Over the hour in which he spoke, Dr. Cornel West covered a lot of ground: Ferguson, Yemen, auto-tune vs. Otis Redding.But he always came back to one word: integrity.
He spoke at Mt. Zion African Methodist Episcopalian Church Wednesday night as the keynote in a series of lectures dealing with race, poverty and social and economic justice.
The audience seemed to hang onto every word he spoke, regardless of whether he was talking about militarization of police in predominantly African-American neighborhoods or the crassness of American pop culture as compared to Sly Stone's day.
He decried American youth culture as intentionally formulaic, vapid and hyper-sexual.
“What's goin' on?" he said. "The same money-making oligarchs at the top who control radio and video and recording and live performance, they don't want that slow, rich, deep, soul-stirring music that can allow folk to straighten their backs and reflect on who they are. They want that body-stimulating, titillating, so they can engage in foreplay forever...If you can just keep them stimulated, there's no need for socratic reflection and dealing with what does it mean to be human.”
He also brought up Ferguson, MO, where he was arrested last October while demonstrating against police violence, and why he thinks so many people came there to protest.
“What we're seeing in Ferguson is the emergence of a grand awakening of young folk in the face of oppression of arbitrary police power, of school systems that often produce soul-murder in our young people, of massive unemployment that is Depression-like," West said. "Even in this very moment when you hear on TV about how strong the economy is and how intense the recovery is, you wonder, what part of town you talking about? And I'm talking about my poor white brothers and sisters, too. They're catching hell economically.”
After all, he said, the U.S. is a country where millions of children live in poverty:
“Can you imagine that? The richest nation in the history of the world with forty percent of black and brown children living in poverty, and 22 percent of all of its children no matter what color, living in poverty? It's a moral abomination...How can we live in a society where one percent of the nation owns 99 percent of the wealth? Where one family has the wealth equivalent of 150 million Americans?”
West has caught fire for criticizing President Obama on a number of things, from domestic issues like police violence against African Americans to international ones like drone strikes in Yemen. He said he criticizes Obama when he deems necessary, but it's also about setting the record straight.
“I'm not hard on the president. I'm trying to keep track of the suffering. I want to protect him when people are lying about him. And there's a whole lot of lies circulating about Barack Obama. They say he's a Muslim That's a lie. They say he's a socialist. That's definitely a lie. You don't bail out Wall Street and leave Main Street dangling and call yourself a socialist.”
He said he's worried about what will happen when President Obama leaves office, and African-American leaders like him start to speak out against the next president, who will likely be white, if they don't levy the same kinds of criticisms on Obama now.
“The very moral and spiritual authority of what we say will be called into question,” he said. “Because the next president may do the exact same thing, and we want to bring critique...but if we didn't critique the black president, they'll say we have no integrity.”