So, I learned of this Michael Eric Dyson/Cornel West thing in Black Kos last Friday.
My first thought on actually reading "The Ghost of Cornel West" was that this has to be the most acrimonious black intellectual takedown of another black intellectual since...well, Michelle Wallace took on bell hooks?
Folks are talking.
And I mean everywhere.
Chaunceydevega (respectable negro that he is) imagines the West/Dyson fracas as a video game.
Myself, I can't help but be reminded of the Roxanne Wars what with all the responses and the responses to the responses.
I will add that the comment sections of various blogs are equally hilarious. And circular. The occupiers of these various comment section seem to range from Stormfronter types to black nationalists with missing teeth in their afro picks to good-old fashioned Negrotarians.
Truthfully, I don't have much more to add but (lol, there it is)...
Well, there were a couple-two-three items Dyson's original piece that did catch my eye (and none of them have anything to do with Anita Baker).
This:
I shared my three-part formula for discussing Obama before black audiences: Start with love for the man and pride in his epic achievement; focus on the unprecedented acrimony he faces as the nation’s first black executive; and target his missteps and failures. No matter how vehemently I disagree with Obama, I respect him as a man wrestling with an incredibly difficult opportunity to shape history. West looked into my eyes, sighed, and said: “Well, I guess that’s the difference between me and you. I don’t respect the brother at all.”
Well, yes...and to be sure Dyson has
"vehemently" disagreed with the President at times.
But even here, Dyson left out a very important exception to this "code." Follow me Behind the Orange Veil...
The phrase "black audience" is unclear.
In a lecture or speaking before a church or in any mixed race crowd, Dr. Dyson would be correct.
Amongst other black folks (and only black folks!) in an informal setting such as a barber shop or at a card table?
You might hear anything.
I don't know too many African Americans that haven't had criticisms of President Obama, at various times and for all sorts of reasons. Noone that I know views President Obama as being Jesus (or even the Pharoah). And, yes, in the (somewhat) safe space of the black community things can get said in a manner and tone that no white person need (or should) ever hear.
So the issue (at least with me) isn't so much that Dr. West has called President Obama a “Rockefeller Republican in blackface” or a “brown-faced Clinton” or "a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs"
I've occasionally heard worse.
But it was for my ears and for the ears of other black folks only.
Language and tone of that sort is inappropriate for any formal lecture or address and definitely not for any crowd of mixed race folks or for a worldwide YouTube audience.
Dr West's "pulpit" is way too big and respected of that.
The second point that struck me in Dyson's essay were his views on written v. "oral" philosophizing.
The ecstasies of the spoken word, when scholarship is at stake, leave the deep reader and the long listener hungry for more. Writing is an often-painful task that can feel like the death of one’s past. Equally discomfiting is seeing one’s present commitments to truths crumble once one begins to tap away at the keyboard or scar the page with ink. Writing demands a different sort of apprenticeship to ideas than does speaking. It beckons one to revisit over an extended, or at least delayed, period the same material and to revise what one thinks. Revision is reading again and again what one writes so that one can think again and again about what one wants to say and in turn determine if better and deeper things can be said.
On one hand, I agree with Dyson that West's written work has decayed over the years; I've voiced some of those criticisms of West myself.
However, I have to say that it's a noble enterprise that Dr. West has been one of the few bonafide philosophers that is seriously attempting to bring philosophy back to the streets and marketplaces (real and virtual) where it truly belongs as opposed to merely being the purview of esoteric and expensive journals and superstar professors of one percenter children in Ivy Towers.
One of the things I loved (and continue to love) about the study of Greek philosophy is that concepts and realities of life, love, reason, the gods, justice, language etc. were discussed and, at times, fought for, out in the streets (admittedly, for a few male citizens). People died for what they believed about this stuff.
And all of us need to talk about this "stuff" more than ever. I'm not simply talking about what Dr. Martin Luther King called "the paralysis of analysis" but to think profoundly and deeply about who "we" are and where ""we" are going.
And then to do something about it.
And we need guides...prophets...oracles (my own preferred nomenclature) like Dr. Dyson and Dr. West (among so many others) to do less of this petty bullshit and more of assisting the rest of us how to hold and shine our own lanterns.