THE SUPREME LOVE AND REVOLUTIONARY FUNK OF DR. CORNEL WEST, PHILOSOPHER OF THE BLUES

by Jeff Sharlet
(A version of this article first appeared in the May 28, 2009 Rolling Stone.)

Cornel West is a slender man, but he hugs like a sumo wrestler: crouch, grab, wrap and squeeze. “I want to love everybody,” West tells me not long after he greets me at his Princeton University office with a bear hug that is warm and wonderfully conspiratorial. ”Ah, yes, Brother Jeff!” he exclaims, like I’ve arrived just in time for a clandestine mission.

I’d feel special if it weren’t for the fact that there’s hardly a soul on Earth whom West won’t call “Brother” or “Sister.” As we walk around town, West embraces and is fully embraced by a maintenance man, a schoolteacher, a group of street missionaries and a class of fifth-graders visiting from Queens, who recognize him from the cover of his 1993 bestseller, Race Matters, still so popular that it’s sold on the street in some inner-city neighborhoods. West never holds back from anyone who wants a piece of him—whether it’s a blessing or banter, an argument with the great man or simply a hug that lasts too long—but he never gets pinned down, either. He locks eyes and holds hands, asks and answers real questions, and then pirouettes away.

West has been called “perhaps the preeminent black intellectual of our generation” by Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr., himself a candidate for that mantle. It might be more accurate to say that West is the preeminent intellectual of our generation, no qualifiers. No other scholar is as widely read, no other philosopher courted by presidential candidates, no other Ivy League professor referenced not just by other academics but by popular filmmakers (The Matrix trilogy, in which West played a bit role, was inspired in part by his work) and musicians (West has collaborated with Prince, Talib Kweli, and jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard, among others).

What makes West’s fame even more remarkable is the fact that he’s among the most radical figures in American public life. He stumped for Obama last year but only with the caveat that he would be Obama’s number-one critic the day after the inauguration. He started even sooner. In his book Hope on a Tightrope, published weeks before Obama’s election, West declares, “I’m not an optimist at all. Brother Barack Obama says he has the audacity to hope. I say, ‘Well, what price are you willing to pay?’“

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“It’s all about witness, brother,” he tells me one evening in his office, rocking in his chair. “Every person who bears witness has to have the depth of conviction of a martyr. You have to be willing to die. That’s the statement allowing you to live.”

He calls himself “a Martin man,” after King, but not predictably so. His religion is rooted in the angry prophets of the Old Testament and a Christ story as awful as it is redeeming, “the painful laughter of blues notes and the terrifying way of the cross,” he says—a radical Christianity diametrically opposed to the suburban sermons of Rick Warren and Joel Osteen. It’s not a belief in a Christ gladly crucified on Good Friday or risen from his tomb in time for church Easter Sunday, but a faith drawn from a recognition of the despair of the Saturday in between. ”That Saturday,” West tells me, the normal humor of his voice giving way to a growl, “it’s the full-fledged experience of the death of God. Which is spiritual abandonment. By any of the positive powers in the universe.” West rears up and spreads his arms and his fingers wide, his voice suddenly loud and staccato. “That’s Christ on the cross: ‘My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?’” He laughs and shifts into a Richard Pryor voice: “‘Hey man,'” this Jesus says to the Lord, “‘I thought you were coming through!'”

West leans across his desk, peering through big black-framed glasses. “That’s part of the humanity of Jesus. But it’s also part of the Jewishness of Jesus. Because in the Hebrew scriptures, you can’t have the prophetic tradition”—the Martin tradition—“without Ecclesiastes. Y’see, the prophetic goes hand in hand with the comic.” West reads the most existential book of the Bible—”that which is crooked cannot be made straight: and that which is wanting cannot be numbered”—with the bleak humor of the blues.

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http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/witness/the-supreme-love-and-revolutionary-funk-of-dr-cornel-west-philosopher-of-the-blues/

when it comes to advancing Dr. King’s legacy, a vote for Clinton not only falls far short of the mark; it prevents us from giving new life to King’s legacy. Instead, it is Sanders who has championed that legacy in word and in deed for 50 years. This election is not a mere campaign; it is a crusade to resurrect democracy—King-style—in our time. In 2016, Sanders is the one leading that crusade.