Cornel West - professor of Afro-American Studies and Religion at Harvard University - Interview

Progressive, The, Jan, 1997 by John Nichols

West: I think that after the march. he was a bit bewildered as to what to do. I think he felt cornered in a way, and he went international. And in going international, he got in a lot of trouble--both based on misunderstandings and on certain mistakes. Some of the important things that he has done have been lost in the discussion of the mistakes.

People have downplayed what he said at the recent convention in St. Louis, as well as what he said at the United Nations when they had the one-year-anniversary Day of Atonement event. At the convention in St. Louis, he held up Mother Jones magazine, and told all the black folk to buy it because of its critique of corporate power--something he had not talked about before. He read from Harper's, from Lewis Lapham, who is of course a kind of an aristocratic radical, the best of the patrician radical tradition in America and very insightful in his own way.

To have Minister Louis Farrakhan putting forward calls for redistribution of the wealth, focusing on corporate power, and talking about building coalitions of poor people across lines of race was hardly reported in the radical press. But it was heard by 20,000 black folk in the dome in St. Louis, and that was important.

Similarly so, his critique of the imperial policies of the United States was important.

But, as always, those important messages are interwoven with a whole host of other things that are a part of the black-nationalist tradition in general and the Nation of Islam in particular his struggles with patriarchy, his struggles with homophobia, his struggles with anti-Semitic elements in his rhetoric.

I see significant movement in Minister Louis Farrakhan, but many still think it's just manipulative.

Q: You mentioned the increase in African-American voter turnout in 1996. Without the African-American vote, Clinton's margin over Dole would have been extremely narrow, Democrats would have lost several more Senate seats, and the party's modest gains in the House would not have been possible. Yet the signals from the Clinton Administration in the aftermath of the election gave no indication that the President or the Democratic Party had any intention of responding to the concerns of African Americans. Is there any reasonable hope that this higher level of electoral contribution to the Democratic Party from the African-American community will be rewarded?

West: Well, that's what's so very sad, because I don't think so. I was hoping that the Democrats would take over the House, so that we would have Charles Rangel in charge of the Ways and Means Committee, Bill Clay over at Education and Economic Opportunity, John Conyers running Judiciary, Ron Dellums at Armed Services. That's what I was looking for.

Again the black vote was decisive and yet we gain very, very little with Clinton moving toward the right. I think he's going to move continually toward the right.

So I would hope that the Congressional Black Caucus at the national level, black elected officials at the state and local levels, and black citizens would think very seriously about some kind of realignment with progressives. That's very, very amorphous at this time. But I think that the Democratic Party is reaching the point of sheer bankruptcy when it comes to actually contributing in a substantive way to black freedom-let alone the freedom of working people and poor people.