Summer Recovery Moon
I’d not even begun to read Ta-Nehisi Coates‘ new book, Between the World and Me, when I came across Cornel West‘s (picture) defense of his review of the book. I met Cornel at a Liberation Theology conference in Detroit. This was the late 70’s when all things seemed possible if we could just get organized. He was a young academic star on the rise.
Now he’s professor emeritus from Princeton in Philosophy and still teaching at Union Theological Seminary in New York. West’s critique of Coates’ work lies in Coates’ unwillingness to connect his observations to the struggle for black liberation. West is an unreconstructed black and 1960’s activist who sees all things through the prism of praxis, saying must be connected to doing. Me, too, but he’s been far more faithful to the dream.
What interested me even more than Cornel’s critique of Coates was his critique of Obama as the first black president. He used it too as an example of a place Coates was not willing to go with his analysis. I don’t recall all of it but he called Obama out on drones, the closing(non) of Gitmo, the national surveillance state, and his support of the occupation of Palestine.
Some of us follow our thought where it goes and in so doing allow our actions to be guided by the most fiery, the most pure of our ideas. West is such a man. So was King and Malcolm X. I admire all 3. They stand as bright sentinels on the margins of our culture, illuminating the path of that broad arc toward justice. Often such people can seem irrelevant, too willing to forego gains for the sake of a further dream. And that’s a fair argument, but it discounts the larger ecology of the work.
We need pathfinders, ones who can see the way forward and cast light upon it. Others can make the day-to-day compromises that actually move society forward. Without our Wests and Kings and Malcolms, our Freidans and Steinhems and Stantons, the path ahead would remain hidden, tailing off in the dark edges of the future. Bless them all.
