Cornel West Bio

Cornel West is considered to be our modern day W. E. B. Du Bois. He is a brilliant and provocative democratic intellectual. Cornel West is a passionate, loving, and inspiring scholarly individual, that I feel as a black seminary student we can gleam from him his thoughts on social economic injustices, racism, nihilism in America, and urban youth culture. Even though I do not agree with all of his philosophical ideals, I feel Cornel West is a great contributor to the African American culture. Cornel West is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University.

He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M. A. and Ph. D. in Philosophy at Princeton. He has taught at Union Theological Seminary, Yale, Harvard and the University of Paris. He has written 19 books and edited 13 books. He is best known for his classic Race Matters, Democracy Matters, and his new memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. He appears frequently on the Bill Maher Show, Colbert Report, CNN and C-Span as well as on his friend, Tavis Smiley’s PBS TV Show.

Cornel West can be heard weekly on the Tavis Smiley’s NPI radio program. The Tavis Smiley and Cornel West radio show is a highly acclaimed progressive program. He made his film debut in the Matrix and was the commentator with Ken Wilbur on the official trilogy released in 2004. He also has appeared in over 25 documentaries and films including Examined Life, Call and Response, Sidewalk and Stand. Last, he has made three spoken word albums including Never Forget, collaborating with Prince, Jill Scott, Andre 3000, Talib Kweli, KRS-One and the late Gerald Levert.

His recent spoken word interludes were featured on Terence Blanchard’s Choices which won the Grand Prix in France for the best Jazz Album of the year of 2009, The Cornel West Theory’s Second Rome and the Raheem DeVaughn’s Love and War: Masterpeace. In short, Cornel West has a passion to communicate to a vast variety of publics in order to keep alive the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. a legacy of telling the truth and bearing witness to love and justice. Cornel West in his own words said he is, “a bluesman in the life of the mind, a jazzman in the world of ideas, forever on the move. Formative Years Cornel West was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1953, and lived most of his childhood and youth in segregated working class neighborhoods in Oklahoma, and Kansas. The West family moved a great deal and finally settled in a middle-class neighborhood in Sacramento, California. Both of his parents attended Fisk University. His father was a civilian Air Force Administrator for the Defense Department and his mother was a teacher and a principal. Irene B. West Elementary School in Elk Grove, California, is named after his mother.

In high school he excelled in scholarship and athletics. It was there that the young Cornel West began what would become a lifelong habit of protest by refusing to salute the flag because of the second-class status of African Americans in the country. From his parents, siblings, and community, young Cornel West derived “ideals and images of dignity, integrity, majesty, and humility. ” These values, presented in Christian narratives, symbols, rituals, and moral examples, provided him “existential and ethical equipment to confront the crises, terrors, and horrors of life. As a young man, Cornel West was greatly impressed by the Baptist church. His grandfather, the Reverend Clifton L. West, Sr. , was pastor of the Tulsa Metropolitan Baptist Church in Tulsa Oklahoma. Cornel West had been deeply touched by the stories of parishioners who, only two generations from slavery, told stories of Blacks maintaining their religious faith during the most trying of times. In W. E. B. Du Bois 1903 treatise “The Souls of Black Folk, he said “for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line” a prescient statement.

Setting out to show to the reader “the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century,” Du Bois explains the meaning of the emancipation, and its effect, and his views on the role of the leaders of his race. I believe it was stories such as these that stimulated the young intellectual mind of Cornel West. Cornel West was equally attracted to the commitment of the Black Panthers, whose office was nearby his boyhood church. It was from the Panthers that Cornel West began to understand the importance of community based political action, but it was a biography of Teddy Roosevelt that

Cornel West borrowed from the neighborhood bookmobile that would steer his academic future. Cornel West felt an affinity to Roosevelt, as both were asthmatics. He read how Roosevelt had overcome his asthma, went to Harvard and became a great speaker. So at eight years old, even though he was not exactly sure what it was, Cornel West decided he would go to Harvard. Educational Years Cornel West at the age of seventeen enrolled in Harvard as an undergraduate. He took eight courses per term as a junior, and was able to graduate one year early, achieving magna cum laude in Near Eastern languages and literature.

While there, he wrote a spontaneous fifty page essay to work through the differences between Immanuel Kant and George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s conceptions of God. He even dreamed of philosophical concepts taking form and battling one another. According to Robert S. Boynton, government professor Martin Kilson called West “the most intellectually aggressive and highly cerebral student I have taught in my 30 years at Harvard. ” Cornel West credited his time at Harvard with fueling a reexamination of his world views; over those three years, he surveyed his own thoughts and actions and pursued a rigorous study of new ideas.

In class, he developed a passionate interest on the effects of time and culture on philosophical thought and historical actions. Outside of class, he participated in a breakfast program group in the Massachusetts village of Jamaica Plain. He took weekly trips to Norfolk State Prison, and worked with the Black Student Organization, which was responsible for the 1972 takeover of Massachusetts Hall to both protest Harvard’s investments in Gulf Oil and show support for liberation forces operating in the southwest African country of Angola.

Cornel West also attributed his greatest intellectual influences on political matters to a variety of philosophers such as nineteenth-century Serbian political writer Svetozar Markovic. He continued, however, to recognize the limits of book knowledge and to value dedication in action. After graduating from Harvard, Cornel West began pursuing a doctorate in philosophy at Princeton University. There, he discovered that the values most precious to him were those of individuality and democracy.

In his introduction to Ethical Dimensions, he defined individuality as “the sanctity and dignity of all individuals shaped in and by communities,” and explained democracy as a way of living as well as a way of governing. The work of Richard Rorty, a philosopher at Princeton, also impressed Cornel West. Cornel West called Richard Rorty’s attention to history “music to my ears” and subsequently developed his own vision of Richard Rorty’s favorite philosophical tradition American pragmatism in his 1989 book The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism.

In this book, Cornel West defined his own version of pragmatism, called prophetic pragmatism, which he believes is vital in promoting the formation of a democracy that both recognizes and extols the virtues of individual morality, autonomy, and creativity. Philosopher K. Anthony Appiah, writing in Nation, considered the book “a powerful call for philosophy to play its role in building a radical democracy in alliance with the wretched of the earth” and deemed Cornel West possibly “the pre-eminent African-American intellectual of our generation. Social and Theological Influence Cornel West was heavily influenced by the Black Panthers black power movement at an early age. Robert S. Boynton highlighted in the New York Times Magazine the role the Black Panthers played in refining Cornel West’s progressive international perspective: they taught him the importance of community based struggle; introduced him to the writings of Ghanaian anticolonial philosopher Kwame Nkrumah; and acquainted him with the principles of critical Marxist thought, which called for the achievement of a classless society.

Still, Cornel West recalled in his introduction to Ethical Dimensions that he never fully agreed with these groups and thinkers, since he longed for more of the self-critical humility found in the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr. In addition, he considers himself a non-Marxist socialist, since he champions his Christianity over Marxism and believes that religion and socialism are reconcilable doctrines. In the seven Spiritual Tradition introduced by Reverend Dr. Robert M. Franklin, I would classify Cornel West in the category of Social Justice and Black Liberation Theology.

According to James Cone, the chief architect of Black Liberation Theology in his book A Black Theology of Liberation 1970 develops black theology as a system. In this new formulation, Christian theology is a theology of liberation “a rational study of the being of God in the world in light of the existential situation of an oppressed community, relating the forces of liberation to the essence of the gospel, which is Jesus Christ,” writes James Cone. Black consciousness and the black experience of oppression orient black liberation theology that is one of victimization from white oppression. Cornel West has called the U.

S. a racist patriarchal nation where white supremacy continues to define everyday life. White America, he writes, “has been historically weak willed in ensuring racial justice and has continued to resist fully accepting the humanity of blacks. ” This has resulted, he claims, in the creation of many “degraded and oppressed people hungry for identity, meaning, and self-worth. ” Cornel West attributes most of the black community’s problems to “existential angst derived from the lived experience of ontological wounds and emotional scars inflicted by white supremacist beliefs and images permeating U.

S. society and culture. ” In Cornel West’s view, the September 11, 2001 attacks gave white Americans a glimpse of what it means to be a black person in the United States feeling “unsafe, unprotected, subject to random violence, and hatred” for who they are. “The ugly terrorist attacks on innocent civilians on 9/11,” he said, “plunged the whole country into the blues. ” Cornel West said, “I’m a bluesman moving through a blues soaked America, a blues soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration, Frankie Beverly and Maze call it, “Joy and Pain”.

Career and Public Ministry Cornel West books were first published in the early 1980s, but he wrote many of them in the late 1970s. During his mid-twenties, he left Princeton, returned to Harvard as a Du Bois fellow to finish his dissertation, and then began his first tenure track teaching job as an assistant professor of philosophy of religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. While a Du Bois fellow, Cornel West married and had a son, Clifton. This marriage and a later one ended in divorce.

While teaching at Union Theological Seminary, Cornel West concerned himself with the major national progressive multiracial and religious activity in the country in the 1970s. He also traveled to Brazil, Jamaica, Costa Rica, Mexico, Europe, and South Africa, where he saw and involved himself with intellectual and political progressive movements reminiscent of our 1960s. In the early 1980s, Cornel West encountered Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organization that shaped the version of democratic socialism he would subsequently promote.

Cornel West described the DSA in Ethical Dimensions as “the first multiracial, socialist organization close enough to my politics that I could join. ” Cornel West wrote The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought during his time at Union Theological Seminary, but it was not published until 1991. In the book, he traced Karl Marx’s intellectual development to reveal how Marx incorporated the growing consciousness of history in modern thought with values of individuality and democracy. Cornel West combined his interests in Marxism and religion in his 1982 book Prophesy Deliverance!

An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, in which he shows the potential in prophetic Christianity and especially in aspects of the black church for meaningful opposition to racism and oppression. In 1984 Cornel West assumed a post at the Yale Divinity School that eventually became a joint appointment with the institution’s American Studies Department. He participated in a campus drive for clerical unionism and against Yale’s investments in South African companies. He was arrested and jailed during one campus protest.

Cornel West viewed his political actions at Yale as “a fine example for my wonderful son, Clifton,” who had become a progressive student body president in his predominantly black middle school in Atlanta. The Yale administration punished West by canceling his leave and requiring him to teach a full load of two courses in the spring of 1987. Before his leave was canceled, Cornel West had already arranged to teach African-American thought and American pragmatism at the University of Paris, so in order to fulfill his responsibilities to both schools, he commuted to Paris for his three courses there while teaching his two courses at Yale.

He also served as the American correspondent for Le Monde diplomatique at Yale. In 1988, Cornel West returned to Union Theological Seminary. One year after that move, he accepted a position at Princeton University as professor of religion and director of the Afro-American Studies program. Cornel West continued to write and edit books on philosophy throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. In his 1985 publication Post-Analytic Philosophy, which he edited with John Rajchman, Cornel West reflected on the crisis in American philosophy. Prophetic Fragments, an essay collection published in 1988, is onsidered a tome of contemporary cultural criticism, addressing such subjects as theology, sex, suicide, and violence in America today. In Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life, published in 1991, coauthors West and bell hooks limit themselves to the problems of creating black male-female dialogue and an effective black intellectual community while suggesting practical solutions to communication problems. Cornel West is devoted to celebrating African-American citizens who have left an indelible mark on people of all cultures and races, and continues to address issues that affect the lives of all people.

Since his move to Harvard, West has published several more books including The Future of the Race and The African American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country, both coauthored with his colleague Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The latter is a book that is comprised of approximately 100 biographies of prominent African Americans, including some obscure notables such as the first black woman aviator, Bessie Colman. For the book, the authors wrote, “At the dawn of the 21st century we cannot imagine a truly American culture that has not, in profound ways, been shaped by the contributions of African Americans. ”