Cornel West, Making of a Media Star
Lee Sustar
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • Winter 1993-1994 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 3, No. 2 (pp. 39) | ||
| • September 24, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
Cornel West has been hailed as an intellectual giant by virtually every serious media organization in the country.
The New York Times Magazine hailed him in a major story.
Time and Newsweek ran profiles of a length and style usually reserved for entertainment celebrities and big-name politicians.
Lengthy interviews with West have appeared in the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today. The Seattle Times ran excerpts of his book, Race Matters.
It was perhaps no surprise that newspapers like the liberal Washington Post gave the book a positive review.
But even the conservative Dallas Morning News gave West the star treatment in a June 13 book review and a July 13 profile.
In a PBS McNeil-Lehrer News Hour interview, West was treated as the foremost social critic in the U.S.
Network news reporters seek sound bites from West on racial issues of the day.
The hype has accelerated sales of Race Matters. Beacon Press quickly sold out of its initial 45,000 print run.
What is more, West recently received a $100,000 advance for a book on Black-Jewish relations to be written with Michael Lerner, editor of the liberal magazine Tikkun.
How has a black sociologist unknown outside academic and left circles a few months ago been transformed into a media star?
The most important reason is the dramatic shift in political consciousness in the U.S. since George Bush got 90 percent approval ratings after the Gulf War in 1991.
Los Angeles Rebellion
The Los Angeles rebellion, recession and “jobless recovery” led to the downfall of the Reagan-Bush Republicans. Clinton was elected because he promised “change.”
All this opened up a space in public debate for social criticism from the left.
West, an engaging speaker and prolific writer, was well placed to take advantage of this opportunity.
Yet the more liberal climate does not fully explain the adulation given West.
He is seen as a hot commodity in the media because although Race Matters documents the social ills that millions want to discuss, it lets the employers and the government off the hook.
West sees an abstract, impersonal market as the problem without taking a clear aim at the ruling class that profits from it.
This makes West a safe bet for publishers and editors. They can promote him to a public desperate for a discussion of the burning issues precisely because he does not call for protests or class struggle.
A rare critical review of Race Matters in the St. Petersburg Times (Fla) summed up West’s shortcomings.
“At 105 pages, West seems to hit most of the issues, but is capable only of giving simplistic answers to the race troubles plaguing the country,” wrote reviewer Tanara Bowie.
“All Americans have to do is follow this simple advice: ‘…our ideals of freedom, democracy and equality must be invoked to invigorate all of us, especially the landless, propertyless and the luckless.’ West doesn’t seem to realize that all of this has been said before with little success.”
Smooth Out His Radical Edge
It must be said that West goes along with his promoters’ efforts to smooth out his radical edge.
This is clear when you compare his left-wing speech to a Black audience at a Chicago book fair to his moderate interviews with leading publications.
According to the May 20 Chicago Tribune, West said at the African American Book Center, “Nobody in America likes to acknowledge that 1 percent of the population owns 30 percent of the wealth. Ninety percent are scrambling over the crumbs.
“The issue of redistribution of wealth is crucial. You can’t talk about Black folk without talking about poverty…
“I do not believe food, shelter, health care, child care ought to be connected to a job. The average annual income is $31,000. In Chicago with three kids that’s nothing! You and the Holy Ghost just gettin’ by.”
But given a mass audience via a USA Today interview published June 22, West didn’t demand a redistribution of wealth.
Nor did he argue for the necessity to put human needs above profit.
In an interview in the May 9 Los Angeles Times, he counterposed the “institutional buffers” of the Black family and the “closer-knit neighbourhoods of 20 years ago to today.
Nowhere in his recent round of interviews does West call for Blacks or anyone else to fight back against the racism and poverty that he criticizes.
Nor does West criticize Clinton for his broken promises and turn to the right.
“Fairly Calculated Actions”
A reporter asked West what he thought of Clinton’s efforts to “distance himself from the African-American community through what seems like fairly calculated actions.”
“I couldn’t mind his wanting to win the election,” West said.
“He had to get Bush out. He wanted to realign the electorate after years of the other side being so successful playing the race card. He broke the Republican hold. I admire him for that.”
In other words, West argues that to win the election it was acceptable for Clinton to preempt Bush’s race-baiting with his own.
West, who admonished Black Americans for their “nihilism,” exempts Clinton from his moral critique of the U.S.
And far from demanding a redistribution of wealth, West took pains in the Globe interview to distinguish between criticisms of “market culture” and the market in general.
“Now markets do play a very important role in our economy,” he said. “I don’t want to downplay that. I don’t want in any way to be cast as one who trashes markets.”
At his worst, West plays into the racist stereotypes of the right.
In an issue of Time, he is quoted as saying: “For too long black brothers have been beating up black sisters just like the white policemen beat up Rodney King. We’ve got to clean up the moral content of Black freedom struggle.”
Of course, all violence against women must be condemned.
But it is absurd to compare the behaviour of individual Black men with racist cop violence.
One is an act of individual powerlessness and desperation. The other is part of a racist “justice” system that imprisons over a million Black males.
By suggesting a moral equivalency between the two cases, West renders his social criticism irrelevant.
Here as elsewhere, West shifts the focus away from struggle against social problems and toward changing individual behaviour.
Which is just fine for the major publications that hail him as a “prophet.”
According to the June 7 Newsweek, West “seems on the verge of major stardom in that twilight zone where intellectual debate and TV talk meet.”
Unfortunately, there is little indication that West will use his growing influence to organize for social change.
Newsweek described him as a “world class clothes horse” and an “elegant prophet with attitude and a taste for fancy cars and flashy cuff links.”
One suspects that if Cornel West developed a taste for struggle, the media would treat him differently.
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