Cornel West Research Articles

What Is This "Black" in Black Popular Culture?

I BEGIN WITH A QUESTION: WHAT SORT OF MOMENT IS THIS IN WHICH TO POSE THE question of black popular culture? These moments are always conjunctural. They have their historical specificity; and although they always exhibit similarities and continuities with other moments in which we pose a question like this, they are never same moment. And combination of what is similar and what is different defines not only specificity of moment, but specificity of question, and therefore strategies of cultural politics with which we attempt to intervene in popular culture, and form and style of cultural theory and criticizing that has to go along with such an intermatch. In his important essay, New Cultural Politics of Difference, Cornel West (1990: 19--36) offers a genealogy of what this moment is, a genealogy of present that I find brilliantly concise and insightful. His genealogy follows, to some extent, positions I tried to outline in an article that has become somewhat notorious (Hall, 1988: 27--31), but it also usefully maps moment into an American context and in relation to cognitive and intellectual philosophical traditions with which it engages. According to Cornel, moment, this moment, has three general coordinates. The first is displacement of European models of high culture, of Europe as universal subject of culture, and of culture itself in its old Arnoldian reading as last refuge.... I nearly said of scoundrels, but I won't say who it is of. At least we know who it was against -- culture against barbarians, against people rattling gates as deathless prose of anarchy flowed away from Arnold's pen. The second coordinate is emergence of United States as a world power and, consequently, as center of global cultural production and circulation. This emergence is both a displacement and a hegemonic shift in definition of culture -- a movement from high culture to American mainstream popular culture and its mass-cultural, image-mediated, technological forms. The third coordinate is decolonization of Third World, culturally marked by emergence of decolonized sensibilities. And I read decolonization of Third World in Frantz Fanon's sense: I include in it impact of civil rights and black struggles on decolonization of minds of peoples of black diaspora. Let me add some qualifications to that general picture, qualifications that, in my view, make this present moment a very distinctive one in which to ask question about black popular culture. First, I remind you of ambiguities of that shift from Europe to America, since it includes America's ambivalent relationship to European high culture and ambiguity of America's relationship to its own internal ethnic hierarchies. Western Europe did not have, until recently, any ethnicity at all. Or didn't recognize it had any. America has always had a series of ethnicities, and consequently, construction of ethnic hierarchies has always defined its cultural politics. And, of course, silenced and unacknowledged, fact of American popular culture itself, which has always contained within it, whether silenced or not, black American popular vernacular traditions. It may be hard to remember that, when viewed from outside United States, American mainstream popular culture has always involved certain traditions that could only be attributed to black cultural vernacular traditions. The second qualification concerns nature of period of cultural globalization in progress now. I hate term the global postmodern, so empty and sliding a signifier that it can be taken to mean virtually anything you like. And, certainly, blacks are as ambiguously placed in relation to postmodernism as they were in relation to high modernism: even when denuded of its wide-European, disenchanted Marxist, French intellectual provenance and scaled down to a more modest descriptive status, postmodernism remains extremely unevenly developed as a phenomenon in which old center/peripheries of high modernity consistently reappear. …

Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth

Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth. By Robert B. Westbrook. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 272p. $29.95.In this ambitious collection, Robert Westbrook aims to recover, from philosophical pragmatism, insight—and hope—regarding the promise of democracy. Following on his John Dewey and American Philosophy (1991), Dewey is surely his main man. Part One, “Pragmatism Old,” offers critical discussions of Dewey, Charles Peirce and William James. Part Two, “Pragmatism New,” treats recent writers who have identified themselves with pragmatism, including Hilary Putnam, Cheryl Misak, Cornel West, and Richard Posner. Richard Rorty is surely the main character in these accounts.

Once upon a Time When Patriotism was What You Did

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. --James Baldwin I AM A patriot. To most people who know me that statement probably comes as a surprise. Critical, yes. Radical, perhaps. But patriot? Not her. Yet I make this statement with the same vehemence that Cornel West asserts that he is a Christian (and I am one of those, too). (1) The reason this declaration seems so strange to most people is that, like many words in the English language, the term patriot has been hijacked by an increasingly narrow and undemocratic sector of society. Other words that have fallen into this category include Christian, liberal, multicultural, and religious. George Lakoff asserts that progressives have to learn to recapture the public discourse by reframing the debate. (2) I believe we are in a much worse place than simply lacking the ability to frame the debate. Indeed, I want to argue that there is no debate to frame. Instead there are shouting matches. Everything is already settled, and if you do not subscribe to the current dominant orthodoxy, you are unpatriotic and godless. Your very presence is a threat to the society. According to conservative pundit Ann Coulter, you are a traitor. (3) In this article I hope to address the challenge of in this current age. I want to challenge those who are patriotic enough to criticize common discourses about the nation and national policies to work on recapturing the language so that real debate is not only possible but valued. And I make my argument in a time when this bold kind of is being eroded in favor of a new patriotism that is more akin to indoctrination than critical and analytic citizenship and civic discourse. My thinking about is deeply autobiographical. Having grown up as an African American in the Fifties and Sixties, I have clear memories of what being an American meant in that era. For one thing, it meant participating in regular air raid drills in schools--huddling under our desks, away from windows, in anticipation of an attack by the Communists. It meant recognizing Communism as the worst evil that could happen to the nation and identifying and rooting out Communist influences wherever they appeared. It meant that, after the Soviets successfully launched Sputnik, it was part of my duty to be a good student and that when I became one I was participating in the national defense. Indeed, when I made my way to college, I was eligible to borrow money for tuition and fees at extraordinarily low interest rates (or not pay the money back at all if I decided to teach in a low-income community) thanks to the National Defense Education Act. It also meant that some people had to be excluded and persecuted for their collaboration with Communism either through party affiliation or through association with known Communists. Thus people like Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois, heroes in my eyes, could not be spoken of in open conversation. It meant a war hero like Dwight Eisenhower was a more valuable national leader than an intellectual like Adlai Stevenson. My vision of patriotism, the nation, and my role in it was also shaped by the race relations of this period. In the early 1950s, African could legally be excluded from attending schools that white children attended. A 14-year-old boy from Chicago could be killed (beaten, lynched, castrated, and drowned) for whistling at a white woman. Children could not expect to go to school with members of racial groups and social classes different from their own, even if it meant they had to go miles outside of their neighborhoods to a school with inferior resources. In short, racial and ethnic encapsulation was a way of life, and we could be Americans only within our own groups. I knew that we were because there were photos of my dad and the other adult men in my family--uncles and cousins--on display throughout our home, smiling out at me in their military uniforms. …

Logics of Similitude and Logics of Difference in American and Contemporary Continental Philosophy

In his now classic study, The American Evasion of Philosophy, Cornel West documented how American pragmatism, with its Emersonian roots, side-stepped modern philosophy's epistemological turn in favor of an ethically centered project: evasion of epistemology-centered philosophy?from Emerson to Rorty, West writes, results in a conception of philosophy as a form of cultural criti cism (1989, 5). The task of philosophy, for the pragmatist, as for Marx, is not to know the world in itself, disinterestedly, but to transform it, to reconstruct it. Similarly, the self articulated by the pragmatists is one defined not primarily by epistemological projects and functions but in terms of moral agency. What wish to suggest here, following some suggestions of Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, is another way by which American philosophy, now stretching back all the way to its Puritan and not just Emersonian roots, evaded, or, in this case, resisted, elements of modernity, specifically its logic of identity and difference, by retaining an older logic, described by Foucault as a logic of similitude. From its beginning, in Madness and Civilization, Foucault's life's work was a study of the logic of dividing practices, viz., the logic that built the walls of modern institutions, preserving sameness and difference?e.g., the asylum, the prison, the hospital?and separating the mad, the sick, the criminal, the poor, the perverted from the normal. With modernity, Foucault claimed, A sensibility was born which had drawn a line and laid a cornerstone, and which chose?only to banish (1965,64). By such a logic the modern subject assertively constitutes itself as sovereign, struggling constantly to define itself as not the repressed other, who has been condemned to the other side of the wall; but, ironically, all the while this modern subject continuously subjugates himself within the endless binary logic of sameness and difference, thereby internalizing the policing mechanism of the social order. I am not guilty. am not guilty, Kafka's character K pleads before the magistrate, without even knowing the crime of which he has been charged. Everyone is guilty of something, replies the magistrate. In a world thoroughly

Childhood lost: how American culture is failing our kids

Introductiona by Sharna Olfman Children's Irreducible Needs The Natural History of Childhood by Meredith Small Why Parenting Matters by Laura Berk How American Culture Is Failing Our Kids The War Against Parents by Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West The Impact of Media Violence on Developing Minds and Hearts by Gloria DeGaetano Childhood: The Fastest Growing Market Segment by Susan Linn Big Food, Big Money, Big Children by Katherine Battle Horgen So Sexy So Soon: The Sexualization of Childhood by Diane Levin Techno-Environmental Assaults on Childhood in America by Varda Burstyn and Gary Sampson No Child Left: What Are Schools for in a Democratic Society by Peter Sacks Where Do the Children Play by Sharna Olfman About the Contributors Index

Africana: the encyclopedia of the African and African American experience

A landmark in reference publishing, Africana is an incomparable one-volume encyclopedia of the black world - a vital resource for families, students, and educators everywhere.. Inspired by the dream of the late African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois and assisted by an eminent advisory board, Harvard scholars Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Kwame Anthony Appiah have created the first scholarly encyclopedia to take as its scope the entire history of Africa and the African Diaspora. This single-volume reference includes more than three thousand articles and over two million words. With entries ranging from affirmative action to zydeco, from each of the most prominent ethnic groups in Africa to each member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Africana brings the entire black world into sharp focus. Every concise, informative article is referenced to others with the aim of guiding the reader through such wide-ranging topics as the history of slavery; the civil rights movement; African-American literature, music, and art; ancient African civilizations; and the black experience in countries such as France, India, and Russia. }Inspired by the dream of the late African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois and assisted by an eminent advisory board, Harvard scholars Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Kwame Anthony Appiah have created the first scholarly encyclopedia to take as its scope the entire history of Africa and the African Diaspora.Beautifully designed and richly illustrated with over a thousand images - maps, tables, charts, photographs, hundreds of them in full color - this single-volume reference includes more than three thousand articles and over two million words. The interplay between text and illustration conveys the richness and sweep of the African and African American experience as no other publication before it. Certain to prove invaluable to anyone interested in black history and the influence of African culture on the world today, Africana is a unique testament to the remarkable legacy of a great and varied people. With entries ranging from affirmative action to zydeco, from each of the most prominent ethnic groups in Africa to each member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Africana brings the entire black world into sharp focus. Every concise, informative article is referenced to others with the aim of guiding the reader through such wide-ranging topics as the history of slavery; the civil rights movement; African-American literature, music, and art; ancient African civilizations; and the black experience in countries such as France, India, and Russia.More than a book for library reference, Africana will give hours of reading pleasure through its longer, interpretive essays by such notable writers as Stanley Crouch, Gerald Early, Randall Kennedy, and Cornel West. These specially commissioned essays give the reader an engaging chronicle of the religion, arts, and cultural life of Africans and of black people in the Old World and the New. }

Alain Locke: Personality and the Problematic of Pragmatism in the Construction of Race

In the current interest in American pragmatism, the role of African American intellectuals within that tradition, together with questions of race and ethnic identity, has increasingly been given serious attention. Cornel West, for example, argued in The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989) that pragmatism represented our most important intellectual tradition for confronting the inequalities that existed due to “hierarchies based on class, race, gender and sexual orientation.” Nevertheless, West claimed, it was a flawed tradition still limited in its intellectual and social reach because “the complex formulations and arguments of American pragmatists shape and are shaped by the social structures that exploit and oppress.” Given this claim, West challenged his readers to expand “the pragmatist canon to encompass a major body of critical reflection on ‘race’ and racism in the United States.”Of those who have responded to West's challenge, Nancy Fraser was one of the first to link her critical project directly with that of his. In “Another Pragmatism: Alain Locke, Critical ‘Race’ Theory, and the Politics of Culture” (1995), Fraser writes, “I intend to take up Cornel West's challenge. I am going to discuss a recently rediscovered work by another African-American theorist of ‘race’ and racism who was trained in philosophy at Harvard under Josiah Royce and William James early in this century and who also deserves a place in the “pragmatist pantheon.” Thus, whereas W E. B. Du Bois was the only African American to appear in West's “pragmatist pantheon,” Fraser gave a careful reading of five lectures that Locke gave at Howard University in the spring of 1916 — “Race Contacts and Interracial Relations: A Study of the Theory and Practice of Race” — to establish his pragmatic credentials. These credentials, however, included his specific use of race as a form of social solidarity; that is, as an expression of group solidarity, race served to articulate as well as shape the cultural and political needs of African Americans. For this reason, Fraser argued that although “pragmatism undoubtedly lay at the core of Locke's 1916 vision,” his “lectures present a strand of pragmatist thought that differs importantly from the mainstream of the movement.”

African American Spirituality and Cornel West’s Notions of Prophetic Pragmatism: Restructuring Educational Leadership in American Urban Schools

Schools in America are facing rapidly changing demographics, and because of those changing demographics, this article makes the following propositions. First, the increasing demographic changes in urban schools demand new leadership approaches. Second, because many of the urban educational demands are shaped by ongoing social and cultural issues for addressing needs of African American students, perhaps the answer to leadership changes lies in African American culture. Third, and finally, one possible feature of the African American culture, the application of personal spirituality to community issues of social change and social justice, may provide a direction for educational leadership. The purpose of this article is to propose a theoretical base for reforming educational leadership in demographically changing public schools. With critical theory and antifoundational tenets of pragmatic thinking and postmodern thought interrogating the traditional canon of educational administration, educational leadership has had to, even if reluctantly, include voices of alternative perspectives into its discourse. This essay applies Cornel West’s notions of prophetic pragmatism along with the tenets of African American spirituality to serve as the foundation for this progressive transformation of leadership especially in urban schools.

Segregation Nostalgia and Black Authenticity

“The politics of conversion shuns the limelight—a limelight that solicits status seekers and ingratiates egomaniacs” (20). Thus spake Cornel West, one of the foremost African-American public intellectuals, who, a few seasons ago, reminiscent of Ann Hutchinson and Roger Williams, departed the stultifying environs of Massachusetts and embarked on a symbolic errand into the wilderness of Princeton, New Jersey. If there is a black intellectual tradition, the author of these words has identified one of its essential features. Authentic leadership is vernacular; it “stays on the ground among the toiling everyday people,” the unpretentious folk, “humble freedom fighters—both followers and leaders” (20). Let us not forget those prophetic leaders, engaged in colloquial discourses with “everyday people,” whom one encounters, no doubt, in peregrinations from Princeton to Harvard and back again. Organic intellectuals do, in all fairness, occasionally carry their evangelical revivals to such frontiers of civilization as Morehouse College or Wayne State University, although they seldom stay overnight. It would break their hearts to be relegated to hardship posts like Michigan’s Highland Park Community College or to the institution formerly known as Rhode Island Junior College (RIJC), which uncouth snobs pronounced “reject.” The rootsiness of public intellectuals is frequently observed in televised forums, where oversized panels nod vigorously in confirmation of one another’s sermons on the necessity of “giving back to the community.” In theory, the black intellectual tradition is valid only insofar as it arises organically from the folk. In order to be legitimate, it must be popular. If it is genuine, it must be grassroots. If it is authoritative, it must be vernacular; if justifiable, plebeian; if sound, democratic; if convincing, communal; if binding, proletarian; if valid, colloquial.

BookTalk: The Celebrity Citizen: Cornel West at a Crossroads

BookTalk: The Celebrity Citizen: Cornel West at a Crossroads

Understanding Charles Johnson

Understanding Charles Johnson offers a critical introduction to the fiction of one of the most highly acclaimed contemporary writers and the first African American male since Ralph Ellison to win the National Book Award, which Johnson received in 1990 for Middle Passage. In addition to providing a biographical sketch, Gary Storhoff analyzes Johnson's four novels and two volumes of short stories. Describing his body of work as unique in American fiction, Storhoff explains how philosophical and religious orientations differentiate Johnson's writings and challenge his readers. Storhoff explores the merging of Johnson's philosophical and spiritual interests with his concern for African American culture. In identifying the literary principles of Johnson's texts, Storhoff emphasizes the writer's commitment to Buddhism and demonstrates its impact on his themes, characters, narratives, and rhetoric. Suggesting that Buddhism is the linchpin of Johnson's work, Storhoff acknowledges that scholars and critics are aware of Johnson's close association with the tradition but provides readers with what they need to appreciate fully its importance in his work. Storhoff also considers Johnson's extensive study of Western philosophy, which includes a Ph.D. in the subject. Storhoff explicates the influence of the British empiricists, including Bishop George Berkeley, on the novelist; his rejection of relativism and utilitarianism; his adaptation of Aristotelian ethics; and his ambivalent treatment of American pragmatism as recently propounded by Cornel West. Johnson emerges from Storhoff's discussion as a profoundly eclectic, sophisticated, interdisciplinary writer, with complex views on race relations in the twenty-first century.

William James's Politics of Personal Freedom

Contemporary pragmatists often describe politics as primarily an exercise in social organization. Our tendency is to see the task of political philosophy in terms of the conceptualization of social, governmental, and legal institutions that will protect and deepen the core liberal values of freedom and equality. John Patrick Diggins could thus confidently and truly assert in 1994 that pragmatism "embrace[s] society as almost redemptive . . . no other modern philosophy has so dignified the social" (Diggins 1994, 160–61), I do not see this claim as untrue so much as the unfortunate residue of recent pragmatism's narrow emphasis on a social conception of a pragmatist politics. This emphasis has been at the expense of early pragmatists' skepticism toward the idea that social institutions are the tool most useful for deepening democratic freedom and equality. In articulating pragmatist politics within frameworks with decided biases for the social over the individual, recent pragmatists have obscured a novel element central to early pragmatists William James and John Dewey: the philosophical and political idea of a personal action that is reducible to neither individual power nor social relations. Recent pragmatism's social bias is perhaps clearest in the case of Richard Rorty.1 In his early work, Rorty defended a conception of knowledge as a social product, describing his position as "explaining rationality and epistemic authority by reference to what society lets us say" (Rorty 1979, 174).2 In Rorty's later work on politics, this social conception of epistemic practice is rephrased in terms of a social authority of consensus. In the first instance, political authority rests on the weight of social consensus: "nothing save freely achieved consensus among human beings has any authority at all" (Rorty 1998, 18). Further, democratic politics is mostly a matter of finding ways of broadening consensus, of bringing more persons into the authoritative social fold: the resolution of disagreement always requires "widen[ing] the range of consensus about how things are" (35). Rorty thus often slides toward a conception of democratic politics as purely social and consensual—individual dissensus is accommodated in private rather than explicitly invited or cherished as a valuable aspect of democratic political culture. [End Page 175] Rorty is not alone in voicing this position—his work skillfully condenses themes entrenched over the last twenty-five years of pragmatist political theory (these themes are equally prevalent in non-pragmatist liberal and socialist theory). According to Richard Bernstein, the value of pragmatism is that it articulates social insights such as the following: "the institutionalization of democratic forms of life require[s] a new understanding of the genesis and development of practical sociality" (Bernstein 1991, 48).3 Cornel West, who describes his envisioned "Emersonian culture of creative democracy" as one "in which human participation is encouraged and for which human personalities are enhanced," tends to view participation and personality in decidedly social terms. According to West's vision of Emersonian culture, "social experimentation is the basic norm" because "once one gives up on the search for foundations and the quest for certainty, human inquiry into truth and knowledge shifts to the social and communal circumstances under which persons can communicate and cooperate in the process of acquiring knowledge" (West 1989, 213). Pragmatists should not accept these arguments. Once we abandon the quest for certainty, the balance of interest does not necessarily tip toward the social. My argument is that our interest should shift, rather, to the synergy between individual and social forces that alone cultivates democratic practice. Only in this way can we hold in vision a conception of democratic practice that both originates and terminates in human personality. Dewey wrote that democracy "is, as we often say, though perhaps without appreciating all that is involved in the saying, a way of life, social and individual. . . . In one word, democracy means that personality is the first and final reality."4 We are social insofar as we always constitute ourselves in terms...

Faith‐based leadership: ancient rhythms or new management

This conceptual essay examines the controversial idea of faith‐based leadership without relying on traditional notions of conservative, essentialist theology. The essay challenges scholars as well as practitioners in educational leadership to grapple with the realities of an esoteric or spiritual existence that has a phenomenal impact on their personal as well as professional behavior. It eschews the Western, modernist subscription to binaries and dualisms and suggests that an educational leadership which applauds such bifurcations handicaps the leader and the entire learning community. It argues that a leader’s ‘faith to’ see and ‘faith in’ ideas and notions of democracy and social justice as well as his/her belief in the humanity of those serving in the school community can provide the fundamental steps for essential school reform. Finally, the essay explores Cornel West’s notions of a deep‐seated moralism and profound pessimism, two planks of his African‐American prophetic spirituality, in constructing what the author calls principled and purposive leadership.

Toward humanity and justice: the writings of Kenneth B. Clark, scholar of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision

This first collection of black psychologist Dr. Kenneth B. Clark's body of work over a half-century reveals his insight into the fields of social science, education, politics, and the law. He tells the inside story of the groundbreaking studies he made of black public school children-showing they lacked self-esteem because they were treated separately and differently than their white counterparts. His social science papers were the basis for the United States Supreme Court's landmark decision of May 17, 1954, that state-sponsored segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. Dr. John Hope Franklin, the nation's most prestigious black historian, provides a Foreword. A number of prominent individuals in academics and politics offer brief commentaries about Dr. Clark, including Nobel Prize-winner Gunnar Myrdal , Dr. Cornel West, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Marian Wright Edelman, Roger Wilkins, Dr. Alvin Poussaint, and many others. There are also brief quotes about Dr. Clark by Congressmen Charles Rangel and John Lewis, and former U.S. Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach. In addition, the book contains Dr. Clark's views of his contemporaries, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter. This is an essential collection from a key figure often overlooked in studies of the Civil Rights Movement.

Racializing and concretizing gramsci in contemporary adult education practice

This response to Mayo’s book emphasizes its Gramscian aspects and explores two dimensions not addressed in the original. The first is Cornel West’s attempt to racialize Gramsci and examine how his ideas might serve the interests of African-Americans. The second is Michael Newman and Ian Baptiste’s exploration of the partisan, directive role of adult educators confronting situations of conflict.

Cornel West: The Politics of Redemption By Rosemary Cowan Cambridge, Polity, 2003. 216 pp. $22.95

Cornel West: The Politics of Redemption <i>By Rosemary Cowan</i> Cambridge, Polity, 2003. 216 pp. $22.95

Remedying defective or deficient political agency: Cornel West's uses of the tragic1

American culture has often been seen, particularly from the standpoint of Europe, as lacking a sense of the tragic. On the European view, this tragic deficit is the reason that Americans are more likely to act intemperately or with hubris. A critique of American culture for its lack of conscious engagement with tragedy figures prominently in the work of Cornel West. He argues that a broader American receptiveness to the tragedies of American history and life will result in a greater commitment to participate in public life for the purpose of relieving unnecessary suffering. In the first place, he sees tragedy as a means of fostering hopefulness and counteracting the tendency of citizens, particularly African‐Americans, to retreat to privatized modes of despair. Tragedy also functions in West's thought as a means of fostering a sense of solidarity across class and racial lines. Lastly, tragedy can heighten the appreciation of left intellectuals for the existential dimensions of political and social agency.

Racial Profiling

Racial Profiling

Cornel West and the Tempest in the Ivory Tower

A major American news story of 2002 centred on a dispute at Harvard between president Lawrence Summers and Cornel West. This article explores why many commentators erroneously portrayed the dispute between the two men as a matter of civil rights and affirmative action. It also examines the issue at the heart of the fracas, namely a long-running debate about the quality of West's scholarship, and considers whether his commitments to publics outside the classroom detract from his scholarly work. Is the release of a hip-hop CD an appropriate form of intellectual activity for a senior Ivy League professor?

Politics, Racial Solidarity, Exodus!

In this paper I explore the issue of racial solidarity through a detailed engagement with Eddie Glaude's Exodus! (2000; hereafter Ex.), a substantial and timely contribution to the study of African American political thought and practice. Like some of the recent writing of political philosopher Tommie Shelby, Exodus! is a subtle attempt to reconceptualize the possibility of African American political solidarity amidst the remnants of racial domination affecting post-Civil Rights America and in the wake of the demise of plausible appeals to an "essential black subject," an expression that Glaude borrows from Stuart Hall and Cornel West (Shelby 2002, 231-66). As will become apparent, I strongly sympathize with the central thrust of Glaude's argument and, specifically, with his defense of a pragmatist notion of black solidarity. I shall contend, however, that Glaude's approach to racial solidarity is not pragmatic enough, precisely because the myth of the essential black subject still haunts it, its claims to the contrary notwithstanding.