Cornel West

Cornel Ronald West is a prominent African-American scholar and public intellectual. Formerly at Harvard University, West is currently a professor of Religion at Princeton. West's intellectual contributions draw from such diverse traditions as the African American Baptist Church, Marxism, pragmatism, and transcendentalism.

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• I focus on popular culture because I focus on those areas where black humanity is most powerfully expressed, where black people have been able to articulate their sense of the world in a profound manner. And I see this primarily in popular culture. Why not in highbrow culture? Because the access has been so difficult. Why not in more academic forms? Because academic exclusion has been the rule for so long for large numbers of black people that black culture, for me, becomes a search for where black people have left their imprint and fundamentally made a difference in terms of how certain art forms are understood. This is currently in popular culture. And it has been primarily in music, religion, visual arts and fashion.
  • "Cornel West interviewed by bell hooks" in Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (1991)

• In situations of sparse resources along with degraded self-images and depolitcized sensibilities, one avenue for poor people is in existential rebellion and anarchic expression. The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people.
  • "The Role of Law in Progressive Politics" in Keeping Faith : Philosophy and Race in America (1993)

• To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.
  • "Chekhov, Coltrane, and Democracy: Interview by David Lionel Smith." in The Cornel West Reader (1998)

• I remind young people everywhere I go, one of the worst things the older generation did was to tell them for twenty-five years "Be successful, be successful, be successful" as opposed to "Be great, be great, be great". There's a qualititative difference.
  • Speech in San Francisco: Democracy Matters (1 October 2004)

• The Enlightenment worldview held by Du Bois is ultimately inadequate, and, in many ways, antiquated, for our time. The tragic plight and absurd predicament of Africans here and abroad requires a more profound interpretation of the human condition — one that goes beyond the false dichotomies of expert knowledge vs. mass ignorance, individual autonomy vs. dogmatic authority, and self-mastery vs. intolerant tradition.
  • The Future of the Race (1997) by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West, p. 64, ISBN 0-679-76378-3

• You can't lead the people if you don't love the people. You can't save the people, if you don't serve the people.
  • Hope on a Tightrope : Words and Wisdom (2008); also on "The Way I See It" Starbucks Coffee Cup #284