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Cornel West

Prominent American scholar and public intellectual, West is best known for his works on race, religion, and politics in America.  An American Book Award recipient, West serves as co-chair for the National Parenting Organization’s Task Force on Parent Empowerment and has been a long-time member of the Democratic Socialists of America.  He also was a participant of President Clinton’s National Conversation on Race and a senior advisor to 2000 Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate Al Sharpton.  In several books, such as The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989), West has tried to incorporate Marxist analysis into the different strands of American thought and practice, ranging from black religious congregations to university-trained philosopher like John Dewey, in his critique of American society.

Born on June 2, 1953 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, West was active in civil rights demonstrations, having been influenced by the works and examples of Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, and James Cone.  He completed his undergraduate degree in Near Eastern languages at Harvard in 1973 and achieved his Masters in 1975 and his doctorate in 1980, both at Princeton University.  His dissertation was revised and published as The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought in 1991, where he incorporates Marxist analysis into the prophetic tradition of the African-American Baptist Church.  This theme is explored again in his book, Prophesy Deliverance! (1982).  In 1977-1984 and 1987-1988, West taught at Union Theological Seminary, with an appointment at Yale Divinity School from 1984-1987.  In 1988, he was director of African-American Studies and a professor of Religion at Princeton University, where he stayed until 1993 when he joined the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University.  While at Harvard, West co-authored two books with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. – The Future of Race (1996) and The African-American Century (2000) – before returning back to Princeton University in 2002, after a public dispute with Harvard President Larry Summers about West’s spending too much time in political activity.

The book that brought public prominence to West was Race Matters (1993).  In this work, West examines an array of controversial topics such as black-Jewish relations, the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, and the black conservative movement.  In this work, West criticized both conservative and liberals for their dependence upon the capitalist economy to provide solutions to social, cultural, and political problems, and seeks to create a new way to solve these problems by restructuring economic relations on a socialist model.  Later, with Rabbi Michael Lerner, West explores black-Jewish relations in Jews and Blacks (1995).  Here West is unwilling to repudiate Louis Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism, although in Race Matters he does criticize the black leadership for not condemning the 1991 murder of Yankel Rosenbaum.  More recently, West has returned to his earlier theme of prophetic criticism in Democracy Matters (2004).  Placing himself in the African-American prophetic tradition, West draws upon American cultural, political, and religious thought to criticize the United States’  free-market economy, foreign policy, and Christian fundamentalism, equating the last with Islamic fundamentalism.

 

References

Cowan, Rosemary.  Cornel West: The Politics of Redemption.  Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2003.

Johnson, Clarence Sholé.  Cornel West and Philosophy.  Oxford: Routledge Press, 2002.

Wood, Mark David.  Cornel West and the Politics of Prophetic Pragmatism.  Champagne, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Yancy, George, ed.  Cornel West: A Critical Reader.  Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.

 

This essay was originally published with the same title in Roy P. Domenico and Mark Y. Hanley, eds., Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Politics (Greenwood Press, 2006), 591-92.

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Lee Trepanier is Chair and Professor of the Political Science Department at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama and former editor-in-chief of VoegelinView (2016-21). He is author and editor of several books and editor of Lexington Books series Politics, Literature, and Film (2013-present).

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