Cornel West: We Must Keep Our Souls Intact as We Organize Under Trump Again

After the election, I received several texts and email messages expressing a deep sense of sorrow, angst, dread and heartbreak. Personally, I felt that sense of anger. Specifically, I share Audre Lorde’s frankness: “My response to racism is anger.” My claim is not that every single person who voted for Donald Trump is a racist, a card-carrying white supremacist. I do hold, however, that as a result of his election we will inherit the whirlwind — the tumultuous process — of his dangerous neofascist sensibilities, his despicable sexism, his horrifying xenophobia, his ugly lies, retaliatory mentality and his support of white Christian nationalism.

Another way of putting it: America, welcome to the nightmare that many of you have unleashed and have done so despite the reality of the unethical and dangerous man that Trump is.

Facing this nightmare to come, I feel anger, but like so many, I also feel a sense of deep despair. It is a form of despair that I know intimately because I am a philosopher who refuses to look away from those who suffer.

During times like these, I am reminded of the courageous speech of philosopher Cornel West, who attributes to St. Augustine the profound existential observation that we are born between urine and feces, that we are born out of and through the funk. West has said, “We down in the funk, and there is love and freedom and sublimity in that funk.” Within the context of this funk, West urges us to think of the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, reminding us: “His funk raised us and renewed us. His funk got us through.” The point here is that we must be on intimate terms with funk and despair but not prisoners of despair.

This speaks to the blues sensibilities that West embodies. In his memoir, West writes, “I’m a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe—Frankie and Maze call it ‘Joy and Pain’—sit side by side.”

It is this blues sensibility that fights against political and moral stagnation. West reminds us, and it is an existentially powerful message at precisely this historical moment, that pain and sorrow can be our constant companions as we continue to “engage in an endless quest for healing and serving others.” It is this sense of ethical fortitude in the face of this election that led me to reach out to my dear brother Cornel West.

This exclusive interview is the fruit of West’s generosity. As a person who refuses to be bought by empire and seduced by “sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal,” brother West urgently reminds us of a tradition of speaking truth to power and refuses to honor a political and corporate duopoly that has forgotten about poor and working-class people. Read closely and you will feel the pain, the outrage, and the love and insistence to keep on keeping on.

George Yancy: Brother West, let me first thank you for continuing to engage in courageous speech or parrhesia, and chesed or loving kindness, and for your fortitude in running as an independent presidential candidate.

Cornel West: I appreciate it. As you know, brother, it’s just a particular Beruf, a particular calling and vocation tied to being a witness, and trying to bear witness, not just to the suffering, and not just to the joy, and the preserving of some energy and vision to deal with the suffering, but it’s also trying to be true to the best of the tradition that produced you, and that produced me. You know, the Du Boises, the Ella Bakers, the Fannie Lou Hamers, the Anne Bradens and the St. Clair Drakes, and the Noam Chomskys and the C. Wright Millses and Stanley Aronowitzes, and Fredric Jamesons, as well as the Hortense Spillers and the Toni Morrisons and the Farah Jasmine Griffins. You know, what I discovered during the campaign is that so many young people pulled out of any kind of participation in the system. But I was there to give them an idea of what some fallible exemplar, like myself, of our great tradition of Black freedom struggle and truth-telling and justice-seeking and joy-sharing, really looks like and what it feels like. That impact on the younger generation, I think in many ways is intangible. But it’s very important, it seems to me.

What impact did whiteness, do you think, have on the reelection of Donald Trump? I’m thinking here of Trump’s explicit and implicit racism, his xenophobia, his violent discourse of othering nonwhites, his white nationalist sensibilities and his appeal to white Christian nationalism.

Oh, there’s no doubt that the vicious legacy of white supremacy was operating in a complicated way. But I always begin with my dear brother, the great Gerald Horne, who is also a great exemplar of this grand tradition that I’m talking about of Black truth-telling and Black justice-seeking. We must situate any discourse of whiteness or the vicious legacy of white supremacy within the matrix and backdrop of where the American empire is, the predatory capitalist system that sits at the center of it, and the culture of the American empire. Now, as you know, the American empire is number 68 out of 70 empires in the history of the species. And what distinguishes the American empire is its obsession with innocence, and its obsession with dreams. The innocence hides the violence, and the dreams generate the sentimentalism. And the flip side of sentimentalism is always cynicism. And, therefore, it’s very difficult for genuine hope, which is neither cynical nor sentimental, and genuine integrity, which is a sign of maturity. But if you’re an empire obsessed with innocence, the way F.O. Matthiessen used to say in those great classes he taught at Harvard University before he committed suicide, the American empire is unique because it moves between perceived innocence to corruption without a mediating stage of maturity.

The first thing that we must do is to get our spirits and souls intact, so we don’t give up, we don’t cave in, we don’t sell out. We don’t rationalize our accommodation to an unjust status quo.

I mean, that’s what Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, that’s what Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, is all about. That’s what The Sound and the Fury of William Faulkner is about. That’s what Toni Morrison’s Beloved is about. Our great literary figures, let alone blues figures like Louis Armstrong and Sarah Vaughan, are looking for forms of maturity that shatter childishness, that shatter obsessions with innocence. But also know that when you talk about maturity you’re going beyond cynicism and sentimentalism. You’re pushing that coin aside and you’re trying to accent the ways in which you become fortified to be a mature, passionate person who tells the truth about the American empire and its predatory capitalist processes, and the vicious legacy of white supremacy that sits at the center of its settler colonial character.

And so, we always must be systemic in talking about whiteness, or systemic in talking about white supremacy, or we can fall into traps. I think it’s very important that you must start with the kind of thing that Gerald Horne does. I mean, this is part of my criticism of some of the younger generation who I appreciate, brother Ta-Nehisi Coates and others, but when we talk about whiteness or talk about white supremacy without situating it within the imperial matrix and the predatory capitalist matrix, it’s easy to end up talking simply about whiteness as an isolated ideology rather than one that performs a certain role and function within the imperial and predatory capitalist processes.

Yes. I agree. Whiteness/white supremacy is fundamentally linked to capitalist empire building. As you were talking about innocence, I thought of James Baldwin’s letter to his nephew in The Fire Next Time. Within the context of thematizing and critiquing whiteness Baldwin says, “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”

Oh, yes, innocence itself is a crime. But remember the deepest line in The Fire Next Time is when he tells his nephew, “You, don’t be afraid.” That’s 365 times in Hebrew scripture, “Be not afraid.” And, of course, the Palestinian Jew, Jesus, picks it up, too. But this is very important, because we’re living in such dim and grim times as we are, as we witness undeniably the death throes of the American empire — it is going to take a long time, but it’s very clear that’s what it is, the military overreach, the corruption of the elite, the impotence of the citizenry, the inability of citizenry to gain access to the best of the traditions in the American empire, that is, Martin King and Fannie Lou Hamer and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Dorothy Day and Edward Said and Noam Chomsky, and others. So, what happens is that we get overwhelmed by the radical evil and we get paralyzed by the despair. And the reason why I began talking about maturity on the one hand and fortitude on the other is that we must never be surprised by radical evil. We must never be paralyzed by despair. That’s what it means to be a part of a blues tradition, and by blues I’m talking about those who are on intimate terms with forms of catastrophe, forms of death, but forever are forging new forms of fortitude — political, economic, existential, spiritual and moral.

Your emphasis on a blues ontology is powerfully and beautifully stated. With Trump soon to be back at the presidential helm, what escalating catastrophic impact will this now have on Gaza and our Palestinian siblings. I recall that back in about 2019, Trump quoted a tweet where someone on Twitter said of him that he is the “King of Israel. They love him like he is the second coming of God.” And I also just read recently that West Bank settlement advocates broke open a bottle of champagne to celebrate the coming of President-elect Trump, and I know that Benjamin Netanyahu is far more delighted that Trump will now resume the helm of the presidency. So, I’m deeply concerned about the continued and even intensified catastrophic nature of his presidency vis-à-vis Palestinians.

Whether it was Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, whether it’s the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, the situation is still catastrophic for our precious Palestinian brothers and sisters, where Israel is a satellite of the U.S. empire and its imperial policy. There’s no doubt that the level of the rawness of Trump’s fascism does have a more intense impact symbolically, but in terms of the material conditions of precious Palestinians, whether we’re talking about Biden and Harris on the one hand, and Trump and Vance on the other, it really makes very little material difference. In saying that, I would also say that there are always unpredictable factors and variables. See, we don’t know what new escalating wars, or intense conflicts, are ahead. Because we know Trump is obsessed with China. We know that he wants to bring the Russia-Ukraine war to a close. He wants to settle on whatever terms are possible. Usually, in the form of the ugly imperial terms in the Middle East. But the focus is really on China, and the possibility of escalating strife if not war with China is one that is very, very real. In so many ways, when we think about the impact on Gaza and the West Bank, I think the best that we could do is to continually cast a limelight, continually hit the street, continually be willing to go to jail, and remind our fellow citizens in the U.S. empire that we are collectively complicit with crimes of genocide, with war crimes against Palestinians, and that a real genocide is going on even as we speak, though the corporate media wants to act as if it doesn’t exist.

So, politically, whether it is Trump or Biden or Harris functioning in the capacity of the president of the U.S. empire, in terms of the material devastation and the material manifestation of violence in Gaza, you understand that we have a situation of a distinction without a difference.

That’s right. When it comes to the thousands and thousands of precious Palestinian children and innocent men and women being murdered daily with no serious focus by the corporate media, no serious conversation by the elected officials in either party. That’s what it means to try to keep alive the legacy of a Martin King or a Rabbi Heschel or a Philip or Daniel Berrigan, because they’re not just antiwar protesters, but they’re trying to get us to continually view the world through the lens of the wretched of the earth, which includes very centrally the colonized, those who suffer from the policies of settler-colonial regimes, be it within the United States, be it in Australia, be it in Canada, be it in Israel. All of these are various examples of settler-colonial experiments.

I remember right before she passed away, bell hooks and I were talking over the phone. She was talking about the election of Donald Trump back in 2017, and she intimated that some white people see Trump as the embodiment of a certain kind of white male masculinity, a twisted but white male masculinity. And she was surprised that so many white women voted for him. I think that bell was trying to theorize the adulation of Trump as a form of idolatry. Against this backdrop, I’m curious about Black men in this case, particularly as there were in this election more Black men than Black women who voted for Trump. And I’m trying to make sense of that. We don’t want to say that Black men are a monolith. We want to make sure we recognize political diversity within Black male spaces. We want to make sure we recognize political nuance. I don’t want to call Black men who voted for Trump sellouts. I’m wondering, how do you think about this?

I think that voting is not the place to begin to talk about sellouts. Sellouts have to do with people who have an opportunity to choose integrity, and they choose simply narrow careerism. That’s a different kind of situation. That’s one that you find more clearly within the professional managerial strata who are actually in positions of power. The masses of people in the United States really are not in positions of power at all. That’s why 80 million don’t vote at all. You know what I mean, almost 40 percent. That was the percentage that I spent a lot of time with in my 17 months of running as an independent. Within the context of 1,000 interviews and over 400 speeches, I met some of the most wonderful people in the world. But so many of them have completely dropped out. They wouldn’t think about voting for the corrupt two parties. They know that the corrupt duopoly, the corporate duopoly, is a major impediment to any kind of serious democratic insurgency, and therefore they feel like they have no option. Keep in mind, voting for a candidate is not a referendum, it’s a comparative judgment. So, a lot of the Black brothers — one out of five who voted for the neofascist gangster Trump — made a comparative judgment, right? They can’t stand the arrogance, they can’t stand the condescension of the Democrats, and they figure what’s left?

Well, they don’t spend a whole lot of time looking at independent candidates or third-party candidates, so they say what’s left? And, so, it’s not as if this analysis of toxic masculinity will take you too far. There are elements of that, we know that, very much so. But I think in the end — back to what I was saying before about innocence and the dream being these two distinctive features of the culture of American empire — that Black folk, like anybody else, become captive to this dominant conception of the world as a gold rush. And you remember what brother Heschel used to say, if you view the world as a gold rush, and view life and history as a gold rush, you’re going to end up worshipping the golden calf. And the golden rule that says “do unto others that you will have others to do unto you” becomes “he who has the gold, rules.” And that’s Trump. Trump is American gangsterism crystallized, honest about itself, unashamed and bold. And it can become something that is seductive when people feel as if there’s no alternative to life as gold rush, there’s no alternative to he who has the gold, rules. There’s no alternative to the idolatry of worshipping the golden calf. And that’s why the Black freedom tradition is such a profound and rich tradition, because it functions at the spiritual level. It talks about idolatry.

Even when sister Harris said that the greatest story ever told is the American story, that’s idolatry. That’s a lie. When she said the greatest privilege is being an American, that’s idolatry. That’s a lie. It’s the same idolatry as Trump, even though it’s a multicultural militaristic idolatry, and he’s got a neofascist one, but it’s still idolatry. And the same is true in terms of the innocence, you know, that you’ve got to tell the truth about the violence that is hidden and concealed by American innocence. It is the frontier myth. As the U.S. expands, we’re engaging in genocide. It’s based on the barbaric slavery of Africans and working peoples, and on patriarchal households, and so forth. And so, in that sense, it does complicate our understanding of why people voted for Trump. Because the only alternatives are these very low-level options of this neofascist gangster and this deeply multicultural militarist who’s been driven by careerism and opportunism.

Yet, it’s clear that Harris is much, much brighter and has better aims. But in terms of generating serious policies here and around the world, sure, there are some differences in terms of reproductive freedoms — I don’t want to act as if they’re identical, no, not at all — but it’s not enough to make the kind of differences that are necessary to deal with the major challenges of the empire right now, which have to do with the grotesque wealth inequality, and the 62 percent of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, but the professional classes and the upper classes and ruling classes and billionaire classes, living as if they’re kings and queens in medieval Europe. And that’s unsustainable. We know that ecologically it’s unsustainable, militarily it’s unsustainable, and politically it’s unsustainable. And we’re back to again what Herman Melville taught us, which is how do you break the American addiction to self-destruction in the name of innocence and the dream.

Absolutely. So, what should we, as the demos (the people), do going forward as we face the next four years?

Well, I think the first thing you want to do is continually try to see, think and feel deeply the suffering, as well as the resilience and resistance, of those who suffer. Philosophically, it means that we must recognize that we are a wretched species that for most of human history is what philosopher Hegel called a slaughterhouse, and what historian Edward Gibbon said is the register of human crimes and follies and misfortunes. And in fact, it’s very rare that the demos, which is to say, those that Sly Stone calls everyday people, are able to gain access to organizational capacity, to create a disruption or interruption of the rule of organized greed and weaponized hatred, the rule of domination, the rule of exploitation, the rule of subjugation and degradation, especially, of course, regarding those who find themselves of African descent, or women, or gay brothers and lesbian sisters and precious trans people, or Jews in an anti-Jewish world, or the Turks, or the Muslims in an anti-Turk and anti-Muslim world.

But that doesn’t mean that given our overwhelming wretchedness we end up like a Jonathan Swift or Mark Twain, and say that the human race has very little, even no potential. No, we’re also a wonderful species. We have the ability to see and feel and think deeply and differently and muster the courage — because selling out has become so normalized these days, especially among the professional strata in the U.S. empire — to organize, bear witness and fight with words on the page, bodies in the street, songs sung, jokes told, laughter expressed — all of the various forms of resistance and resilience. But those moments of interruption are very, very fleeting, brother. They’re very fleeting. Shakespeare used to say that human life itself in many ways, human history itself, was a flickering candle against the backdrop of the dim barbarism of the species. And Shakespeare is no joke. He’s got some very profound things to say. That’s why Anton Chekhov in some ways is the most exemplary artist of our day. He is the grand artist of catastrophe, very much like a blues musician.

So, what do we do? Well, the first thing that we must do is to get our spirits and souls intact, so we don’t give up, we don’t cave in, we don’t sell out. We don’t rationalize our accommodation to an unjust status quo. We don’t become well-adjusted to injustice and well-adapted to indifference; rather, we think, act, feel radically against the grain, even when it looks as if we have the chance of a snowball in hell. We are with Harriet Tubman. We do it because we love. We do it because we have a calling. We do it because we think it’s right and moral. And then we have an analysis of the imperial, and the capitalist, and the white supremacist, and the xenophobic forces that have so deeply shaped the history and destiny of the species. Mighty, but they are not almighty. There’s always, as William James might say, something more, that tremendous muchness that has to do with our ability to still try to tell the truth, still try to seek justice for the least of these. And we must still try to organize, even though it looks as if we have little success at the moment.