Oh shit! Excuse my language, but that was my reaction after reading Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry's blogpost, article, let-me-take-Cornell West-to-the-woodshed moment in The Nation. As my Dad used to say way back in the day, she "beat the black" off the brother!
First a little context around the Cornel West matter and his secretly black-hating white fans. Follow me below the fold.
One or two white progressives on DKOS have proffered that blacks are supporting President Obama unconditionally because he's black, which is, of course, nonsense. Black folks support President Obama primarily because he's not a MOTHERFUCKING REPUBLICAN! Our elders didn't have the option of considering policy nuances between the two parties. They knew that one party was responsible for the Civil Rights Act while the other believed in a permanent black underclass. Cornel West and his white progressive fans on DKOS seem to have forgotten that bit of history. Both Al Gore and John Kerry, two white as rice politicians, received 93-95% black support, right up there with Barack Obama's level of black support. Bill Clinton, who never got as much as 50% of the popular vote in either of his elections, would never have been president without overwhelming black support. But let black voters show a black president the same love we've showed white Democrats and so-called progressives charge it's because of his skin color. It's the same old canard that black folks can't be objective, that we're like the black jurors in O.J.'s criminal trial, that only white people - specifically white progressives - can make political decisions without regard to race.
Now, about the white progressive hero of the moment, Dr. Cornel West. We know why he's their hero. He publicly criticizes President Obama, providing cover for closet racists to cheer him on. But why does he do it? Professor Harris-Perry exposes the privileged, Afro'ed and bearded, scarf-wearing Dr. West as an egotist aligned with another egotist, specifically Tom, I mean Tavis Smiley.
In a self-aggrandizing, victimology sermon deceptively wrapped in the discourse of prophetic witness, Professor West offers thin criticism of President Obama and stunning insight into the delicate ego of the self-appointed black leadership class that has been largely supplanted in recent years.
Believe me, she was just getting started:
West begins with a bit of historical revision. West suggests that the President discarded him without provocation after he offered the Obama for America campaign his loyal service and prayers. But anyone with a casual knowledge of this rift knows it began during the Democratic primary not after the election. It began, not with a puffed up President, but when Cornel West’s “dear brother” Tavis Smiley threw a public tantrum because Senator Obama refused to attend Smiley's annual State of Black America.
And then,
Fiercely loyal to his friend, Professor West chose sides and began to undermine candidate Obama is small and large ways. Candidate Obama ceased calling West back because he was in the middle of a fierce campaign and West’s loyalties were, at best, divided. I suspect candidate Obama did not trust his “dear brother” to keep the campaign secrets and strategies. I also suspect he was not inaccurate in his hesitancy.
She exposes the Princeton Prof as having an ego as thin as his slender frame:
Furthermore, West’s sense of betrayal is clearly more personal than ideological. In Hedges's article West claims that a true progressive would always put love of the people above concern with the elite and privileged. Then he complains, “I couldn’t get a ticket [to the inauguration] with my mother and my brother. I said this is very strange. We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks up my bags from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration... We had to watch the thing in the hotel.” Let me get this straight—the tenured, Princeton professor who collects five figures for public lectures was relegated to a hotel television while an anonymous hotel worker got tickets to the inauguration! What kind of crazy, mixed up class politics are these?
Dr. Harris-Perry hangs the pot-calling-the-kettle-black snugly around Cornel's skinny neck just like one of his scarves:
Take for example West's ad hominem attack on the President’s racial identity.
“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men… It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation.”
This comment is utter hilarity coming from Cornel West who has spent the bulk of his adulthood living in those deeply rooted, culturally rich, historically important black communities of Cambridge, MA and Princeton, NJ. And it is hard to see his claim that Obama is “most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they” as anything other than a classic projection of his own comfortably ensconced life at Harvard and Princeton Universities. Harvard and Princeton are not places that are particularly noted for their liberating history for black men.
As tenured professors Cornel West and I are not meaningfully accountable, no matter what our love, commitment, or self-delusions tell us. President Obama, as an elected official, can, in fact, be voted out of his job. We can’t. That is a difference that matters. As West derides the President’s economic policies he remains silent on his friend Tavis Smiley’s relationship with Wal-Mart, Wells Fargo, and McDonald's—all corporations whose invasive and predatory actions in poor and black communities have been the target of progressive organizing for decades. I have never heard him take Tavis Smiley to task for helping convince black Americans to enter into predatory mortgages. I’ve never heard him ask whether Tavis' decision to publish R. Kelley’s memoirs might be a less than progressive decision. He doesn’t hold Tavis accountable because Tavis is his friend and he is loyal. I respect that, but I also know that if he were in elected office the could not get off so easily.
She ends her spanking of the diminutive, dazed and confused Dr. West with this:
But I can tell the difference between a substantive criticism and a personal attack. It is clear to me that West’s ego, not the health of American democracy, is the wounded creature in this story.
There is much more. Read the whole blog post, which I have renamed Melissa Harris-Perry Tears Cornel West a New One Right on, Sister!
Updated by The Plainsman at Tue May 17, 2011 at 09:01 PM PDT
Thanks for the rec list. I get tired of elite black folks like Cornel West, who I have a lot of respect for, and Tavis Smiley, who I have no respect for, acting like "crabs in a bucket" as my late father used to say.