Probably doesn't quite belong here, but I don't really know where else to put it.
Cornel West came to my school tonight and I was smart enough to get my butt out of my apartment and go see him. He talked for about an hour and twenty minutes seemingly without notes and while brilliantly referencing all sorts of other great thinkers and doers, be it Emmett Till's mother or Kant or George Eliot (though he did call her a "brother" which got my lit friends a little riled for a moment or two) or Rosa Parks. He used W.E.B. Dubois's four questions as a frame to talk about how to live in the face of injustice. “How shall integrity face oppression? . . . What does honesty do in the face of deception? . . . What does decency do in the face of insult? . . . How does virtue meet brute force?” Because it was a talk somewhat focused on the black liberation movement and BLM, he skewed his specifics towards that, which I found fascinating. My favorite was from the first question, as he argued that it has become harder to have integrity in the face of neo-liberal market forces, and he used Beyonce and Aretha Franklin to show how even the forces for good, the artists that help propel movements through their art have aquiesced to the power of image, of material goods, and of money. Beyonce is beautiful, an amazing dancer, and a great singer. But she is part of the corporate machine, and her image makes her and those who "own" her a whole ton of money. Whereas Franklin just stood there and sang. He talked a lot about music, actually. Jazz and soul and they way that black musicians in America have made it possible to dream of a place where all people are treated with equal humanity.
Another moving detail: He said that the logical response that black people might have had when they were finally released from slavery could have been to form a kind of terrorist response to the violence and oppression they endured which would have started a cycle of violence that would have ripped this nation apart. Instead, they imagined a world where nobody would suffer like they suffered, where all people would be brought out of all oppression. It's a model of caring deeply about every human because they are a human that I can really get behind.
It was such an exciting and invigorating talk. The guy has a gift for public speaking. You want to just listen to him for forever.