We talked for hours, and he said, “I’m not as progressive as you are.” I said, “That’s fine. That’s not the point.”
I supported my dear brother Bill Bradley, who I love very deeply. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, but he’s a person of integrity. He says what he means and means what he says. And I’ve supported a whole host of politicians like that.
And you’re right. I broke my neck in over sixty-five events for Obama, way back in Iowa at the very beginning, when he was at four per cent, all the way to that last night in Ohio, getting folk out on the buses and things. And I would do it again, because it wasn’t about him. Wasn’t about me. It’s about suffering—the poor people and working people, especially Black folk, catching hell. That’s the reason why you do it, no matter what. But you try to have a constancy and consistency, because you have to intervene in the electoral political system, not in a naïve way. You know the consensus of both parties when it comes to militarism, when it comes to war, when it comes to surveillance, when it comes to the national-security state, when it comes to their allegiance to Wall Street. Both parties are tied to all of those. But you also say, “Oh, as bad as Biden is, we have to have an antifascist coalition against the gangster neo-Fascist Trump, right?”
When it comes to hitting the streets and going to jail, you’ve got to be there, because that is another option: social movements and massive demonstrations. Third political parties are very important, as well, and I’ve been a part of those throughout my career, as well—that’s why I supported Nader and Jill Stein, as a Green Party person. The Green Party’s got some serious analysis. We just didn’t have enough traction.
There has been a resurgence of interest in the Democratic Socialists of America. I know that you’ve been intimately involved in that organization, from its beginnings in the early eighties. Do you think that that interest is sturdy? Is that something that heartens you?
Oh, it does. Absolutely. We launched that thing in March of 1982 with my dear brother Michael Harrington and Barbara Ehrenreich. Brother Hudson is a very important figure—Black brother, the trade-union movement, now in D.C.—Gerry Hudson.
So I’m glad to see it growing. I really am. It’s got its own ideological conflicts on the inside, but I’m glad to see it growing. We need all we can, given these desperate times of ecological catastrophe and corporate greed and the escalating neo-Fascist movements and organized hate against Black people and gays and lesbians and trans and Jews and Arabs and Muslims. These are very grim days. We’ve got to get all we can get from our positive sources that have to do with justice and compassion and critical reflection. But we just have to be honest. We got so much cowardliness in the professional-managerial class. We got so much conformity in the Black bourgeoisie, still obsessed with representation, “Want somebody to look like me.” Yes, you do. Clarence looks like you, too.
And look at all the good he’s doing.
Clarence looks like you. O.K., we love Clarence. He’s a beautiful Black man. He sides with the wealthy and the strong, too. So it couldn’t just be about representation—got to be something deeper than that. What is the moral content of that representation? What is the political consequence of the identity that you choose? You see, that’s why Adolph Reed is a crucial voice when it comes to weaponizing identity politics under a neoliberal aegis.
You mentioned this professional-managerial cowardice and its relationship to speech issues. Your break with Harvard—you’ve talked about it so much, I don’t want to belabor the fact of it, but it has to do with this issue of prophetic speech. One thing that you brought to the fore, toward the end of that whole ordeal, was that you thought that some of the rationale for the break had to do with your speaking out on behalf of Palestine and what’s happening there, the occupation.
Oh, absolutely. No doubt about that.
The culture-war conversation about speech, especially on campuses, usually says that the left has put up all these speech codes—that there are young people who try to get people in trouble for saying things around race and gender and sexuality. But less remarked upon is the bureaucratic, as you say, cowardice about certain issues that leads more privately, I guess, to outcomes like the one that you talked about vis-à-vis Palestine, at Harvard.
Harvard is a fascinating place. I’ve got a certain love for it, and I’ve got a deep critique of it, but it’s a slice of the professional-managerial culture. If you are fundamentally identified with the Palestinian cause, not in a way of putting Jews down but in a way of hating occupations, in a way of loathing domination—it’s not just professors, it’s true for professionals across the board—there is a certain kind of consensus that it’s a taboo issue, and somehow to raise the issue means you’re either anti-Semitic or don’t understand the complexities of the Middle East, or all the different rationalizations that lose sight of the humanity of Palestinian brothers and sisters.
All you’ve got to do is just flip it over. If there were a Palestinian occupation of Jews in a vicious way, to where there’s been since ’67, and going back to the catastrophe of ’48, the professional-managerial class in America would be very different in their response. It would be a badge of honor to critique the Palestinian occupation of Jews, you’d be on the cutting edge of progress, you’d be on the cutting edge of justice—and rightly so. If there were a Palestinian occupation of Jews, I would say exactly the same thing I’m saying now with the Israeli occupation of Palestinians, you see? All you’ve got to do is tease out the golden rule, you see the hypocrisy of it all, you see the cowardliness of it all, but it’s so encrusted in the professional-managerial classes of newspapers, and so forth and so on, that it won’t become apparent until another twenty-five, forty years. You and I will be long gone, brother.
How, then, do you open up spaces of conversation? I have always admired your friendship with the very recently departed bell hooks, and one thing that heartened me about your relationship was that you made a point of talking in public, opening up spaces for dissent, for disagreement among yourselves, for critique.
bell, you know, she was a real intellectual giant, spiritual genius, free as Nina Simone and Muhammad Ali, just free in her soul and spirit. I loved that about “Breaking Bread,” both editions, 1991 and 2017, books that I have tremendous connection to because we loved working together. We loved fighting with each other, contesting each other, disagreeing with each other and so forth. But I try to be like that across the board. My dear brother Robert George, the conservative brother, my Catholic brother, who I also have a deep love and respect for, we do the same thing. I was blessed to do the same thing with so many other figures in my life, Roberto Unger at the law school or Sylvia Ann Hewlett and our book, “The War Against Parents.”
I’ve been blessed to be able to do the same thing with Davíd Carrasco, my brown brother at Harvard. I’ve been blessed to have these kind of Socratic relations and dialogical engagements with a variety of folk, where there’s overlap and when there’s deep disagreement. That’s just the way a jazzman proceeds in the life of the mind, you know what I mean?
Jeff Stout, to me, is one of the towering figures in American philosophy and American pragmatism, with a democratic-left sensibility that is deeply improvisational—his notion of bricolage and bricoleur in his work “Ethics After Babel” has meant much to me. He and I have that same kind of very deep dialogical relation with one another that enriches one’s own life, not just one’s own mind. These are gifts, these are acts of grace to have this kind of relation.
I’m now thinking about personal relationships as, not in opposition to, but maybe a parallel track to the life of institutions. If you want to speak at all, if you want to do anything public, you often have to lean on institutions. Is it the personal dimension that then creates, not an escape hatch, but sort of a parallel current to that?
Part of it is that, when you have a vocation, as opposed to just a profession, and a calling as opposed to a career, then you’re really trying to proceed in the spirit of integrity, and you’re going to find persons who also have that same sense of vocation, no matter what color they are. And you form some genuine relations and friendships and brotherhoods and sisterhoods and siblinghoods, as my nonbinary folk would say.
But the problem is that, these days, everybody wants their brand to be so commodified, rather than to find their cause and be so courageous that they’re willing to pay a cost and take a risk for their cause, not just their careers. That’s a spiritual decay right there, and that cuts across region, race, class, gender, sexual orientation—across the board. We see gangsterization and thuggishness, every color, every gender, every sexual orientation, and we see it in every class, but those at the top see the élites unaccountable. Say anything, do everything: no answerability at all.
That’s not just brother Trump, even though he’s a neo-Fascist one. He’s on the continuum with so much of the professional-managerial class in terms of their lack of accountability to working people and poor people. Once you have that kind of spiritual decay and moral decrepitude, man, then it’s just gangsterization on steroids, man. That’s where America’s headed. I tried to say the same thing in “Democracy Matters,” but it was hard for that book to gain visibility, partly because of what I said about the Middle East. I talked about the gangsterization. Through what? Militarism, free-market fundamentalism, and increasing authoritarianism that’s become neo-Fascism in its expressions. And that’s eighteen years ago.
It’s interesting to talk about that continuum between someone like Trump and the more, let’s say, respectable billionaires among us—the idea that there’s not a stark opposition but sort of a palette. I’ve heard you say before that, O.K., Biden’s not the best, but we need an antifascist movement to beat back the worst of these elements that we have so recently been dealing with. How do you feel that that coalition, to the extent that it is even in charge of this country, or in control—how is it holding up, do you think?
I think it’s breaking down, man. The Democratic Party is in deep trouble. The neoliberal vision of brother Biden, which, in his own individual case, is predicated on crimes against humanity in terms of mass incarceration, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the Wall Street bailout that led toward the collapse of so many poor and working people’s life chances—to me those are crimes against humanity, just as a person that’s trying to be decent in the world, the crushing of lives of so many folk, the killing of so many folk in Iraq and so on. But he’s still better than Trump. Now, good God almighty, we wonder why we are so desperate.
It’s very clear he turns out to be milquetoast, and the only way he can deliver is the opposing posture, as if you put a Black sister on the Supreme Court and you satisfy the Black women who voted. You’re going to tell me that Black women voted solely to have a representative on the Supreme Court, and not to deal with Black people, Black children, and other folk who are suffering economically and socially? All you need is just a Black woman on the Court, and you’re satisfied now? Most Black sisters out there that I know did not go out for that. But, of course, we want a Black progressive on the court, and a Black woman, fine. But he can’t fight for voting rights for a whole year, can’t hardly engage in any courageous action for that for a whole year? [After Biden announced his selection of Ketanji Brown Jackson, I asked West what he thought of the choice. “It’s a beautiful thing,” he said. “I applaud Black success. The challenge is: how do we sustain Black moral greatness?”]
You’re not dealing with deportation. You’re still locked into a very knee-jerk defense of nato so that the militarism still goes on—everybody knows if Russia had troops in Mexico or Canada there would be invasions tomorrow. He sends the Secretary of State, telling Russia, “You have no right to have a sphere of influence,” after the Monroe Doctrine, after the overthrowing of democratic regimes in Latin America for the last hundred-and-some years. Come on, America, do you think people are stupid? What kind of hypocrisy can anybody stand?
That doesn’t mean that Putin is not still a gangster—of course he is. But so were the folk promoting the Monroe Doctrine that had the U.S. sphere of influence for decade after decade after decade after decade, and anybody critical of you, you would demonize. Yet here are you, right at the door of Russia, and can’t see yourself in the mirror. That’s spiritual decay right there, brother, it really is.
Some people on the left have placed a lot of emphasis on the aggression of the United States and of nato in that region—arguing that they have some culpability in what’s happened. Others have said, No, if we’re against American imperialism, we also have to recognize this as an instance of Russian imperialism, against the will of the Ukrainian people. I wonder what you make of that debate.
We must first be in deep solidarity with our Ukrainian brothers and sisters who are suffering and resisting. We must also be in solidarity with our Russian brothers and sisters who are protesting and going to jail against the war. And we must try to stop the war, recognizing that the American empire has little or no moral authority when it comes to violation of international law and the overthrow of national sovereignty, as in Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia.
The buildup to the invasion exposed, I think, a slight change in our politics, where there are people on the far right—let’s say they’re on the illiberal right—who are, all of a sudden, proposing an anti-interventionist critique, in a way that they wouldn’t have before.
Look at brother Tucker Carlson now—
Right!
Now, he has made his way for a thoroughgoing right-wing populism, xenophobic at home, and so contemptuous and hateful of the neoliberal élite, because he sees the hypocrisy of the neoliberal élite. That’s where he and I agree—he sees it. That’s why brother Glenn Greenwald can go on his show. Brother Glenn has the same hatred of the hypocrisy of the neoliberal élites that Tucker has, and I have that hatred, too. But I can also see the difference between a neoliberal like Biden and a neo-Fascist like Trump. That’s why I ended up still casting my ballot for Biden. But what has happened with brother Tucker now is he’s calling to support Putin, to support Russia.
Amazing.
Why? Because, if these hypocritical neoliberal élites were talking about their support of Ukraine, and he knows how empty that usually is, then something must be wrong, so he’s got to be on the other side. You’re right, it’s fascinating to see this shift. The sad thing is that neither the neo-Fascists nor the neoliberals have too much deep love of poor and working people across race, gender, and nation, and very few of them are committed to democratic processes all the way down. And so things really begin to get very confusing on a surface level. But when you really scratch beneath that surface, you can still see just how empty and decrepit, spiritually and morally, both the neo-Fascists are, with all of their ugliness, and the neoliberals, with all of their hypocrisy. Because if we can’t provide an alternative vision between neoliberalism and neo-Fascism, then, as neoliberalism goes under, America will go neo-Fascist. Period. Then everybody all, “Oh, my God. Sinclair Lewis was right. Oh, my God. Those people who were so critical of America, like Malcolm and the later Martin King and Fannie Lou Hamer and Claudia Jones and Amiri Baraka, they were right. Oh, Lord.”
We said, “We’ve been telling you that.” Especially from the chocolate side of town, because slavery and Jim Crow and Jane Crow and mass incarceration shows us the neo-Fascist slice of American democracy from the very beginning, all the way up to now. Now, there’s some other slices that are not neo-Fascist. Certain kinds of democratic processes are precious and fragile. That’s why we try to hold on to them. We’re losing those, too. And that’s why these days are so grim and dim. And that’s why we have to be committed to being certain kinds of persons, no matter what the possibilities are for triumph. We have a chance of a snowball in Hell of fighting for freedom. We fight anyway, because it’s right and because it’s just. And we just get crushed when we get crushed, but we get crushed with a smile.
That’s the blues. That’s B. B. King, you see. With a smile, you up there. You know you getting crushed, but you still got to smile because there’s a triumph in your spirit, but you can’t execute it in any serious way outside of the performance space. You know what I mean? After you finish singing a song in Mississippi, the Klan going to get you if you don’t act a certain way. I don’t care how much you singing, too. But that don’t mean you stop singing your song. That don’t mean you stop writing your poetry.
That don’t mean you stop organizing and mobilizing and loving your children and loving other people. And being in solidarity with Palestinians and landless peasants and folk in Kashmir. And folk in China, dealing with the Chinese repression or dealing with the too-often-corrupt African leaders in the name of Blackness. You preserve your moral integrity and tell the truth. And then the worms get you. Because they going to get you one way or the other anyway. Might as well go with some integrity and with style. Right?
You mentioned several times during this interview that there’s a feeling of grimness, there’s a burial shroud over us all. And it’s strange to me. I mentioned your friend bell hooks. You have been very, to me, movingly open about the death of your mom. And I’ve just been astounded in some ways—and I’m certainly not the first person to say this—by our difficulty with mourning in this country. When you teach philosophy, when you talk about that side of life, about grief and the public nature of that, what do you say?
I tend to go much more with the poets and the literary writers and the musicians. I would rather go to school with Chekhov, go to school with Baldwin and Toni Morrison and Beckett and Kafka, than go to school with philosophers. Most philosophers just don’t strike me as having the depth and the breadth and the sources or the resources that allow us to get through the worst of dim and grim times. But I think some of those artists that I mentioned—Melville, of course, is probably the greatest that we have, alongside Toni Morrison, to help us deal with these things, because these are truth-tellers. These are existential deep-sea divers, wrestling with death, dread, despair, and disappointment. As you know, I think Chekhov’s about as deep as you can get.
I would include Stephen Sondheim, because he comes right out of the Tennessee Williams-Chekhov lineage within our culture. He does it in musical theatre, so he can flip the whole genre around and push aside his teacher, Oscar Hammerstein, and say, “Look, this is not ‘June Is Bustin’ Out All Over’ now—this is ‘No More’ ”: that powerful song in Act II of “Into the Woods,” the son saying to the father and the father to the son. Didn’t get more grim and dim than that, in that song. And that’s what we need. See, we live and we need the Chekhovs and the Becketts and the Kafkas and the Sondheims and the blueswomen and the jazzmen and so forth.
One of the best works of theatre that I saw over the early pandemic, in 2020, was by this young playwright named Celine Song, who did a digital version of “The Seagull,” by Chekhov.
Ooh, man.
I don’t know if you know about Twitch—it’s this live-gaming platform. She staged it on a game called the Sims, moving the digital people around to do Chekhov. It was a multimedia presentation, and she sometimes would play audio over certain moments in the play and in the act break. She played a snippet of you talking about Chekhov. And, I tell you, it was a goosebump moment for me—it was theatrical catharsis. If I can find it, I will send it to you.
Wow. That’s neat. I never heard of that, my brother.
I think the best thing that I know on Chekhov is this new book by Yuri Corrigan. He’s got a book with a collection of essays of people who have been thinking about Chekhov for decades, and it is powerful.
What have you been listening to these days? Anybody new?
No, no, I haven’t. It’s been very backward-looking, man. It’s been all about “Soul Train” and Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington. I think I’ve gone back to some of the tried-and-true spaces in my soul. So I would have to learn from you as to who I should be exploring in terms of jazz or rhythm and blues or even hip-hop. Now, of course, I mean, there’s always a space for the Delfonics and Dramatics.
Always. You’ve talked a lot about those groups and how there aren’t groups anymore.
Ain’t no doubt about it. There’s always a space for brother Kendrick Lamar and hip-hop, and always space for Aretha and Luther Vandross. I do listen to those, as well, but I’ve been really focussed on some of the greatest of the greatest, man, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington. You know, somebody I’ve been listening to is Ben Webster, man. You remember Jimmy Forrest? Jimmy Forrest, he got a sound, man, that’s so sweet, it’s so mellow, that I don’t know how I overlooked him. Ooh. They’re old school, but they’re still new in terms of the gifts that they give us.
By Vinson Cunningham | Photographs by Elias Williams for The New Yorker
