Excerpt: "Fitting in, in a neoliberal world, is to be well adjusted to injustice. I'll give you an example: Dear brother Ta-Nehisi Coates has just come out with a new book."
Professor Cornel West. (photo: VICE)
09 December 17
fter nearly a year of the Trump presidency, do you regret your criticisms of Barack Obama? Oh, no. I told the truth. When I said drone strikes are crimes against humanity, when I said Obama bailed out Wall Street rather than Main Street — I shall forever support that. I was just speaking to the reality that people are hurting, and we have to do the same thing under Trump as we did under Obama.
Do you feel as if the black community punished you for that? I think most black people disagreed with me, but they didn’t call for my punishment. They just disagreed in terms of the timing and the intensity of it. But somebody’s got to tell that truth and be pushed to the margins no matter what — every generation has it, and I don’t mind being it.
In the original introduction to “Race Matters,” you wrote that there was a crisis of black leadership. Now we’re seeing this whole new generation of black activists: Black Lives Matter, or even N.F.L. athletes taking a knee during the national anthem. Do you still see this crisis? Well, I was talking about the crisis of black elite leadership. When it comes to black leaders, if the model is to be successful but not publicly attack white supremacy — well, then that’s really about success to fit in. Fitting in, in a neoliberal world, is to be well adjusted to injustice. I’ll give you an example: Dear brother Ta-Nehisi Coates has just come out with a new book.
