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

Progressive, The, Jan, 1997 by John Nichols

Q: Jesse Jackson attempted to achieve something along these lines within the Democratic Party back in 1988.

West: It's a different moment; 1988 was a different moment than today. Jesse's always had progressive tendencies, but he's also wanted to be a player in the big game, the main game in town. All leaders have their own insights and blindnesses, virtues and vices. All of us do as human beings.

Jesse, to me, played a very important role, but it was shot through with contradictions. And I think the next wave of leadership has to learn from his grand and very courageous example. Q: So you're looking for someone new. Do you see anyone around the country who might be prepared to assume the leadership role you've outlined here?

West: Not one individual, and I tend not to focus just on one person. But I do see a number of progressives, activists, elected officials around the country--folks who are not that well known, but represent the tendency that I'm talking about. That, to me, is what's most important.

Q: Where does an intellectual figure, someone like yourself, fit into these reformulations?

West: In one sense, Noam Chomsky's right: You speak the truth, expose lies, and bear witness. Which is to say that you try to be part of a conversation where you represent a radical democratic perspective, but also one that is very much improvisational and experimental. You must be able to move from a variety of different contexts--so you don't just get locked into one group or one party and become unable to empathize with those in different parties on the left--to be able to see what it takes to bring them together.

That means, as well, that you have to generate certain kinds of trust, even with people who radically disagree with you.

I see my own self as a freedom fighter who happens to be in a professional, managerial class in a capitalist society that's called the academy. You understand that as one context, and you speak the truth, and expose the lies, and bear witness in that context--the same way you do in the church on Sunday, and in the trade-union hall on Monday, and in some dialogue with some businessman on Tuesday. You move from one context to another, you move back and forth, but the people who you're talking with always must know that what's coming at them is this radical democratic perspective.

Right now, we're at such an embryonic stage in terms of broadening the public conversation in relation to corporate power, in relation to just how deep the legacy of white supremacy actually still is in America, let alone male supremacy and homophobia and so on, that you just try to keep pressing the point. That means you continually travel, you continually interact with new folk, and you also try to relate to people on a personal level and a human level. I think one of the problems on the left is that we tend to get so caught up at times in our own ideology and our own analysis and jargon that we don't actually relate to people as human beings who we know are catching hell but who have a very different language, a very different tradition.