The Real Cornel West

Profilific and popular Marxist intellectual; describes himself as a "prophet"
Highly paid campus speaker and professor at Princeton
Friend of Louis Farrakhan, political adviser to Al Sharpton


Growing up as a precocious black child in the radical 1960s, Cornel West became a black militant activist, president of his senior high-school class, and an inevitable target of liberal uplift. At seventeen, he was recruited to Harvard where his political militancy convinced him that he had more to tell his professors than they had to teach him. He was determined, as he informs us, to press the university and its intellectual traditions into the service of his political agendas and not the other way around: to have its educational agendas imposed on him. "Owing to my family, church, and the black social movements of the 1960s," he says, "I arrived at Harvard unashamed of my African, Christian, and militant de-colonized outlooks. More pointedly, I acknowledged and accented the empowerment of my black styles, mannerisms, and viewpoints, my Christian values of service, love, humility, and struggle, and my anti-colonial sense of self-determination for oppressed people and nations around the world."

After completing his higher education, West went on to become a professor in theology and African American studies at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Paris. His current annual income is in the six-figure range, and his books are required texts in college curricula across the nation. West has been called?if only by his publisher?"the pre-eminent African American intellectual of his generation." His work has elicited White House invitations and more requests as a speaker, blurb writer, and distinguished guest than any individual could possibly fill. In a market in which it is increasingly difficult for genuine scholars to get an academic monograph in print, West has written or edited twenty books published by commercial publishers. Even more remarkable, except for a thin volume of opinions on issues of the day called Race Matters, none of West's books sell sufficiently to justify the commercial support his work has received. They are put into print (as one of his publishers informed me) as "prestige" publications to bring credit to the house.

West's first effort, published when he was 29, was titled Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity. Then followed Prophetic Fragments; The American Evasion of Philosophy; The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought; Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times; Prophetic Reflections; and Keeping Faith and Restoring Hope. We learn from notes West supplied for the Cornel West Reader that "prophesy" means injecting Marxist clich鳠into religious dogmas: "These introductory remarks to my second book, Prophetic Fragments (1988), convey my moral outrage at the relative indifference of American religion to the challenge of social justice beyond charity." The excerpt from that book that appears in the Reader is more explicit: "The principal aim of Prophetic Fragments is to examine and explore, delineate and demystify, counter and contest the widespread accommodation of American religion to the political and cultural status quo."

One of the early catalysts of West's rise into the cultural stratosphere was his plea for racial harmony. As a Marxist black radical he was almost unique in saying that it was not appropriate for other black militants to hate all whites and Jews. Yet he has endorsed the radicals grouped around the magazine Race Traitor, which calls for the "abolition of whiteness." He has also endorsed two of America's most notorious black race-haters. Indeed he is a friend to Louis Farrakhan, the most influential anti-Semite in America. Moreover, in 1999, in his role as then-presidential candidate Bill Bradley's advisor on blacks, West encouraged Bradley to meet with Al Sharpton (whose own senatorial candidacy West supported).

This was the same Sharpton who, four years earlier, had incited a group of black anti-Semites to boycott a Jewish-owned Harlem clothing store named Freddy's -- on grounds that the Jewish storeowners, wanting to expand their business, had decided to no longer sublet part of their store space to a black-owned record shop. It was an ugly boycott that featured Morris Powell, who headed Sharpton's "Buy Black" Committee, shouting at passersby: "Keep [going] right on by Freddy's. He's one of the greedy Jew bastards killing our people. Don't give the Jew a dime." Urging blacks to join "the struggle [that] Brother Powell and I are engaged in," Sharpton himself told a radio audience, "we will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so some white interloper can expand his business on 125th Street. . . . There is a systematic and methodical strategy to eliminate our [black] people from doing busines on 125th Street." After hearing innumerable repetitions of such rhetoric, one deranged member of Sharpton's boycott group, Roland Smith, entered Freddy's on December 8, 1985; he ordered all blacks to exit the store and then proceeded to shoot three whites and a Guyanese Indian who remained. He thereafter set the building on fire, killing himself and seven others, all of whom were black and Hispanic.

This profile was adapted from the article "Cornel West: No Light in His Attic," written by David Horowitz and published by Salon.com on October 11, 1999.