Kiese Laymon
"This
is the last thing I'ma say on this for a while, but I reread Dyson's
rumination on writing and listened to his interview with Root. I wrote
two books the year before last and sold around 30,000 copies. I have two
new books coming out next year with Scribner. I write a lot. Mainly
because I'm a terrible person when I don't. But writing a lot does not,
and has never, equaled meaningful loving black cultural production.
Dyson's dig at West for not writing his own books in the last part of his career is a smack in the face to the idea of collaboration that so many folks who I respect push forward, and it's disrespectful to the hundreds of black professors in the country, like my mother who spent her entire career almost loving and teaching the fuck out of black kids at Jackson State University.
My mother published one book in the 80's. It was her dissertation. And I read that shit when it came out like it was Sweet Valley High. It smelled like new saw dust. Mama was proud. And I was proud. And I took that little hard red book to school to show my friends. But I was much more proud at the smaller pieces she wrote about poverty in my state, and way more proud of the work she did with her students. She didn't just launch her students or hook them up. She worked tediously with them on every part of their lives. She loved them and encouraged them to take love, commitment, black politics, seriously.
My mama never wrote another book. Maybe she will. Maybe she won't. But she created meaningful black cultural production and worked hard at creating and sustaining loving relationships with her colleagues and students. Making this some sort of contest about who has the most books, or writes the most words, or who has the most debilitating writer's block, is about the silliest shit I could ever imagine launching at anyone black, much less someone like Cornel West, or my mother.
It's some dumb man-shit that when probed means nothing except the person writing it is terribly insecure and hiding what they're really mad about. Think of the incredible black scholars like who create incredible black cultural production without writing books. Think of artists like Ellison who wrote a masterpiece and didn't really feel great about anything he wrote after. Toni Cade Bambara is one of the reason I think and feel. Is she a mental midget because she doesn't have tens of books? Think about Cornel West who challenged so many of us with his philosophical books and Race Matters, who continues, in different ways, to teach and probe.
In the rush to diss this black man, Professor Dyson dissed a huge part of our black tradition. And he dissed my mama, someone who would have some choice words for him if he ever stepped to her with that brittle-ass critique. Im thankful for the work of Dyson. I'm thankful for the work of West. Honestly, Im more thankful for some of the people they have taught who have profoundly impacted my life and the life of my students.
My mama was committed to the work. She is committed to the work. And the work has to begin and end with loving commitment to justice and searing honest imagination. That work must take multiple forms. It simply must. Black death is countered by textured black love, and acceptance of our aint-shitness, and acceptance or our majesty, and multiple funky forms of creation. Those forms of creation need not be written. My mama, your mama, and most mama's I've heard of, taught us that. And I know we heard them when they said it. It wasn't written. We can be better ..."
--------------
Ádìsá Ájámú
White intellectuals—here I'm thinking the "New York Intellectuals" like
Irving Howe, Mary McCarthy, Trilling, Dwight MacDonald, Daniel Bell
etc.—have long history of intellectual disputation as blood sport and
though they always spoke for white folks, white was and has always been
the synonym for human in the alabaster imagination.
What this falling out underscores, what it reveals is what many of us already kinda know: That public intellectualism is really just performance art that nods towards activism and is only tangentially interested in people and social justice. Let me be clear here: For me, there is a difference between a thinker whose work and idea gathers public attention from the sheer force of their intellect which shows up in the form of them and their ideas at work and a "public intellectual" someone whose primary notoriety comes from the sheer force of their public persona.
Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, Stokely Carmichael, for example, were thinkers (intellectuals is you will) who became public because of the power of their ideas in demonstrated practice. They represented a quality of thought in practice. What we seem to have increasingly is really smart, very well trained television personalities, who speak on issues of the time but very often follow the light rather than bringing illumination.
We should be clear that the conflation of academic with intellectual is relatively recent historical phenomenon. Historically, intellectuals existed largely outside of predatory sprawl of academia. For Black folks most of our intellectuals had very little connection with academy, most of the 19th century nationalist, most of the intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance (Although Alain Leroy Locke was certainly an architect) as well as most of those affiliated with the Harlem History Club were in the words of Ellis Thorpe, " scholars without portfolio."
What we are seeing here in the Dyson piece is a battle over new plantation real estate. I still think the definitive piece on the Black Intellectual phenomenon was penned by Adolph Reed Jr's in a 1994 Village Voice piece, "What Are The Drums Saying Booker?"
What should have people who love Drs Dyson and West or their ideas appalled is not their lovers quarrel, but that at a time in which Black life is placed increasingly in peril, a strong mind saw fit to expend ten thousand words on playing the dozens, and not on police terrorism, the increase in white racial animus, the chronic intra-community violence or mass incarceration. That tells you everything you need to know about elephants fighting and why the grass always gets hurt.
— Ádìsá
,----------------------
Ben Norton
The Ghosts of Obama’s Victims: How Liberals’ Attacks on Cornel West Expose Their Political Bankruptcy
This article is published in Medium. Author, Benjamin Ben Norton
"In her 1987 autobiography, Assata Shakur characterized liberalism as a politically and morally bankrupt ideology, writing
In a parenthetical statement in the essay, Dyson recalls a private discussion he had with Obama in the White House. Later on, he writes that, “Throughout his presidency I have offered what I consider principled support and sustained criticism of Obama,” and states he has “expressed love for Obama and criticized him for not always loving us back.” A quick look at the White House visitor records helps paint a picture of this cozy relationship.
Dyson’s affection for Obama certainly shines through the work; even the scantest of criticisms is hard to come by. In perhaps the most ludicrous, topsy-turvy moment in the extended work, Dyson claims “Obama talks right … but veers left public policy,” whereas “West, on the other hand, talks left but thinks right.” In the real world, the exact contrary is true: Obama talks center-right and veers decidedly right on policy. Obama is and has always been a conservative. The Obama the Conservative project meticulously detailed his right-wing policies for years.
The evidence overwhelmingly shows that Cornel West is absolutely correct in his insistence that Obama “posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit. We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency.” This presidency is also built upon the expansion of murderous imperialism in the Middle East, upon the adoption of neoliberal trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) (often described as “NAFTA on steroids”), upon the mass deportation and inhumane and illegal internment of millions of Latin@ immigrants and refugees, upon the privatization of prisons, upon the McCarthyist crackdown on whistleblowers, and more.
According to Dyson, West “derides” Obama as a “neoliberal opportunist.” This is not derision. This is an objective fact. Obama is a neoliberal through and through. He has made it his singular mission to pass the TPP and gut regulatory and labor laws, using secretive, anti-democratic methods in order to do so.
In the words of Chris Hedges
In the overture to the protracted piece, Dyson claims he is “just as critical of the president as” West, yet proof of such an assertion is certainly hard to come by—and he spends the next several thousand words detailing why exactly the opposite is true.
Defending Corporate Civil Rights Figures
While shielding Obama from West’s criticisms, Dyson elevates corporate civil rights figures Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, among others. The two men’s names appear constantly (Sharpton 16 times and Jackson eight).
Black Agenda Report’s Glen Ford describes Al Sharpton as “a crook who is always for sale,” with strident “amorality and infinite capacity for corruption.” Sharpton, Ford says, is a “celebrity locked in the embrace of the rich and powerful.”
Sharpton’s ostensible civil rights organization the National Action Network is sponsored by the world’s largest corporations, including Walmart, PepsiCo, McDonald’s, AT&T, Verizon, and more. He clearly seeks real, systemic change and justice with those kinds of progressive backers.
Jackson is a reactionary pro-imperialist proponent of “black capitalism” who destroyed the Rainbow Coalition, co-opting its legacy as an internationalist, multi-cultural revolutionary organization created by the socialist Black Panthers and turning it into a neoliberal nationalist “coalition.”
Young black Americans recognize that Sharpton and Jackson are not fighters for liberation. When the two reactionary public figures tried to exploit the Black Lives Matter uprisings in Ferguson and elsewhere, they were booed off stage. Cornel West, however, unlike these corrupt corporate celebrities, has been at the forefront of the Black Lives Matter movement, getting arrested at demonstrations, constantly attending and speaking at rallies, tirelessly working from the bottom up, in true grassroots fashion.
Dyson essentially writes off the import of these actions as mere “highly staged and camera-ready gestures.” In Dyson’s view, West “hungers for the studio, and conspicuously so.” It is implied that his civil disobedience is part of a façade for attention. Dyson even admits he, at least for a time, entertained the preposterous notion that West is motivated to do so because he is “consumed with jealousy of Obama” and firmly maintains that “West’s deep loathing of Obama draws on some profoundly personal energy that is ultimately irrational.” In a similarly superficial moment, Dyson speculates that West may “hate” Obama because he was unable to get a ticket to the president’s inauguration.
For starters, the idea that West loathes Obama is incredibly misguided. West is the polar opposite of a hate-filled person; he constantly speaks of love, and firmly opposes Obama’s reactionary policies, not his being. In a 2014 interview on Democracy Now, West in fact remarked of Obama, “when I say when I love the brother, it means we have to tell the truth about him.”
The fact that West does not hold any kind of deep hatred of Obama aside, this is the kind of puerile argument liberals regularly construct to defend their untenable positions. They personalize critiques of political figures, turning political argumentation into apolitical beauty pageants that are fueled on “irrational personal energy,” not substantive material concerns about existing systems of oppression.
Ignoring the Political for the Personal
Dyson makes no serious critiques of West’s actual political positions. His entire essay reads primarily as a very long-winded ad hominem (which is all the more ironic considering Dyson accuses West of “biting our ears with personal attacks”). Dyson focuses almost entirely on how West speaks and presents himself, but largely glosses over West’s political criticisms of society.
He harshly writes “West is a scold, a curmudgeonly and bitter critic who has grown long in the tooth but sharp in the tongue when lashing one-time colleagues and allies,” yet fails to enunciate why this is purportedly the case. He furthermore claims West has become “an unintentional caricature of his identity” and accuses the scholar of “delusion and exegetical corruption.”
Borrowing from what one might hear in a high school breakup scene in a John Hughes film, Dyson pillories West for being “crushed that Obama had ideologically cheated on him”—as if it were a petty thing to be frustrated at a president who campaigned on promises of progressive “change” but turned out to be just another neoliberal warmonger.
Much of the article is devoted to dissecting West’s characterization of himself as a prophet, which one gets the impression is overstated. Dyson also writes extensively about “West’s diminished scholarly output” and what he feels to be a “paucity of serious and fresh intellectual work,” then proceeding to conflate these criticisms with West’s activism and criticisms of the status quo, implying the latter are equally “vain and unimaginative.” In a problematic selective reading of West’s work, Dyson accuses the professor of propagating a “conservative view of ghetto culture as deeply pathological, and as the chief source of the problems that beset African Americans.” Again, however, he does not spend a single sentence acknowledging West’s politics. No mention whatsoever is made of West’s work on Marxism, nor is his involvement with the Democratic Socialists of America ever brought up.
Absent from the essay—in spite of its prolixity—is any attempt to engage with, let alone refute, West’s critiques of Obama and the US political establishment. Dyson does raise warranted concerns about gaps in West’s scholarship, noting, for instance, that the professor failed to clearly define what exactly makes a person a prophet, yet, to a large extent, Dyson avoids the political. He illustrates the liberal tendency to emphasize that the personal is political to such a degree that the non-personal, systemic political is ignored.
Dyson even goes so far as to write off West’s critiques of Obama as “a species of antipathy that no political difference could ever explain.” Instead of engaging in the political, Dyson reduces it to a mere “shrill and manic dispute.” He classifies West’s denunciation of Obama as the sign of “the loss of a brilliant black mind,” as if criticizing a president who won an election thanks to the financial backing of some of the world’s most powerful banks and corporations were only something a “maniac” would do.
In a bout of full liberalism, Dyson concludes the essay averring that West’s problem ultimately lies with his own self, not with any politician or political system. This is the kind of vacuous political perspective that dominates the intelligentsia today.
One wishes that Dyson would get as worked up about the victims of Obama’s drone war, which Chomsky calls “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times”; about Obama’s steadfast support for Israel during its summer 2014 massacre of over 2,300 Gazans, in which it intentionally targeted civilians; about Obama’s expansion of the war in and occupation of Afghanistan, which he promised countless times he would end by 2014; or about Obama’s mass deportations of over two million people—to name just a few of his positively reactionary policies—as he is about West’s supposed hatred of Obama.
The fact of the matter is West’s heated criticisms of Obama are the logical result of a morally consistent human being seeing the horrors for which the Obama administration has been responsible. The problem does not lie with West’s admittedly provocative denunciations of Obama, but rather with the fact that more self-identifying progressives are not standing up for their values and opposing their government’s obscene crimes.
Siding with Larry Summers, the ‘Toxic Colonialist’
In his criticisms of West, it should be pointed out that Dyson favorably cites neoliberal economist Lawrence Summers, former Chief Economist at the World Bank and President of Harvard University, a figure who has occupied many important positions in the Clinton and Obama administrations and has a long history frequenting the corporate elevator and revolving doors between powerful economic and political institutions, including hedge funds like D. E. Shaw & Co. Summers, who has come under attack for blatant misogyny, is the kind of liberal who helped former Soviet countries privatize their economies—leading to enormous increases in poverty—and oversaw the deregulation of the US financial system.
Summers, on whose authority Dyson relies without trepidation, signed an internal World Bank memo in 1991 that called for Western countries to dump toxic waste in the Global South, because, in his view, from a capitalist economics perspective, the value of the lives of people in Africa, Asia, and more is less than the value of the lives of people in North America and Europe. Summers’ defense of “toxic colonialism” was of little importance to liberals like Obama himself, who relied on the former World Bank economist as the White House United States National Economic Council and the principle economic decision-maker during the Great Recession.
The ultimate irony lies in the sharp contrast between Summers’ belief that (presumably white) Western lives are more valuable than black and brown ones in the so-called Third World and Cornel West’s antithetical adamant insistence that all lives are equal. In his condemnation of killer drone strikes, West often implores listeners to consider whether they truly do consider all lives to be equal, whether they truly care about the young Pakistani children killed in Obama’s drone program—which Amnesty International has accused of war crimes.
Whitewashing MLK
As is common among the liberal intelligentsia, Dyson also exploits the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. in order to defend and lionize the war criminal (according to Amnesty International) Obama.
The irony is that many of the criticisms Dyson levies against West were equally true for MLK—a “prophetic” leader who, like West, was not a “moderate” toer of the party line, but was rather a radical, a relentless critic of not just racism but also of imperialism and capitalism, someone who alienated many supposed allies in his indefatigable and intersectional quest for justice.
Dyson predictably whitewashes MLK’s radical legacy, claiming the civil rights icon “was arguably more beneficial to the folk he loved when he swayed power with his influence and vision”—that is to say, when he worked within the system and did not step on the toes of the powerful.
Throwing Progressive Leaders Under the Bus
Do West’s claims of prophethood go overboard? Yes. Does Dyson exaggerate these claims? Also yes. Is Cornel West immune from criticism? Absolutely not. He is not perfect. And I concur with Dyson; he is not a prophet.
Yet, by siding with a criminal presidential administration over one of the leading purveyors of justice in the world today, figures like Michael Eric Dyson demonstrate, once again, how politically and morally bankrupt liberalism is.
The MSNBC analyst’s essay “The Ghost of Cornel West” exemplifies what is precisely the problem with liberals. They will side (and gleefully, at that) with neoliberal leaders who consider the lives of people in the Global South less valuable than those of Westerners, who wage genocidal wars, and who destroy economies with structural adjustment programs and odious debt, over radical justice-seekers because, in their myopic, ahistorical, and frankly ignorant view, it is “arguably more beneficial” to do so.
Liberals should be much more concerned about the innumerable ghosts of the victims of their leader’s policies than they are about the ghost of one of his most strident critics.
Cornel West is a hero—absolutely, unequivocally a hero. And he is one of the few heroes the Left has today. Unfortunately, that has never stopped liberals from throwing them under the bus."
,----------------
Dave Zirin
http://m.thenation.com/blog/204769-cornel-west-not-mike-tyson
Cornel West is not Mike Tyson
"As a sportswriter I am very sensitive to the use and misuse of boxing metaphors. Few analogies are either more powerful or more universally understood than comparing a public figure to an iconic fighter. Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, in a panoramic, painfully personal, deeply researched 10,000-word excoriation of Dr. Cornel West, published in The New Republic, has compared the 61-year-old professor to Mike Tyson. He describes West as someone who once "tore through opponents with startling menace and ferocity," but who has since devolved into a "faint echo of himself," an ear-biting sideshow, more interested in celebrity than serious academic and political work.
With all respect to Dyson, who wrote the intro to my book Game Over and has been a friend to me on numerous occasions, this is in my view the wrong choice of championship pugilists. West is not Mike Tyson: he's Muhammad Ali. Not the Muhammad Ali of ESPN hagiographies or Hollywood films starring Will Smith. But the real Muhammad Ali: effortlessly provocative, undeniably narcissistic, and unquestionably brilliant. The deeply hurtful quotes that West has aimed at Dyson (he has "prostituted himself intellectually") and Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry ("she is a liar and a fraud") are 21st-century iterations of Ali's regrettable, and for many unforgivable, questioning of the blackness of the great Joe Frazier, comparing the proud fighter to an ugly gorilla, all in the name of hyping up fights and throwing Frazier off of his game.
These comments are vicious, and as someone who has benefited from the kindness offered me by both Dyson and Dr. Harris-Perry, they anger my blood. The restraint that Dyson has shown over the last several years as West has thrown out his assorted rabbit-punches should be acknowledged. But the sight of Dyson escalating what was a one-sided series of verbal taunts into a written treatise, and marshaling his intellectual powers toward a polarizing 10,000-word New Republic essay is to see nothing less—I suppose based upon your perspective—than the academic version of either George Foreman punching himself out in Zaire or "Smokin' Joe" sending the champ to the canvas of Madison Square Garden. (I am well aware that in this metaphor, I'm the white sportswriter getting some copy out of the spectacle of two heavyweights throwing hands. Hopefully, I'll be more Bob Lipsyte than Jimmy Cannon.)
The timing of the essay is also very disorienting. We are at a moment when a new movement is attempting to confront an epidemic level of police violence. Dyson and West have in word and deed both been important voices in this movement. As the challenges of sustaining this struggle grow with every police killing, it is an odd moment for a public figure like Dyson to write so particular, so personal, and so granular an attack against West over his lack of scholarship, his love of celebrity, and his at times highly intimate racialized attacks against President Obama.
The piece begins with Dyson's thesis that Cornel West's animus for the president is rooted in a love betrayed. West "hates" President Obama and uses such personal invective in his political critiques because he once loved him and feels wronged, both personally snubbed and politically ignored. It is difficult to escape the idea that this thesis mirrors Dyson's perspective toward West. His anger is so intense toward Cornel West because his onetime mentor—someone with whom he would attend Anita Baker concerts in the 1980s for no reason other than to swoon—has branded him a sellout for not joining him in denunciation of the Obama administration. Dyson defends himself against these charges, writing that he has never relinquished his criticisms of President Obama but has also never relinquished either his love for the man or his respect for the accomplishment of becoming the first black president of a country founded on principles of white supremacy. He believes he has been principled and is demonstrably hurt that West has translated his political approach through the ugliest possible lens. There has been no give, no charity, in West's public analysis of Dyson's political tactics, and now Dyson is ready to return in kind. In honor of the boxing metaphors used by Dyson, several of his blows hit their mark, and Dyson is, frankly, too good a writer to not make this piece leave a bruise. West has exposed his chin through his acquisition of celebrity and absence of scholarship, and Dyson never forgoes taking a roundhouse punch, even when just a jab will do.
But there are several holes in Dyson's piece that are glaring. To read the article, one would think that West's anger toward Obama is solely rooted in snubbed invitations and unanswered phone calls. This ignores a series of key political criticisms that West has been raising for years.
Cornel West believes in Palestinian liberation. He believes in amnesty for undocumented immigrants. He believes that the bankers responsible for the 2008 crisis should be brought to justice. He believes that capitalism is a driving engine of much of the injustice in our world. He believes that Obama's drone program is an act of state-sanctioned murder. One can choose to agree or disagree with these points, but one cannot ignore that West has been relentless in his efforts to place them in the political discourse. The word "Palestine" or "Palestinian" does not once make its way into Dyson's piece. Neither does "Wall Street" or "immigration." The word "drones" only comes up in a quote attributed to West. We can debate how sincere West's commitments are to these issues or whether they are a cover for his hurt feelings and heartbreak that Dyson posits is at the root of all the discord. But they should be reckoned with. Does a "black politics" going forward need to have something to say about corporate power, Israeli occupation, immigration, and drone warfare? That's the unspoken debate in this article, made all the more glaring because Dyson is sympathetic—and far closer to West than President Obama—on many of these questions.
Dyson says repeatedly that he is a critic of Obama but loves the man, while disagreeing with much of his "neoliberal" policy. Yet he also goes out of his way to write,
Then there is the specter of the Black Lives Matter movement, which hangs over every syllable in this piece. Aside from one dismissive mention of West's getting arrested in Ferguson during a staged act of civil disobedience, it is not discussed explicitly. But, at least for this reader, it was impossible to divorce this major article coming out at a moment when the movement is publicly facing a series of questions: namely, whether it "should be moving in a more radical or conciliatory direction."
It has to be noted that Dyson's initial public critique against West came not with this article but last week at the National Action Network's 16th annual convention, where he said,
Sharpton is cracking down on those who would challenge his authority. In other words, while Dyson has been given ample provocation to strike back at West, there is also a political battle thrumming beneath the surface that we would be naïve to ignore. Dyson says that West's fatal flaw lies in seeing that his way is the only way. It is true that no one has all the answers but we can't settle the questions unless we depersonalize and get at the substance of the divisions: reform vs. revolt; working inside vs. working outside the corridors of power; and so many other "old" debates that have taken on, to use a much-abused phrase, the fierce urgency of now.
Cornel West is no Mike Tyson, and it has to be said that even in the land of metaphor, comparing West to a convicted rapist is difficult to read. But in comparing him to Ali, let's also remember that the Champ had two careers: one where he was simply too quick to touch, and one, after he returned to the ring in 1970, where he was slower but still fighting with his gloves down and possessing a new strategy: one where he chose to take punch after punch after punch to the chin, until he either fell down or his opponent tired from exhaustion. Ali paid a dear price for this strategy, but it was devastatingly effective. West has chosen over the last several years to take numerous punches from his political opponents. I don't believe any have punched quite as hard as Dyson. But with this 10,000-word escalation that increases the personal heat while brushing over the political differences, Dyson may have done exactly what West was tempting him to do. The tragedy is that there are so many others who should be higher on everyone's list of those who need to be prodded, need to be provoked… and need to be knocked the hell out."
----------------------
Kirsten West Savali
http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2015/04/michael_eric_dyson_s_cornel_west_essay_was_a_hit_piece_wrapped_in_scholarly.html?wpisrc=topstories
" began reading Michael Eric Dyson’s lengthy essay for the New Republic, “The Ghost of Dr. Cornel West,” with some trepidation. By the time I finished it, I was sickened. Framed as an impartial assessment of West’s so-called steep decline as a scholar, public intellectual, thought leader and writer, Dyson backdoors into a scathing critique of his former friend that felt as bruising as a series of sucker punches delivered with increasingly gleeful frequency and viciousness.
What this falling out underscores, what it reveals is what many of us already kinda know: That public intellectualism is really just performance art that nods towards activism and is only tangentially interested in people and social justice. Let me be clear here: For me, there is a difference between a thinker whose work and idea gathers public attention from the sheer force of their intellect which shows up in the form of them and their ideas at work and a "public intellectual" someone whose primary notoriety comes from the sheer force of their public persona.
Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, Stokely Carmichael, for example, were thinkers (intellectuals is you will) who became public because of the power of their ideas in demonstrated practice. They represented a quality of thought in practice. What we seem to have increasingly is really smart, very well trained television personalities, who speak on issues of the time but very often follow the light rather than bringing illumination.
We should be clear that the conflation of academic with intellectual is relatively recent historical phenomenon. Historically, intellectuals existed largely outside of predatory sprawl of academia. For Black folks most of our intellectuals had very little connection with academy, most of the 19th century nationalist, most of the intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance (Although Alain Leroy Locke was certainly an architect) as well as most of those affiliated with the Harlem History Club were in the words of Ellis Thorpe, " scholars without portfolio."
What we are seeing here in the Dyson piece is a battle over new plantation real estate. I still think the definitive piece on the Black Intellectual phenomenon was penned by Adolph Reed Jr's in a 1994 Village Voice piece, "What Are The Drums Saying Booker?"
What should have people who love Drs Dyson and West or their ideas appalled is not their lovers quarrel, but that at a time in which Black life is placed increasingly in peril, a strong mind saw fit to expend ten thousand words on playing the dozens, and not on police terrorism, the increase in white racial animus, the chronic intra-community violence or mass incarceration. That tells you everything you need to know about elephants fighting and why the grass always gets hurt.
— Ádìsá
,----------------------
Ben Norton
The Ghosts of Obama’s Victims: How Liberals’ Attacks on Cornel West Expose Their Political Bankruptcy
This article is published in Medium. Author, Benjamin Ben Norton
"In her 1987 autobiography, Assata Shakur characterized liberalism as a politically and morally bankrupt ideology, writing
I have never really understood exactly what a ‘liberal’ is, since I have heard ‘liberals’ express every conceivable opinion on every conceivable subject. As far as I can tell, you have the extreme right, who are fascist racist capitalist dogs like Ronald Reagan, who come right out and let you know where they’re coming from. And on the opposite end, you have the left, who are supposed to be committed to justice, equality, and human rights. And somewhere between those two points is the liberal.Liberals’ constant attacks on Cornel West—one of the most important leaders in the US anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and economic, social, and environmental justice movements of today—serve as a reminder as to just how accurate Assata was in her assessment, made almost three decades ago. The Democratic commentariat seem to take pleasure in heaping scorn on the principled iconoclast, never failing to include as a header image on their articles a photo of the professor scowling, in a cheap attempt to portray the amiable, peace-seeking public intellectual as angry and impetuous.
As far as I’m concerned, ‘liberal’ is the most meaningless word in the dictionary.
In the latest of such shameless attacks, MSNBC
analyst and avowed Obama defender Michael Eric Dyson published a
9,600-word article excoriating Dr. West, or, rather, “The Ghost of Cornel West.” Instead of attacking white supremacy,
the Georgetown University professor invested a great deal of time and
energy in carrying out a public attack on a leading voice in today’s
civil rights struggle.
Misrepresenting Obama
Misrepresenting Obama
In a parenthetical statement in the essay, Dyson recalls a private discussion he had with Obama in the White House. Later on, he writes that, “Throughout his presidency I have offered what I consider principled support and sustained criticism of Obama,” and states he has “expressed love for Obama and criticized him for not always loving us back.” A quick look at the White House visitor records helps paint a picture of this cozy relationship.
Dyson’s affection for Obama certainly shines through the work; even the scantest of criticisms is hard to come by. In perhaps the most ludicrous, topsy-turvy moment in the extended work, Dyson claims “Obama talks right … but veers left public policy,” whereas “West, on the other hand, talks left but thinks right.” In the real world, the exact contrary is true: Obama talks center-right and veers decidedly right on policy. Obama is and has always been a conservative. The Obama the Conservative project meticulously detailed his right-wing policies for years.
The evidence overwhelmingly shows that Cornel West is absolutely correct in his insistence that Obama “posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit. We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency.” This presidency is also built upon the expansion of murderous imperialism in the Middle East, upon the adoption of neoliberal trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) (often described as “NAFTA on steroids”), upon the mass deportation and inhumane and illegal internment of millions of Latin@ immigrants and refugees, upon the privatization of prisons, upon the McCarthyist crackdown on whistleblowers, and more.
According to Dyson, West “derides” Obama as a “neoliberal opportunist.” This is not derision. This is an objective fact. Obama is a neoliberal through and through. He has made it his singular mission to pass the TPP and gut regulatory and labor laws, using secretive, anti-democratic methods in order to do so.
In the words of Chris Hedges
The Democratic Party in Europe would be a far-right party. It’s pro-war, it’s anti-union, it’s anti-civil liberties. I mean, Obama’s assault on civil liberties is worse than Bush. It’s an enemy of the press. It’s used the Espionage Act to shut down whistle-blowers, which are the lifeblood of a free press. It has assassinated American citizens. I mean, at what point do you say enough?Obama’s actions are what matter, not his rhetoric. Dyson concedes this, averring that it “is a sad truth that most politicians are serial rhetorical lovers and promiscuous ideological mates.” And, yet, Dyson dabbles mostly in rhetoric, utterly failing to engage in these serious political concerns.
In the overture to the protracted piece, Dyson claims he is “just as critical of the president as” West, yet proof of such an assertion is certainly hard to come by—and he spends the next several thousand words detailing why exactly the opposite is true.
Defending Corporate Civil Rights Figures
While shielding Obama from West’s criticisms, Dyson elevates corporate civil rights figures Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, among others. The two men’s names appear constantly (Sharpton 16 times and Jackson eight).
Black Agenda Report’s Glen Ford describes Al Sharpton as “a crook who is always for sale,” with strident “amorality and infinite capacity for corruption.” Sharpton, Ford says, is a “celebrity locked in the embrace of the rich and powerful.”
Sharpton’s ostensible civil rights organization the National Action Network is sponsored by the world’s largest corporations, including Walmart, PepsiCo, McDonald’s, AT&T, Verizon, and more. He clearly seeks real, systemic change and justice with those kinds of progressive backers.
Jackson is a reactionary pro-imperialist proponent of “black capitalism” who destroyed the Rainbow Coalition, co-opting its legacy as an internationalist, multi-cultural revolutionary organization created by the socialist Black Panthers and turning it into a neoliberal nationalist “coalition.”
Young black Americans recognize that Sharpton and Jackson are not fighters for liberation. When the two reactionary public figures tried to exploit the Black Lives Matter uprisings in Ferguson and elsewhere, they were booed off stage. Cornel West, however, unlike these corrupt corporate celebrities, has been at the forefront of the Black Lives Matter movement, getting arrested at demonstrations, constantly attending and speaking at rallies, tirelessly working from the bottom up, in true grassroots fashion.
Dyson essentially writes off the import of these actions as mere “highly staged and camera-ready gestures.” In Dyson’s view, West “hungers for the studio, and conspicuously so.” It is implied that his civil disobedience is part of a façade for attention. Dyson even admits he, at least for a time, entertained the preposterous notion that West is motivated to do so because he is “consumed with jealousy of Obama” and firmly maintains that “West’s deep loathing of Obama draws on some profoundly personal energy that is ultimately irrational.” In a similarly superficial moment, Dyson speculates that West may “hate” Obama because he was unable to get a ticket to the president’s inauguration.
For starters, the idea that West loathes Obama is incredibly misguided. West is the polar opposite of a hate-filled person; he constantly speaks of love, and firmly opposes Obama’s reactionary policies, not his being. In a 2014 interview on Democracy Now, West in fact remarked of Obama, “when I say when I love the brother, it means we have to tell the truth about him.”
The fact that West does not hold any kind of deep hatred of Obama aside, this is the kind of puerile argument liberals regularly construct to defend their untenable positions. They personalize critiques of political figures, turning political argumentation into apolitical beauty pageants that are fueled on “irrational personal energy,” not substantive material concerns about existing systems of oppression.
Ignoring the Political for the Personal
Dyson makes no serious critiques of West’s actual political positions. His entire essay reads primarily as a very long-winded ad hominem (which is all the more ironic considering Dyson accuses West of “biting our ears with personal attacks”). Dyson focuses almost entirely on how West speaks and presents himself, but largely glosses over West’s political criticisms of society.
He harshly writes “West is a scold, a curmudgeonly and bitter critic who has grown long in the tooth but sharp in the tongue when lashing one-time colleagues and allies,” yet fails to enunciate why this is purportedly the case. He furthermore claims West has become “an unintentional caricature of his identity” and accuses the scholar of “delusion and exegetical corruption.”
Borrowing from what one might hear in a high school breakup scene in a John Hughes film, Dyson pillories West for being “crushed that Obama had ideologically cheated on him”—as if it were a petty thing to be frustrated at a president who campaigned on promises of progressive “change” but turned out to be just another neoliberal warmonger.
Much of the article is devoted to dissecting West’s characterization of himself as a prophet, which one gets the impression is overstated. Dyson also writes extensively about “West’s diminished scholarly output” and what he feels to be a “paucity of serious and fresh intellectual work,” then proceeding to conflate these criticisms with West’s activism and criticisms of the status quo, implying the latter are equally “vain and unimaginative.” In a problematic selective reading of West’s work, Dyson accuses the professor of propagating a “conservative view of ghetto culture as deeply pathological, and as the chief source of the problems that beset African Americans.” Again, however, he does not spend a single sentence acknowledging West’s politics. No mention whatsoever is made of West’s work on Marxism, nor is his involvement with the Democratic Socialists of America ever brought up.
Absent from the essay—in spite of its prolixity—is any attempt to engage with, let alone refute, West’s critiques of Obama and the US political establishment. Dyson does raise warranted concerns about gaps in West’s scholarship, noting, for instance, that the professor failed to clearly define what exactly makes a person a prophet, yet, to a large extent, Dyson avoids the political. He illustrates the liberal tendency to emphasize that the personal is political to such a degree that the non-personal, systemic political is ignored.
Dyson even goes so far as to write off West’s critiques of Obama as “a species of antipathy that no political difference could ever explain.” Instead of engaging in the political, Dyson reduces it to a mere “shrill and manic dispute.” He classifies West’s denunciation of Obama as the sign of “the loss of a brilliant black mind,” as if criticizing a president who won an election thanks to the financial backing of some of the world’s most powerful banks and corporations were only something a “maniac” would do.
In a bout of full liberalism, Dyson concludes the essay averring that West’s problem ultimately lies with his own self, not with any politician or political system. This is the kind of vacuous political perspective that dominates the intelligentsia today.
One wishes that Dyson would get as worked up about the victims of Obama’s drone war, which Chomsky calls “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times”; about Obama’s steadfast support for Israel during its summer 2014 massacre of over 2,300 Gazans, in which it intentionally targeted civilians; about Obama’s expansion of the war in and occupation of Afghanistan, which he promised countless times he would end by 2014; or about Obama’s mass deportations of over two million people—to name just a few of his positively reactionary policies—as he is about West’s supposed hatred of Obama.
The fact of the matter is West’s heated criticisms of Obama are the logical result of a morally consistent human being seeing the horrors for which the Obama administration has been responsible. The problem does not lie with West’s admittedly provocative denunciations of Obama, but rather with the fact that more self-identifying progressives are not standing up for their values and opposing their government’s obscene crimes.
Siding with Larry Summers, the ‘Toxic Colonialist’
In his criticisms of West, it should be pointed out that Dyson favorably cites neoliberal economist Lawrence Summers, former Chief Economist at the World Bank and President of Harvard University, a figure who has occupied many important positions in the Clinton and Obama administrations and has a long history frequenting the corporate elevator and revolving doors between powerful economic and political institutions, including hedge funds like D. E. Shaw & Co. Summers, who has come under attack for blatant misogyny, is the kind of liberal who helped former Soviet countries privatize their economies—leading to enormous increases in poverty—and oversaw the deregulation of the US financial system.
Summers, on whose authority Dyson relies without trepidation, signed an internal World Bank memo in 1991 that called for Western countries to dump toxic waste in the Global South, because, in his view, from a capitalist economics perspective, the value of the lives of people in Africa, Asia, and more is less than the value of the lives of people in North America and Europe. Summers’ defense of “toxic colonialism” was of little importance to liberals like Obama himself, who relied on the former World Bank economist as the White House United States National Economic Council and the principle economic decision-maker during the Great Recession.
The ultimate irony lies in the sharp contrast between Summers’ belief that (presumably white) Western lives are more valuable than black and brown ones in the so-called Third World and Cornel West’s antithetical adamant insistence that all lives are equal. In his condemnation of killer drone strikes, West often implores listeners to consider whether they truly do consider all lives to be equal, whether they truly care about the young Pakistani children killed in Obama’s drone program—which Amnesty International has accused of war crimes.
Whitewashing MLK
As is common among the liberal intelligentsia, Dyson also exploits the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. in order to defend and lionize the war criminal (according to Amnesty International) Obama.
The irony is that many of the criticisms Dyson levies against West were equally true for MLK—a “prophetic” leader who, like West, was not a “moderate” toer of the party line, but was rather a radical, a relentless critic of not just racism but also of imperialism and capitalism, someone who alienated many supposed allies in his indefatigable and intersectional quest for justice.
Dyson predictably whitewashes MLK’s radical legacy, claiming the civil rights icon “was arguably more beneficial to the folk he loved when he swayed power with his influence and vision”—that is to say, when he worked within the system and did not step on the toes of the powerful.
Throwing Progressive Leaders Under the Bus
Do West’s claims of prophethood go overboard? Yes. Does Dyson exaggerate these claims? Also yes. Is Cornel West immune from criticism? Absolutely not. He is not perfect. And I concur with Dyson; he is not a prophet.
Yet, by siding with a criminal presidential administration over one of the leading purveyors of justice in the world today, figures like Michael Eric Dyson demonstrate, once again, how politically and morally bankrupt liberalism is.
The MSNBC analyst’s essay “The Ghost of Cornel West” exemplifies what is precisely the problem with liberals. They will side (and gleefully, at that) with neoliberal leaders who consider the lives of people in the Global South less valuable than those of Westerners, who wage genocidal wars, and who destroy economies with structural adjustment programs and odious debt, over radical justice-seekers because, in their myopic, ahistorical, and frankly ignorant view, it is “arguably more beneficial” to do so.
Liberals should be much more concerned about the innumerable ghosts of the victims of their leader’s policies than they are about the ghost of one of his most strident critics.
Cornel West is a hero—absolutely, unequivocally a hero. And he is one of the few heroes the Left has today. Unfortunately, that has never stopped liberals from throwing them under the bus."
,----------------
Dave Zirin
http://m.thenation.com/blog/204769-cornel-west-not-mike-tyson
Cornel West is not Mike Tyson
"As a sportswriter I am very sensitive to the use and misuse of boxing metaphors. Few analogies are either more powerful or more universally understood than comparing a public figure to an iconic fighter. Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, in a panoramic, painfully personal, deeply researched 10,000-word excoriation of Dr. Cornel West, published in The New Republic, has compared the 61-year-old professor to Mike Tyson. He describes West as someone who once "tore through opponents with startling menace and ferocity," but who has since devolved into a "faint echo of himself," an ear-biting sideshow, more interested in celebrity than serious academic and political work.
With all respect to Dyson, who wrote the intro to my book Game Over and has been a friend to me on numerous occasions, this is in my view the wrong choice of championship pugilists. West is not Mike Tyson: he's Muhammad Ali. Not the Muhammad Ali of ESPN hagiographies or Hollywood films starring Will Smith. But the real Muhammad Ali: effortlessly provocative, undeniably narcissistic, and unquestionably brilliant. The deeply hurtful quotes that West has aimed at Dyson (he has "prostituted himself intellectually") and Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry ("she is a liar and a fraud") are 21st-century iterations of Ali's regrettable, and for many unforgivable, questioning of the blackness of the great Joe Frazier, comparing the proud fighter to an ugly gorilla, all in the name of hyping up fights and throwing Frazier off of his game.
These comments are vicious, and as someone who has benefited from the kindness offered me by both Dyson and Dr. Harris-Perry, they anger my blood. The restraint that Dyson has shown over the last several years as West has thrown out his assorted rabbit-punches should be acknowledged. But the sight of Dyson escalating what was a one-sided series of verbal taunts into a written treatise, and marshaling his intellectual powers toward a polarizing 10,000-word New Republic essay is to see nothing less—I suppose based upon your perspective—than the academic version of either George Foreman punching himself out in Zaire or "Smokin' Joe" sending the champ to the canvas of Madison Square Garden. (I am well aware that in this metaphor, I'm the white sportswriter getting some copy out of the spectacle of two heavyweights throwing hands. Hopefully, I'll be more Bob Lipsyte than Jimmy Cannon.)
The timing of the essay is also very disorienting. We are at a moment when a new movement is attempting to confront an epidemic level of police violence. Dyson and West have in word and deed both been important voices in this movement. As the challenges of sustaining this struggle grow with every police killing, it is an odd moment for a public figure like Dyson to write so particular, so personal, and so granular an attack against West over his lack of scholarship, his love of celebrity, and his at times highly intimate racialized attacks against President Obama.
The piece begins with Dyson's thesis that Cornel West's animus for the president is rooted in a love betrayed. West "hates" President Obama and uses such personal invective in his political critiques because he once loved him and feels wronged, both personally snubbed and politically ignored. It is difficult to escape the idea that this thesis mirrors Dyson's perspective toward West. His anger is so intense toward Cornel West because his onetime mentor—someone with whom he would attend Anita Baker concerts in the 1980s for no reason other than to swoon—has branded him a sellout for not joining him in denunciation of the Obama administration. Dyson defends himself against these charges, writing that he has never relinquished his criticisms of President Obama but has also never relinquished either his love for the man or his respect for the accomplishment of becoming the first black president of a country founded on principles of white supremacy. He believes he has been principled and is demonstrably hurt that West has translated his political approach through the ugliest possible lens. There has been no give, no charity, in West's public analysis of Dyson's political tactics, and now Dyson is ready to return in kind. In honor of the boxing metaphors used by Dyson, several of his blows hit their mark, and Dyson is, frankly, too good a writer to not make this piece leave a bruise. West has exposed his chin through his acquisition of celebrity and absence of scholarship, and Dyson never forgoes taking a roundhouse punch, even when just a jab will do.
But there are several holes in Dyson's piece that are glaring. To read the article, one would think that West's anger toward Obama is solely rooted in snubbed invitations and unanswered phone calls. This ignores a series of key political criticisms that West has been raising for years.
Cornel West believes in Palestinian liberation. He believes in amnesty for undocumented immigrants. He believes that the bankers responsible for the 2008 crisis should be brought to justice. He believes that capitalism is a driving engine of much of the injustice in our world. He believes that Obama's drone program is an act of state-sanctioned murder. One can choose to agree or disagree with these points, but one cannot ignore that West has been relentless in his efforts to place them in the political discourse. The word "Palestine" or "Palestinian" does not once make its way into Dyson's piece. Neither does "Wall Street" or "immigration." The word "drones" only comes up in a quote attributed to West. We can debate how sincere West's commitments are to these issues or whether they are a cover for his hurt feelings and heartbreak that Dyson posits is at the root of all the discord. But they should be reckoned with. Does a "black politics" going forward need to have something to say about corporate power, Israeli occupation, immigration, and drone warfare? That's the unspoken debate in this article, made all the more glaring because Dyson is sympathetic—and far closer to West than President Obama—on many of these questions.
Dyson says repeatedly that he is a critic of Obama but loves the man, while disagreeing with much of his "neoliberal" policy. Yet he also goes out of his way to write,
Obama believes the blessed should care for the unfortunate, a hallmark of his My Brother's Keeper initiative. West and Obama both advocate intervention for our most vulnerable citizens, but while West focuses on combating market forces that ‘edge out nonmarket values—love, care, service to others—handed down by preceding generations,' Obama, as [Jonathan] Alter contends, is more practical, offering Pell grants; stimulus money that saved the jobs of hundreds of thousands of black state and local workers; the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which reduced the disparity of sentences for powdered and crack cocaine; the extension of the Earned Income Tax Credit, which kept millions of working poor blacks from sliding into poverty; and the extension of unemployment insurance and food stamps, which helped millions of blacks.One cannot read this as anything but an endorsement—and a very selective telling—of President Obama's political agenda. One could also well ask how the hyper-militarization of our cities, the record number of deportations, the closing of public schools, and the "drill and kill" public-education testing regimen can be translated as the "blessed caring for the unfortunate."
Then there is the specter of the Black Lives Matter movement, which hangs over every syllable in this piece. Aside from one dismissive mention of West's getting arrested in Ferguson during a staged act of civil disobedience, it is not discussed explicitly. But, at least for this reader, it was impossible to divorce this major article coming out at a moment when the movement is publicly facing a series of questions: namely, whether it "should be moving in a more radical or conciliatory direction."
It has to be noted that Dyson's initial public critique against West came not with this article but last week at the National Action Network's 16th annual convention, where he said,
Stop thinking that your way is the only way. It may be a great way, it may be a powerful way that works for you, but one size don't fit all. So be honest and humble in genuine terms—not the public performance of humility masquerading a huge ego. No amount of hair can cover that.NAN is of course the organization of Rev. Al Sharpton. Sharpton has also been, as Dyson mentions, a repeated target of West. Sharpton is currently in a battle against young activists—sometimes a literal battle—over the microphone of this movement. A new generation of leadership, less tied to the Obama administration, wants to be recognized as the leading organizational and political power against police brutality, but Sharpton is not going down easy. As he said to young activists in February, "It's the disconnect that is the strategy to break the movement. And they play on your ego. ‘Oh, you young and hip, you're full of fire. You're the new face.' All the stuff that they know will titillate your ears. That's what a pimp says to a ho."
Sharpton is cracking down on those who would challenge his authority. In other words, while Dyson has been given ample provocation to strike back at West, there is also a political battle thrumming beneath the surface that we would be naïve to ignore. Dyson says that West's fatal flaw lies in seeing that his way is the only way. It is true that no one has all the answers but we can't settle the questions unless we depersonalize and get at the substance of the divisions: reform vs. revolt; working inside vs. working outside the corridors of power; and so many other "old" debates that have taken on, to use a much-abused phrase, the fierce urgency of now.
Cornel West is no Mike Tyson, and it has to be said that even in the land of metaphor, comparing West to a convicted rapist is difficult to read. But in comparing him to Ali, let's also remember that the Champ had two careers: one where he was simply too quick to touch, and one, after he returned to the ring in 1970, where he was slower but still fighting with his gloves down and possessing a new strategy: one where he chose to take punch after punch after punch to the chin, until he either fell down or his opponent tired from exhaustion. Ali paid a dear price for this strategy, but it was devastatingly effective. West has chosen over the last several years to take numerous punches from his political opponents. I don't believe any have punched quite as hard as Dyson. But with this 10,000-word escalation that increases the personal heat while brushing over the political differences, Dyson may have done exactly what West was tempting him to do. The tragedy is that there are so many others who should be higher on everyone's list of those who need to be prodded, need to be provoked… and need to be knocked the hell out."
----------------------
Kirsten West Savali
http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2015/04/michael_eric_dyson_s_cornel_west_essay_was_a_hit_piece_wrapped_in_scholarly.html?wpisrc=topstories
" began reading Michael Eric Dyson’s lengthy essay for the New Republic, “The Ghost of Dr. Cornel West,” with some trepidation. By the time I finished it, I was sickened. Framed as an impartial assessment of West’s so-called steep decline as a scholar, public intellectual, thought leader and writer, Dyson backdoors into a scathing critique of his former friend that felt as bruising as a series of sucker punches delivered with increasingly gleeful frequency and viciousness.
The timing of the essay is jarring in this moment, particularly
since it appears in the New Republic, which, until very recently, has
been written primarily from a white, so-called liberal point of
view. African Americans are being gunned down in record numbers
by police officers and vigilantes in cities across the country, and we
are living in a cultural, political and revolutionary moment of
intensified black rage. This being the case, it hardly seems the time or
place for rehashed Ivy League drama between two well-respected and
accomplished African-American professors.
Perhaps Dyson’s move shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The river of
bad blood between the two men has ebbed and flowed along the banks of
President Barack Obama’s two terms in the White House, occasionally
crashing ashore on cable networks for the world to witness. Through it
all, I’ve still closely followed both of their careers with admiration
and respect. The staccato boom bap of Dyson’s words, at times punctuated
with a controlled gush of alliteration as if he’s masterfully riding a
beat; and the powerful Baptist-preacher thunder of West’s voice, eyes
ablaze with righteous fury, his Afro a subversion of the Ivy Leagues he
favored throughout most of his career.
Meeting West remains unchecked on my bucket list, but I had the honor of meeting Dyson when we both participated in a diversity and inclusion event
at Alcorn State University a couple of years ago. He is as brilliant
and fearless in person as one would expect, laying waste to the
deep-Southern-fried religiosity preferred by “sexual rednecks”—those
black people whose contemptuous intolerance for gender queerness
mirrors the bigotry of racist, Southern whites—with a signature fluidity
that seems to come as naturally to him as breathing.
Though Dyson’s work has always impressed me and continues to do so, it is West, with his unwavering stances against
poverty, police brutality, political tokenism, imperialism and global
terrorism perpetuated by the United States, who represents the beating
heart of global black liberation. As a rarely seen video
of West being schooled by Sista Souljah will attest, he has not always
been this way, but since his consciousness has been awakened, he’s
remained consistent.
I’m not a scholar—I’m just a writer for myself and others—but
I know this to be true: While Dyson was probably working on the second
or third draft of his West essay last week, the man himself was marching
and speaking against police brutality in New York City’s Union Square.
West told the excited crowd, “Don’t be confused by some black faces
in high places. For seven years there’s been our black and brown
brothers and sisters shot down by the police. Black president, black
attorney general, black Cabinet secretary of homeland [security] and not
one policeman sent to jail ... something just ain’t right.”
As the old folks used to say, “Stop him when he’s lying.”
I won’t delve too deeply into Dyson’s essay here because it’s really
something to be read and digested on one’s own. However, several things
stood out to me as hypocritical within a piece that felt intensely
personal and vindictive.
Writing that West should accept his role as a “public intellectual,
social gadfly or merely a paid pest,” Dyson also calls him a vain,
unimaginative, bitter, self-anointed prophet. Interestingly enough,
Dyson said that he would never call himself a prophet, but the lie
detector test determined that was a lie.
In 2010, sitting across from West, he used the term “prophet” to encompass the thinkers gathered at the table discussing
what President Obama owed to black America: “Black agendas are about
America. When America is made best, black people stand up and articulate
our visions, our dreams, our aspirations, our sentiments. We love Mr.
Obama; we recognize him as president. We must have prophets who tell the
truth and that’s what we’re doing here today.”
Interesting.
It becomes clear that his change of heart happened around the same
time that West expanded his anger at Obama to include those he felt sold
out for a seat at the political table.
“In his anger toward me,” Dyson writes, “I was forced, for the first time, to entertain seriously the wild accusations levied against him.”
“In his anger toward me,” Dyson writes, “I was forced, for the first time, to entertain seriously the wild accusations levied against him.”
Dyson also mentions his razor-sharp takedown on
Obama’s tepid racial politics and lack of loyalty at the 2010 “We
Count! The Black Agenda Is the American Agenda” conference in Chicago,
as if that proves his willingness to critique the president for his lack
of loyalty and commitment to black America. But in the New
Republic piece, he criticizes West for becoming angry that Obama made
promises to him that he didn’t keep:
Long before their ideological schism,
however, West believed himself personally betrayed by Obama because of
his (supposed) disinterest after the election. It is a sad truth that
most politicians are serial rhetorical lovers and promiscuous
ideological mates, leaving behind scores of briefly valued surrogates
and supporters. West should have understood that Obama had had similar
trysts with many others. But West felt spurned and was embittered.
This condescending reading of West’s issues with Obama is reductive
and disingenuous. West is angry because Obama did backbends for the GOP;
folded on authentic universal health care, specifically the public
option; bailed out Wall Street; and is complicit in the droning of
children. His critique of Obama's evocation of Martin Luther King Jr. is
valid when his global policy runs counter to what King fought for—in
action, if not always in rhetoric.
Dyson accuses West of being in the throes of “emotional catharsis”
after beginning his piece slyly framing his former mentor as “a woman
scorned.” This is typically an old misogynist hat trick to discredit the
legitimacy of female viewpoints, and I was surprised to see Dyson pull
it out in his essay—particularly because West is clearly not the one in
his feelings here.
Let’s be clear: What Dyson did in the New Republic was not
scholarship; it was a hit piece wrapped in scholarly words. He sliced
West up, took out his insides and returned them in such a haphazard way
that those familiar with West’s quest for justice, peace and love by
fire would no longer recognize the man he presented to us. It took close
to 10,000 words for Dyson to call West a delusional, self-aggrandizing,
washed-up has-been who has overstayed his welcome in academia. Well, if
academia doesn’t want him, the people living, working and dying outside
of it sure do. I’d much rather West put aside his “esoteric” erudition
and “make it plain.”
I’d rather he make it plain about President Obama’s being a “Rockefeller Republican” in blackface. I’d rather he make it plain about the
United States’ being complicit in the droning and murder of innocent people in Palestine and Yemen. I’d rather he make it plain about the issues facing our “dear brothers and
sisters,” instead of propping up a gender-exclusive initiative like My
Brother’s Keeper to prove that President Obama cares about black people.
There is more than one way to be a “public intellectual” that does not
revolve around the academy, and it is elitist to suggest otherwise. In
doing so, Dyson displays the very same arrogance he attributes to West
by exhibiting a “callous disregard for plural visions of truth.”
There is no doubt that West has left himself open for retaliation
from his former friends. Dyson has been publicly derided by West as
being easily seduced by access to power,
and he has every right to defend himself. Still, he shouldn’t disguise a
festering vendetta as an aboveboard scholarly pursuit.
There will be a moment of reckoning when President Obama leaves
office. White feminists will become the new media darlings in
preparation for Hillary Clinton’s presidential run, and Obama will no
longer be the site of exploration where many black people grapple with
what real black political power looks like situated within a white
supremacist structure. During that moment, identity politics and
neoliberal agendas won't be able to masquerade as collective
advancement, and we will climb out of this rabbit hole where progressive
blackness seems to be defined by proximity to the African-American man
in the White House.
And when that day comes, I’d be willing to place a bet that Cornel
West will still be standing in his truth: scholar, activist and lover of
black people, even when too many of us didn’t love him back."
-------------------------
Black and Smart
"I feel like this has been a year filled with fights. The shooting of Michael Brown, Jr., the #Black Lives Matters campaign, the choking death of Eric Garner, the shooting of Tamir Rice, Tony Terrell Robinson, and Walter Scott all have been causes worth fight for. I have been in meetings with Black community leaders, my county District Attorney, grieving mothers, and religious leaders. Some of these meetings have been very difficult and involved “fights.” But they were all worth fighting over and fighting for.
Now we find ourselves in the midst of a “fight” between two well-paid public intellectuals over who is more “down” for the people. Who is a sell-out; who is a charlatan; who is keeping it real; who is a big phony. All I can say is, “Who cares?” When real people’s lives are at stake I really don’t have time to be in “water gun” fights. There are plenty of things I am willing to fight over:
I will fight over Black children’s education – This is the fight I have devoted my life to. I will fight with school people, policy makers, legislators, so-called reformers, pundits, and anyone whose ideas about education denigrate and harm Black children’s educational life chances.
I will fight over legislative policies that harm poor people – The lives of poor people are hard enough without elected officials doing things that make them harder. Taking away basic services like food stamps or the ability to take care of their children makes me mad enough to fight.
I will fight for raising the minimum wage – Everyone knows that making less than $15 an hour makes it virtually impossible to live in a decent home and take care of one’s family. It makes sense for me not to support places that pay less than a decent wage.
I will fight for maintaining peace –It sounds like an oxymoron but I think war is a barbaric and senseless way to operate in a world filled with weapons that can annihilate us all. Thus, I am willing to fight to avoid the crazy fighting that nation’s engage in.
I will fight for my students – I have dedicated my entire professional life to teaching, advising, and researching. And, I realize that students regularly need an advocate for them. I sometimes take the advisee no one else will but I realize the reward in getting a bright, young scholar is actually mine.
I will fight to maintain the dignity of women, especially Black women – Every message we receive about the worth of Black women is negative. What we see on TV, the movies, print ads, or the Internet (especially via social media) all tells us that Black women are some lesser form of humanity. Having been raised by and supported by incredible women, I am compelled to fight for Black women.
I will fight for immigrants and displaced peoples – Recently we saw the horrific death of North Africans desperate to get to Europe drowning from packed boats that unscrupulous traffickers preying upon the oppressed and disenfranchised exploit. Similarly, people crossing the US southern border are worth fighting for. Unaccompanied minors should not be arrested, detained, and shipped back to unsafe situations.
I will fight for missing Nigerian girls –Do you remember the more than 200 Nigerian girls who were abducted by Boko Haram? I do, and they are worth fighting for.
I will fight for prison reform – Our nation incarcerates 2.3 million people. This is inhumane and uncivilized. I am willing to do what I can to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline and work for treatment programs for substance addicts and diversion programs for first offenders.
I will fight for the cultural integrity of all peoples—The ability to speak one’s language, practice one’s customs, and see oneself reflected in school curriculum and text is something everyone should enjoy.
There are a whole host of things I am willing to fight for but some things are just not worth my time or energy. I will not life one finger in defense of the various “housewives” of whatever city. I will not invest one penny on behalf of the gaggle of Kardashians. I would be just as happy to forget that Justin Bieber even exists. And I don’t care that two Black men who have made plenty of money pontificating about all manner of things are in some kind of blood feud. I have had occasion to speak with each of them over my career and I actually “like” each for some of the work they have done. But, the idea of choosing “sides” and supporting one rant over the other while our children are dying in the streets and metaphorically dying in our classrooms is antithetical to the values that matter most to me. For me, Black lives matter, but two highly paid “intellectuals’” lives don’t matter more. Grow the “heck” up guys!"
Stay Black & Smart!
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Black and Smart
"I feel like this has been a year filled with fights. The shooting of Michael Brown, Jr., the #Black Lives Matters campaign, the choking death of Eric Garner, the shooting of Tamir Rice, Tony Terrell Robinson, and Walter Scott all have been causes worth fight for. I have been in meetings with Black community leaders, my county District Attorney, grieving mothers, and religious leaders. Some of these meetings have been very difficult and involved “fights.” But they were all worth fighting over and fighting for.
Now we find ourselves in the midst of a “fight” between two well-paid public intellectuals over who is more “down” for the people. Who is a sell-out; who is a charlatan; who is keeping it real; who is a big phony. All I can say is, “Who cares?” When real people’s lives are at stake I really don’t have time to be in “water gun” fights. There are plenty of things I am willing to fight over:
I will fight over Black children’s education – This is the fight I have devoted my life to. I will fight with school people, policy makers, legislators, so-called reformers, pundits, and anyone whose ideas about education denigrate and harm Black children’s educational life chances.
I will fight over legislative policies that harm poor people – The lives of poor people are hard enough without elected officials doing things that make them harder. Taking away basic services like food stamps or the ability to take care of their children makes me mad enough to fight.
I will fight for raising the minimum wage – Everyone knows that making less than $15 an hour makes it virtually impossible to live in a decent home and take care of one’s family. It makes sense for me not to support places that pay less than a decent wage.
I will fight for maintaining peace –It sounds like an oxymoron but I think war is a barbaric and senseless way to operate in a world filled with weapons that can annihilate us all. Thus, I am willing to fight to avoid the crazy fighting that nation’s engage in.
I will fight for my students – I have dedicated my entire professional life to teaching, advising, and researching. And, I realize that students regularly need an advocate for them. I sometimes take the advisee no one else will but I realize the reward in getting a bright, young scholar is actually mine.
I will fight to maintain the dignity of women, especially Black women – Every message we receive about the worth of Black women is negative. What we see on TV, the movies, print ads, or the Internet (especially via social media) all tells us that Black women are some lesser form of humanity. Having been raised by and supported by incredible women, I am compelled to fight for Black women.
I will fight for immigrants and displaced peoples – Recently we saw the horrific death of North Africans desperate to get to Europe drowning from packed boats that unscrupulous traffickers preying upon the oppressed and disenfranchised exploit. Similarly, people crossing the US southern border are worth fighting for. Unaccompanied minors should not be arrested, detained, and shipped back to unsafe situations.
I will fight for missing Nigerian girls –Do you remember the more than 200 Nigerian girls who were abducted by Boko Haram? I do, and they are worth fighting for.
I will fight for prison reform – Our nation incarcerates 2.3 million people. This is inhumane and uncivilized. I am willing to do what I can to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline and work for treatment programs for substance addicts and diversion programs for first offenders.
I will fight for the cultural integrity of all peoples—The ability to speak one’s language, practice one’s customs, and see oneself reflected in school curriculum and text is something everyone should enjoy.
There are a whole host of things I am willing to fight for but some things are just not worth my time or energy. I will not life one finger in defense of the various “housewives” of whatever city. I will not invest one penny on behalf of the gaggle of Kardashians. I would be just as happy to forget that Justin Bieber even exists. And I don’t care that two Black men who have made plenty of money pontificating about all manner of things are in some kind of blood feud. I have had occasion to speak with each of them over my career and I actually “like” each for some of the work they have done. But, the idea of choosing “sides” and supporting one rant over the other while our children are dying in the streets and metaphorically dying in our classrooms is antithetical to the values that matter most to me. For me, Black lives matter, but two highly paid “intellectuals’” lives don’t matter more. Grow the “heck” up guys!"
Stay Black & Smart!
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Glen Ford
Seeking Hillary’s Favor: Dyson Attacks Cornel West
" Michael Eric Dyson has never produced even a few words of substantive critique of President Obama’s wars, his “Grand Bargain” with the GOP, or his role in the economic collapse of Black America. Instead, Dyson has written a hit-piece on Dr. Cornel West. “The true purpose of his elongated smear of Dr. West is to demonstrate to Hillary Clinton’s camp that Dyson remains a loyal Democratic Party operative who is available for service to the new regime.”
“Dyson has resorted to icon assassination because West’s highly visible critique of Obama’s domestic and foreign policy is an embarrassment to the administration.”
As the clock unwinds on the nation’s first Black presidency, much of the Black political class is scrambling to rewrite the history of their own behavior over the past six or seven years. Suddenly, all of them claim to have been “constructive critics” of the Obama administration, despite the absence of any public record of such criticism when it might have made a difference. In 21 months, the First Black President will leave office having overseen a federal retrenchment more brutal than under Ronald Reagan, a “bipartisan” austerity regime forged in 2010 as Obama pursued his long-sought “Grand Bargain” with the GOP.
Before even taking office, back in early January, 2009, Obama had loudly proclaimed his intentions to plunge directly into austerity mode, once the banks had been rescued from insolvency, by putting all entitlement programs “on the table” for chopping, including Social Security. He spent his first two years in office, when Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress, creating a model for austerity through his hand-picked Deficit Reduction Commission, which recommended $4 trillion in cuts – virtually the same as demanded by the Republicans. When the GOP won control of the House in 2010, Obama bragged that he had already reduced domestic discretionary spending to “its lowest level since Dwight Eisenhower was president. That level of spending is lower than it was under the last three administrations, and it will be lower than it was under Ronald Reagan."
In 2011, Obama outdid George W. Bush in unilateral war making, claiming the War Powers Act did not apply to the US/NATO bombing campaign against Libya because no Americans were killed and, therefore, no war – or even “hostilities” – had existed. A new era of proliferating “humanitarian” and proxy wars was inaugurated under the man who ran as a peace candidate in 2008.
“Dyson thinks this is an auspicious time to unleash a bloated, mean-spirited and politically flatulent assault on a Black public intellectual who risked his ‘icon’ status by breaking with Obama early in the president’s first term.”
Black America has plummeted to such economic depths under Obama’s watch that there is no possibility of ever reaching economic parity with whites absent a social revolution, the beginnings of which we may be witnessing in the growing mobilization against brutal police enforcement of the oppressive social order.It is no wonder that so many members of the Black political class, especially those that style themselves as “progressives,” are now anxious to revise their Obama-era political histories to put a false distance between themselves and the outgoing administration. Which is why I found it curious that Georgetown University professor and preacher Michael Eric Dyson thinks this is an auspicious time to unleash a bloated, mean-spirited and politically flatulent assault on Dr. Cornel West, a Black public intellectual who risked his “icon” status by breaking with Obama early in the president’s first term, when the center-right nature of his corporation-serving administration became manifest.
Dyson is clearly haunted by “The Ghost of Cornel West,” as The New Republic article is titled. In Georgia, the older country folks used to say that when a “haint” (a ghost) got on top of you in your sleep, you became temporarily paralyzed – a condition sometimes called “being rode by a witch.” Dyson’s obsession with West seems to have paralyzed those parts of his brain that process political facts and issues. In almost 10,000 words, Dyson makes no reference to any substantive political issues that divide he and West, and offers only the slimmest assessment of Obama’s stance on the burning issues of the day. Given such a dirth of actual political analysis of either the Obama presidency or Cornel West’s critique of that presidency, the article is a soaring testament to Dyson’s enormous capacity for bloviation.
But, of course, there is method to Dyson’s meanness. The true purpose of his elongated smear of Dr. West is to demonstrate to Hillary Clinton’s camp that Dyson remains a loyal Democratic Party operative who is available for service to the new regime. Having observed how hugely Al Sharpton prospered as President Obama’s pit bull against Black dissent, Dyson offers unto Caesarius Hillarius (“We came, we saw, he died,” as she said of Gaddafi) the iconic head of the nation’s best known Black dissident.
“The article is a soaring testament to Dyson’s enormous capacity for bloviation.”
Dyson’s article is as dishonest as it is long and draining. Dyson is not mad at West because the Union Theological Seminary professor has supposedly turned out a “paucity of serious and fresh intellectual work” over the last several years. He was not driven to write a hit piece because his former “friend” is “not quite up to the high scholarly standard West set for himself long ago.” Dyson has resorted to icon assassination because West’s highly visible critique of Obama’s domestic and foreign policy is an embarrassment to the administration, to the Democratic Party as an institution, and to the sycophantic Black Misleadership Class that has been more loyal to Obama than to Black people as a group. Mostly, Dyson is mad because Dr. West called him out, personally. Dyson wrote:“It was during an appearance with Tavis Smiley on Democracy Now, shortly after Obama’s reelection. ‘I love Brother Mike Dyson,’ West said. ‘But we’re living in a society where everybody is up for sale. Everything is up for sale. And he and Brother Sharpton and Sister Melissa and others, they have sold their souls for a mess of Obama pottage. And we invite them back to the black prophetic tradition after Obama leaves. But at the moment, they want insider access, and they want to tell those kinds of lies. They want to turn their back to poor and working people. And it’s a sad thing to see them as apologists for the Obama administration in that way, given the kind of critical background that all of them have had at some point.’”
Dyson attempts to draw the reader into a discussion of the definition of a “prophet,” and who is, or is not, one. But that’s just a long-winded way of asserting that West has no right to criticize Dyson, Harris, Sharpton and the other Black-notables-for-hire. Dyson attempts to turn the “access” tables on West, noting that West was known to hang with celebrities like Warren Beatty, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Johnny Cochran, Snoop Dogg and Mexican beauty Salma Hayek. As if Warren Beatty has ever maintained a “Kill List,” Sean Combs has plans to bomb Africa, and Snoop Dogg is actively engaged in turning the U.S. government over to Wall Street.
“Dyson not only sells himself, he tries to defame Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a sell-out, access-monger, too.”
Dyson claims West lives by a double standard. Attempting sarcasm, Dyson writes: “West offers himself a benefit that he refuses to extend to others: He can go to the White House without becoming a presidential apologist or losing his prophetic cool. He can spend an evening with the president, the first of many such evenings, without selling his soul.”Well, apparently, West can. And, just as clearly, after 19 or more visits to the White House, Dyson cannot. He not only sells himself, he tries to defame Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a sell-out, access-monger, too. Without shame, honor, or a logical leg to stand on, Dyson writes:
“King was arguably more beneficial to the folk he loved when he swayed power with his influence and vision. When West begrudges Sharpton his closeness to Obama, he ignores the fact that King had similar access.” Dyson continues, “Sharpton and Jackson moved in the opposite prophetic direction of King. While King kissed the periphery with courageous vigor after enjoying his role as a central prophet, Jackson, and especially Sharpton, started on the periphery before coming into their own on the inside. Jackson’s transition was smoothed by the gulf left by King’s assassination, and while forging alliances with other outsiders on the black left, he easily adapted to the role of the inside-outsider who identified with the downcast while making his way to the heart of the Democratic Party.”
Dr. King and other members of the so-called “Big Six” organizations enjoyed some access to Lyndon Johnson’s White House because of the power of the movements they led. Dr. King did not become influential because he got invitations to the White House; he got invited to the White House because he was influential among millions of Black people. MLK made the principled, and possibly fatal, decision to break with Lyndon Johnson’s White House on April 4, 1967, with his “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence” speech. He effectively severed ties with an administration that had, at times, been an ally in the civil rights struggle. Singling out the U.S. as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, today,” Dr. King said:
“I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”
Obscenely, Michael Eric Dyson attempts to depict Dr. King as of his own ilk of boot-licking, access-begging, job-seeking, misleaders in his attack on Cornel West, who made his own break with Obama’s wars at home and abroad, early on.
“MLK made the principled, and possibly fatal, decision to break with Lyndon Johnson’s White House.”
Dyson has for years peppered his talks with references to his nonexistent substantive critiques of Obama, and does the same in The New Republic. “No matter how vehemently I disagree with Obama, I respect him as a man wrestling with an incredibly difficult opportunity to shape history,” he writes. “Throughout his presidency I have offered what I consider principled support and sustained criticism of Obama, a posture that didn’t mirror West’s black-or-white views—nor satisfy the Obama administration’s expectation of unqualified support.” Yet, there is no evidence of “sustained criticism,” in his current attack-piece or anywhere – only sustained opportunism. The only paragraph in the entire 9,600-word piece with any substantive statement on Obama policies, is a boilerplate pitch straight from the White House:“Obama believes the blessed should care for the unfortunate, a hallmark of his My Brother’s Keeper initiative. West and Obama both advocate intervention for our most vulnerable citizens, but while West focuses on combating market forces that ‘edge out nonmarket values—love, care, service to others—handed down by preceding generations,’ Obama, as Alter contends, is more practical, offering Pell grants; stimulus money that saved the jobs of hundreds of thousands of black state and local workers; the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which reduced the disparity of sentences for powdered and crack cocaine; the extension of the Earned Income Tax Credit, which kept millions of working poor blacks from sliding into poverty; and the extension of unemployment insurance and food stamps, which helped millions of blacks.”
In my own two debates with Dyson on Democracy Now! in January, 2008, and September, 2012, I found it best to ignore the bulk of his “wall of words.” The torrent of syllables is mostly show, much of it pure nonsense designed to dazzle churchgoers. In cold print, Dyson is revealed as a rank careerist in the army of personal upward mobility.
Dr. West has nothing to worry about from such quarters. But, Dyson’s bosses will kill you."
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Dr. Cornel West
April 23, 2015 via facebook
Dr. Cornel West"The escalating deaths and sufferings in Black and poor America and the marvelous new militancy in our Ferguson moment should compel us to focus on what really matters: The life and death issues of police murders, poverty, mass incarceration, drones, TPP (unjust trade policies), vast surveillance, decrepit schools, unemployment, Wall Street power, Israeli occupation of Palestinians, Dalit resistance in India, and ecological catastrophe.
Character assassination is the refuge of those who hide and conceal
these issues in order to rationalize their own allegiance to the status
quo. I am neither a saint nor prophet, but I am a Jesus-loving free
Black man in a Great Tradition who intends to be faithful unto death in
telling the truth and bearing witness to justice. I am not beholden to
any administration, political party, TV channel or financial sponsor
because loving suffering and struggling peoples is my point of
reference. Deep integrity must trump cheap popularity. Nothing will stop
or distract my work and witness, even as I learn from others and try
not to hurt others.
But to pursue truth and justice is to live dangerously. In the spirit of John Coltrane’s LOVE SUPREME, let us focus on what really matters: the issues, policies, and realities that affect precious everyday people catching hell and how we can resist the lies and crimes of the status quo!"
But to pursue truth and justice is to live dangerously. In the spirit of John Coltrane’s LOVE SUPREME, let us focus on what really matters: the issues, policies, and realities that affect precious everyday people catching hell and how we can resist the lies and crimes of the status quo!"
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