Cornel West: We Have To Be Militants For Kindness, Subversive For Sweetness, and Radicals For Tenderness

The Loving Wisdom of Cornel West

 

 "Never forget that justice is what 

love looks like in public" 

and other quotes...

There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie.

The country is in deep trouble. We've forgotten that a rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it. We need the courage to question the powers that be, the courage to be impatient with evil and patient with people, the courage to fight for social justice. In many instances we will be stepping out on nothing, and just hoping to land on something. But that's the struggle. To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.

King's response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a reevaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.

Every president needs to deal with the permanent government of the country, and the permanent government of the country is Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats and the questions becomes what is the relationship between that president and Wall Street. 

There are three dominant tendencies in a neoliberal society: financialized, privatized, militarized. And when it comes to black poor people, we get all three.

You see it even in our educational systems, where the market model becomes central. It's a matter of just gaining a skill or gaining access to a job to live in some vanilla suburb, as opposed to becoming a critical citizen concerned with public interest and common good. 

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.

Patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it.

White supremacist ideology is based first and foremost on the degradation of black bodies in order to control them. One of the best ways to instill fear in people is to terrorize them. Yet this fear is best sustained by convincing them that their bodies are ugly, their intellect is inherently underdeveloped, their culture is less civilized, and their future warrants less concern than that of other peoples.

Market moralities and mentalities — fueled by economic imperatives to make a profit at nearly any cost — yield unprecedented levels of loneliness, isolation, and sadness. And our public life lies in shambles, shot through with icy cynicism and paralyzing pessimism. To put it bluntly, beneath the record-breaking stock markets on Wall Street and bipartisan budget-balancing deals in the White House lurk ominous clouds of despair across this nation. 

I don't draw any distinctions between forms of bigotry or forms of ideology that lose sight of the humanity of people. I can't stand white supremacy. I can't stand male supremacy. I can't stand imperial subjugation. I can't stand homophobia.

The aim is not for me to be right. The aim is to make sure that we keep the focus on the people who are suffering. That's what we're here for. 

To get up in the morning and do the monumental tasks that face us, our labor is best fueled by love.  

The love of wisdom is a way of life; that is to say, it's a set of practices that have to do with mustering the courage to think critically about ourselves, society, and the world; mustering the courage to empathize; the courage, I would say, to love; the courage to have compassion with others, especially the widow and the orphan, the fatherless and the motherless, poor and working peoples, gays and lesbians, and so forth — and the courage to hope. 

You can't lead the people if you don't love the people. You can't save the people if you don't serve the people.

To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.

You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth.

 

Greatness is telling the truth and being courageous in pursuit of justice. The worst thing you could tell young people is to be successful but become well-adjusted to an unjust status quo as opposed to being great and being maladjusted to an unjust status quo.

 

To me, healing means you have to recognize there is a wound and you try to understand what the sources of the wound are, which means you try to tell a story about how it came to be. So you have to engage in some historical interpretation. 

 

You've got to love yourself enough, not only so that others will be able to love you, but that you'll be able to love others.

 

We are who we are because somebody loved us.   

 

It takes tremendous discipline, takes tremendous courage, to think for yourself, to examine yourself.

Courage is being true to yourself, true to a sense of integrity. 

 

You can't talk about truth without talking about learning how to die because it's precisely by learning how to die, examining yourself and transforming your old self into a better self, that you actually live more intensely and critically and abundantly.  

 

To be human, at the most profound level, is to encounter honestly the inescapable circumstances that constrain us, yet muster the courage to struggle compassionately for our own unique individualities and for more democratic and free societies. 

 

A rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it. 

 

None of us alone can save the nation or the world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so. 

 

The greatest gift you can give someone is the gift of inspiration.  

We have to be militants for kindness, subversive for sweetness and radicals for tenderness.

(The below are quotes from an Alternative Radio program featuring Cornel West.)

 

Martin Luther King and Donald Trump are both Americans. The question is — what kind of American do we want to be? 

 

Do not respond by hating and dehumanizing."

In the richest country on Earth, one in every two black and brown children in America live in poverty." 

What we are seeing is unregulated greed.

 

These aren't problems. They are catastrophes!" [Poverty, racism, greed, the climate crisis, etc.]  

 

We need to see the urgency of the emergency.  

 

We need to be connecting with movements around the world. [To address the enormity of crises we are facing.]

 

I don't hate people. I hate injustice... 

 

We need to stand against injustice. We need to be love and justice warriors.

We need to be wise and courageous.

Integrity and courage are a way of life we choose.