Cornel West gets into a blackness contest with Obama
Cornel West has long been known to be a loose cannon, but this is pretty vile, even for him:
Cornel West, a Princeton University professor and leading black intellectual, is harshly criticizing President Obama, a candidate he once supported but now calls “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats…I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men…It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white”¦When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening.
Does this make West racist? I certainly think so. It also makes him a self-aggrandizing blowhard, but anyone who follows West’s career already knew that about him.
West, 57, has spent most of his life in the halls of rarified academe, Princeton and Yale and Haverford and then Harvard again and now Princeton again. But he has taken pains in the past to establish his black bona fides:
“Owing to my family, church, and the black social movements of the 1960s”, he says, “I arrived at Harvard unashamed of my African, Christian, and militant de-colonized outlooks. More pointedly, I acknowledged and accented the empowerment of my black styles, mannerisms, and viewpoints, my Christian values of service, love, humility, and struggle, and my anti-colonial sense of self-determination for oppressed people and nations around the world.
West is mad at Obama for a lot of reasons. One of them is the old “you never call, you never write:”
I used to call my dear brother [Obama] every two weeks. I said a prayer on the phone for him, especially before a debate. And I never got a call back. And when I ran into him in the state Capitol in South Carolina when I was down there campaigning for him he was very kind. The first thing he told me was, ”˜Brother West, I feel so bad. I haven’t called you back. You been calling me so much. You been giving me so much love, so much support and what have you.’ And I said, ”˜I know you’re busy.’ But then a month and half later I would run into other people on the campaign and he’s calling them all the time. I said, wow, this is kind of strange.
And who is Obama friendly with instead? Why, take a guess:
He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want…He’s got two homes. He has got his family and whatever challenges go on there, and this other home. Larry Summers blows his mind because he’s so smart. He’s got Establishment connections. He’s embracing me. It is this smartness, this truncated brilliance, that titillates and stimulates brother Barack and makes him feel at home. That is very sad for me.
Perhaps I should have gotten used to it by now, but I continue to be astounded at some of the things that pass for intelligent discourse among the intelligentsia.
[NOTE: This rant by West makes Larry Summers look like a genius for taking him to task at Harvard. Does the following start sounding familiar?:
Summers refused to comment on the details of his conversation with West, except to express hope that West would remain at Harvard. Soon after, West was hospitalized for prostate cancer. West complained that Summers failed to send him get-well wishes until weeks after his surgery, whereas newly installed Princeton president Shirley Tilghman had contacted him frequently before and after his treatment.[ In 2002 West left Harvard University to return to Princeton. West lashed out at Summers in public interviews, calling him “the Ariel Sharon of higher education” on NPR’s Tavis Smiley Show.]
8:30-9PM Nick News With Linda Ellerbee: The Legacy of Slavery (Nickelodeon) Dr. Cornel West talks to kids about the impact of slavery on race relations.
so parents are leaving their kids to be turned into little revolutionaries by watching nick news… (you would be surprised of lots of stuff…)
[its interesting to note that nickelodeon has made sure to scrub their site of any references for parents to check, yet that and other shows still air… they used to have the show up in video so you can watch it, and thanks to the new rules, youtube is becoming safer for scrubbed stuff than for stuff that would inform or allow one to check things out]
Self determination and Social engineering are antithetical and mutually exclusive…
no way around that…
“childhood maltreatment (including both abuse and neglect) nearly doubles the chance that a given individual will commit criminal acts. ”
what if a child grows up believing in abuse he or she never actually experienced, wasnt a part of, but believes somehow was passed on to them.
this is why i don’t understand why nazi social justice is doing the same things, and it ok, even to people whose family had not been to this country until way AFTER…
its still the Volk (as decided by the state) being used to crush the same targets as before…
Does this make West racist? I certainly think so. It also makes him a self-aggrandizing blowhard, but anyone who follows West’s career already knew that about him.
so much for chatechism of a revolutionary and applying it.. no, he is not a racist, he is a purist… you know… like when they sent Mercator to kill trotsky… look up PRAXIS and DIALECTICS
and
di·a·lec·tic
The Hegelian dialectic process is the notion that conflict creates history.
From this axiom it follows that controlled conflict can create a predetermined history. For example when the Trilateral Commission discusses ‘managed conflict’, as it does extensively in its literature, it implies the managed use of conflict for long run predetermined ends – not for the mere random exercise of manipulative control to solve a problem.
The dialectic takes this Trilateral ‘managed conflict’ process one step further. In Hegelian terms, an existing force (the thesis) generates a counter force (the antithesis). Conflict between the two forces results in the forming of a synthesis. Then the process starts all over again: Thesis vs. antithesis results in synthesis.
West isn’t saying anything that hasn’t been known for years. Obama was raised by whites and educated in wealthy private -and white- institutions. Quite Oreo. Obama went to Chicago to acquire his black bonafides. Obama correctly saw that to rise in politics, he had to do so embracing his black identity.
Back in 2007 and early 2008 there was some doubt that black voters would embrace Obama as his own. His initial support was from white leftists.
I would wager that Obama is more comfortable with Bill Ayers than he is with Jesse Jackson.
When I initially saw the headlines that West trashed Obama for not being black enough, I thought that Allen West, the Republican conservative congressman from Florida, was the West involved.
What a jerk Dear Brother West is. So pompous and hissy and posturing. He doesn’t even try to conceal his touchiness and narcissism. Is this what happens to a person when people bend over backwards to grant his every whim?
Now West is making unsubstantiated claims of Obama’s father’s “brilliance”?
It’s all about me. Two narcissists who richly deserve each other. This doesn’t speak well of elite academia either,for employing this turkey.
it’s pretty simple
a figure who has marked his turf within the fiefdom of academia is focusing attention on the qualities that mark/validate his own “purity”– his own necessity– as a figurehead/leader of some hyphenated, quite possibly imagined, victim group
This is just more “Obama is too white and conservative” BS. More smoke and mirrors to assert Obama really isn’t a marxist destroying Americas economy and standard of living.
West’s plays off like a jilted lover but he’s not the only one. The progressives face a contradiction. Having denounced American over seas policy as an abuse of power, they must change their argument or denounce Obama.
The conflict was sure to come. It was built within deconstruction-ism’s simple proscription against power. It was merely a message of rebellion. The message worked to incite the black and brown masses–in fact anyone who shared a claim to entitlement or even a claim for uninterrupted luxury living (think union bosses here)–but the simplicity of the message didn’t provide for the eventuality of the under masses assuming power.
Obama needs the totality of the under masses. Cornell invites him to return to the brother struggle, and brother, there’s just not enough angry people there to win elections. All of the “angries” have to be cobbled together and they have been by an anti-intellectual intellectualism. Obama cannot afford to be downgraded to just one of the angries who doesn’t see the whole picture.
But again, simple reality intrudes. Obama’s coalition is threatened when basic reason invades even the programmed and emotional stance of his base. They ask themselves, perhaps unknowingly, “Is this okay?” Obama’s killing OBL is a violent use of power, but power must never be used to kill. And Obama has extended and expanded the patriot act. He uses drones extensively. He’s trying to kill Gaddafi. The reason Obama didn’t want the death pictures of OBL to be shown wasn’t due to the sensibilities of Muslims, but of his own base. The pictures would bring home the fact that he is using American power to kill what he used to call the oppressed people.
Obama has found a way around that argument the same way the progressives did in WW1: the power is being used for the people. But this is the same argument Bush used.
Obama is on the horns of a dilemma. His answer was to find a way to become a fellow in the same cause. Israel. It unites Obama with his coalition and diverts attention away from the troubling cracks in his base. We can expect the same answer every time.
I think he really overuses the word brother.
1. Brother West does not understand the depth of Dear Leader Obama’s thought. The plan is:
First, eliminate small businesses and the oppressor “entrepreneurs”. Then bring larger companies under the control of progressive unions. At this point Wall Street’s private-sector business base will be blighted, and Wall Street will be even more eager than now to become a subsidiary of the government.
2. Brother West disrespects Dear Leader by referring to him as “brother”. In due course Brother West will be subjected to teachable moments.
3. Kidding aside, Princeton et al now house Nobel Laureates together with bigoted clowns like West. It’s hard to see how this arrangement can be indefinitely stable. Sooner or later it should tip in one direction or another.
Here’s an excerpt of liberal discontent of which Cornell West is just a part. If the Republicans do not capitalize on this opportunity, they are too stupid to deserve the election. (Note: Sorry about the length, but this is just too stupendous. Remember, this is coming from Yahoo News!)
From: Ted Rall, Yahoo News.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucru/20110517/cm_ucru/riseoftheobamabots
Obama lost me before Inauguration Day, when he announced cabinet appointments that didn’t include a single liberal.
It got worse after that: Obama extended and expanded Bush’s TARP giveaway to the banks; continued Bush’s spying on our phone calls; ignored the foreclosure crisis; refused to investigate, much less prosecute, Bush’s torturers; his healthcare plan was a sellout to Big Pharma; he kept Gitmo open; expanded the war against Afghanistan; dispatched more drone bombers; used weasel words to redefine the troops in Iraq as “non-combat”; extended the Bush tax cuts for the rich; claiming the right to assassinate U.S. citizens; most recently, there was the forced nudity torture of PFC Bradley Manning and expanding oil drilling offshore and on national lands.
In the past, editorial rejections had numerous causes: low budgets, lack of space, an editor who simply preferred another creator’s work over yours.
Now there’ s a new cause for refusal:
Too tough on the president.
I’ve heard that from enough “liberal” websites and print publications to consider it a significant trend.
A sample of recent rejections, each from editors at different left-of-center media outlets:
· “I am familiar with and enjoy your cartoons. However the readers of our site would not be comfortable with your (admittedly on point) criticism of Obama.”
· “Don’t be such a hater on O and we could use your stuff. Can’t you focus more on the GOP?”
· “Our first African-American president deserves a chance to clean up Bush’s mess without being attacked by us.”
I have many more like that.
Hey, Obamabots: when the man you support betrays your principles, he has to go–not your principles.
(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)
1. Gringo’s comment is consistent with my recollection. Supposedly Hillary expected that American blacks would not perceive Obama as one of them.
2. The long knives will really be out if the likes of West announce that they should have supported Hillary.
Obama doesn’t call me either – but my belief is that Obama (and the Democrat party in general) are radically left of center statists.
NLRB Mr. West?
Wisconsin statements ring a bell?
Expanding government rapidly is not left of center?
Cornell West is merely saying the obvious and it may be the only common sense thing he has ever said. Everything else he says comes out of the doublespeak that is the folk/womens/black/we-are-the-pass-the-hat-people studies programs. Both were united in contempt and contemptuous people can certainly find new targets of contempt including each other.
And that’s what happened. There’s also the jealousy against the not-so-qualified-to-be-victims victims. “Hey, remember me, your brother? I deserve first in line, boy, not them fagged liberal white pretend put on jazzed up thinking about making you their puppet honky ass white people, but then you never really were a brother, were you?”
But who cares? The blacks without the advantage of an affirmative action education featuring a full mock up of their superior attributes don’t care. Obama has black skin, talks for them, and that’s enough.
Cornell brings his attack now because the question has gelled, has formulated: Obama, why have you left your roots? Why have you become one of them?
It was a question that had to happen and is the saving grace of our country because in the transition from populism to tyranny free speech erects a huge obstacle. People, especially the hardest progressives, are starting to wake up to the assaults on our freedoms which Obama is conducting.
It’s like reading a well spoken 15 year old girl telling everyone how special she is and wondering why they never call. Is this what passed for intellect these days? Blech.. No wonder there’s an education bubble.
Are you sure that this isn’t a clever gambit to produce sympathy for Obama. Certainly, it almost has me feeling sorry for him.
Sorrier for the country that is suffering his Presidency, of course. But sorry nonetheless.
NeoNeocon writes:
“Does this make West racist? I certainly think so”
It would be interesting to see if there is even a coherent consensus definition of racism at present.
I tend to think of it as a belief in the linkage of lineage genetics with certain innate moral sensibilities, or genetically predictable patterns of social behavior; not, intellectual capacity.
Sure, you can make a case that it “costs” more to rub elbows with the stupid and the incompetent, but we don’t generally think that a modest or limited intellect necessarily translates into anti-social behavior. Maybe just low average income and pot holes in the roads and higher collision insurance on your car.
And no one I know thinks that intelligence is preponderantly race based, or that we have a moral duty to sacrifice self-interest for the benefit of the “stupid”, whatever their heritage
Hasn’t the traditional idea that racism is wrong, really been based not so much on the denial that race and intelligence are linked, as on the denial of the premise that haplotype effectively determines the capacity for, or significantly shapes, what can be construed as moral behaviors?
After all, if we had any evidence that there were a highly intelligent lineage or “race” of people who could be identified by their looks as in some Dawn of the Living Dead flick, but who were programmed to climb through your bedroom window at night and take a bite out of your neck, it would not seem to be what we usually think of as “racist” to exclude them from the circle of our normal civil relations.
Pointing out that they were clever wouldn’t do much to put them in everyone’s good graces.
But because our public creed – probably traceable to the doctrines of the Jewish and Christian, and specifically Roman Catholic, religions – is that there is no such thing as separate moral humanities, we conclude any such attempts at exclusion to be intrinsically unjust.
However, my take on the current view of what constitutes racism, and West might possibly be an example of this, is that there is an ongoing attempt to make ideological room for a concept of “humanity” that allows for different “populations” to be programmed by nature to behave in morally different ways. Yet the advocates of this idea wish in the face of their revision to somehow save the notion that what we call racism is still possible as a moral failing.
You toss out old Aristotle* and Aquinas, and their ideas of a common humanity, and I’m not sure how that still follows.
“Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images. This matter has, however, been discussed in my treatise about the soul, for it belongs to an investigation distinct from that which lies before us.” Arist. De Interpretatione
What?
DNW, i think i get what you’re saying. In a nutshell, racism has gone from thinking some races inherently flawed, to now demanding the flaws be recognised but not be narrowmindedly and discriminately refered to as flaws, but equal and valid human behaviors.
In other words, it’s racist to be against liquor store robberies.
Very nice, SteveH, very nice. I’m still wondering how it would produce sympathy for Obama?
SteveH Says:
May 20th, 2011 at 6:01 pm
DNW, i think i get what you’re saying. In a nutshell, racism has gone from thinking some races inherently flawed, to now demanding the flaws be recognised but not be narrowmindedly and discriminately refered to as flaws, but equal and valid human behaviors.
In other words, it’s racist to be against liquor store robberies.”
I’m not sure to what extent I even believe in the concept of “trace”.
But what I am saying – or trying to say about the logical form of the argument – is that the assumption that we have traditionally used to explain the moral evil of racism, is being undercut ( in certain instances) by the race theorizing of people who are ostensibly anti-racist.
We take it as true that it is wrong to prejudge someone on the basis of “race” because, we hold it to be true that morally significant behavioral difference does not follow upon racial identification
Affirm the antecedent, and deny the consequent.
Thus,
If A then B
Not B
therefore Not A
However if morally significant behavior does follow as a consequence of race, as possible racialists like West seem to advocate, then it throws a monkey wrench in the whole process of making a rational argument against racial discrimination: and accusations of racism become nothing more than political theater when made by people holding those beliefs.
This cannot be a good thing.
Seems I got an extra “T” in there.
Sorry.
Curtis Says:
May 20th, 2011 at 6:28 pm
“Very nice, SteveH, very nice. I’m still wondering how it would produce sympathy for Obama?”
If you are referring to what I wrote, it is because although I think that, ideologically speaking, Obama is a kind of near Manchurian Candidate, and I have virtually no sympathy for what he is trying to do as far as reshaping the fundamental predicates of our political association, I think that West’s presumptuous abuse of Obama as a man, is pretty rank.
But then it was my judgment that the main problem with Bill Clinton was not his moral flaws and troubled upbringing, but that he gained the Oval office with all that baggage.
If he were not in there in the first place, it would all be between him and his psychiatrist, and you could probably have a beer with the guy over the back fence without too many qualms.
Obama’s childhood seems to have been a kind of near nightmare of abandonment. And West’s race based attacks on Obama’s identity and race allegiance, are pretty sorry stuff.
Okay, I get it. West, if he argues for superiority of the black race can’t say he was discriminated against by the reverse argument.
But he can. There’s no logical impossibility presenting here, given it’s the truth that the black race is superior. And this is his claim. He’s not broken a single logical law.
Talking past each other here.
I agree with you that Obama’s childhood was abandonment and also that he probably would be a nice guy, like Bill Clinton, except for that fact that he’s President.
I don’t share your disgust with West’s treatment, however, of Obama. It’s apt because it’s true that Obama’s blackness is affected.
I recognized DNW’s analysis of West’s view of blacker-than-thouness (thank you, Steve H, for simplifying it) from the incoherency at the heart of “difference” feminism.
Look at me! Look at me! A wacademic wants another 15 minutes of shame-fame. Trollnel West has simply been in the loony bin known as higher education for too long. The race angle is merely a means to that end.
This isn’t complicated.
Cornel West, a Princeton University professor and leading black intellectual
Damning if true.
I once heard it said that he definition of an intellectual is, “someone who has found something more interesting than sex.”
Based on the intellectuals I have run into, that’s not true.
West’s Wiki bio says his mother was a teacher. So was Jeremiah Wright’s. Both would have been expected to go to college in the 60s, but the emphasis then was on the poor uneducated blacks from the South. So they used their own advantages to become spokesmen for the poor. And now they criticize the Clarence Thomases of the world. I knew blacks caught up in this turmoil in the 60s. The sensible decent ones were trashed by the radical chic. I think this was one of the first realizations that put me on the course away from liberalism. There I was going into the homes of the poorest and actually talking with them and trying to understand their real problems, while the Wests and Wrights hung out with the Bernsteins. It’s all a variation on the DSK phenomenon. The middle class radical socialist/anarchist who loves to f**k the truly poor.
None of this stuff is by accident. What West is on about will end up to the benefit of Obama. Just like Trump and the birth certificate. If Obama had the birth certificate all this time, why did he not immediately show it? It did not make make a particle of sense to me. But when he did show it, it worked wonders. Even if he is the only person on the planet who knew where it was and could find it, and evidently has the only copy.
The question of who’s blacker occasionally surfaces in Detroit politics. Except that the winners of the blackness contests who win elections because of it are frequently jailed shortly thereafter.
Mr. Aubrey – Not to localize this board too much, but that’s an excellent description of the Kilpatrick – Hendrix race for mayor. Poor Mr. Hendrix also had the misfortune of being, like our president, of mixed racial heritage. No way could he win in a blacker-than- thou contest.
I don’t know if this will hurt or help Pres. Obama very much because the national constituency thankfully, is considerably more discerning than Detroit’s. I suspect it won’t make much of a difference.