A peek into the mind of America’s next president

I though I’d already heard everything that Cornel West had to say, but this interview was chock-full of many interesting clarifications. Norman Finkelstein doesn’t say much in this one.

DR. CORNEL WEST — The Marathon Interview, Part One: Race by Norman Finkelstein (YouTube)

At 26:00, they discuss the difference between racism, generalization, and recognition of cultural difference.

“Norman: I’m wondering, is what you’re saying, in your opinion, is it a stereotype, a generalization, is it even valid? I’m curious where you stand on that. I felt it was a form of—it was just another version of Afrocentrism, where Black people think differently, they reason differently.

“Cornel: No, I think we’re talking about again—like Gramsci, and St. Clair Drake, and, of course, Toni Morrison’s great text, the new one that just came out Sources of Self-Image, which lays this out so beautifully—that we’re talking about cultural specificity.

“When you take a dignified African people, who then go through 244 years of slavery, and then Jim Crow and so on, right? That so much of the desire to hold on to sanity and dignity—it’s against the law for them to read and write—and, therefore, so much of their attempt to make sense of the world is going to be oral. They already come from a West African people, where orality was very important. But it becomes even more accented in that regard.

“Remember Saul Bellow says, well, ‘show me the Proust of the Zulus.’ You say, brother Saul, now, you’re one of the great novelists of ideas and comic writers in American tradition. Not as great as Mark Twain, who was the greatest comic, but Twain wasn’t a historian, a novelist of ideas. You were. But you know, in fact, that proof comes out of a particular historical moment in which people are given a priority toward a certain kind of writing.

“And Zulu genius is going to be manifested in other ways. It’s not going to be manifested in the novel. That doesn’t mean the Zulus are lesser, it just means they’re different. And so, when I talk about cultural specificity and kinetic morality, I’m talking about, first, the centrality of song as a way of sustaining black humanity when it was against the law for them to read and write, which is the exact opposite of Jewish culture for 2,000 years, where the love of learning, the love of language, the reading, the interpretation of text, was a precondition for any kind of survival.

“So what does that mean? That means that they’re both still human. It’s just that orality. And how’s that going to be manifested? It’s going to be manifested first in the churches, where people are going to be hanging on the word of the preacher. That the physical investment in the orality that allow people to believe in themselves and a God, so they don’t kill themselves or commit collective suicide. That’s not Afrocentrism or anything. That’s cultural specificity.”

By cultural specificity, West means that you consider the difference between cultures within the historical context that created them. He says neither is better, but I think that there’s a limit to that argument. It all depends on what society considers to be useful, no? Society considers music and literature equally useful, but somehow “cures for disease” has got to come out on top, I think.

It’s only a society in which it is a given that disease can be cured that can even luxuriate in a comparison of music versus writing. And we have to be honest about where cures for diseases are going to come from, where improved means of agriculture and communication are going to come from, where more efficient energy and insulation from the elements are going to come from. They might stem from a strong tradition of song born in illiteracy, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

There is a limit to this “no-one is better” routine. There is a definite path with the potential to lead to more improvements for people, in general. The path we’re on is not that because, while we have the rational science part down reasonably well, our politics and morality are so f@$ked that we’re still acting the same as several centuries ago. We’re still basically pirates, taking everything for a few, and keeping the others around as slaves to the machine that transfers wealth and power away from them. Instead of shooting them outright when they get uppity, we’ve gone the Aldous Huxlex route and anesthetized them.

It’s that machine that also, eventually, makes certain cultures inferior. There is only so much deprivation that a culture or society can endure before it is essentially left behind. You can’t malnourish—either food or knowledge/literacy—generations of a people and then naively say that they’re just as good as any other people. There are such things as real-life advantages, like advantages of climate, health, education, or wealth.

The aforementioned piracy has ensured that the gap grows and grows, until it’s simply no longer true that no one society is better than another. It may be true that one is more just than another, but that’s not even a given. It may simply only be true that one society has gained all of its advantages at the expense of a trail of broken societies it leaves in its wake. But it’s simply wrong to say that there is no objective benefit, in the end. It would almost be worse if all of this destruction had led to absolutely no gain for anyone.

Those societies that arrogate everything to themselves lose any objective claim to the moral high ground, they lose any place in history other than in the scoundrel’s corner—but they’ve definitely won, at least in the short- and medium-term.

At 35:00, Cornel discusses the difference in kinds of racism, in the degree to which a point of reference is forced on a person.

“I resonate very deeply with the humanism of Douglass. Douglass is very much a humanist as a black man, as an American. But it’s first and foremost humanity. It reminds me very much of what Malcolm X said, at the end of his life, ‘I’m for truth, no matter who’s for it. I’m for justice, no matter who promotes it. I’m first and foremost a human being. A Black Man. A Muslim.‘

“If you’re a human being,everybody has specificity. What’s your mama’s name? What’s your daddy’s name? Who are your mentors? Who taught you how to dance? What models did you have in your life, in terms of intellectual work, or love, or whatever? Everybody has a specificity in their humanity, but the humanism that sits at the center of Douglass’s work, I resonate very deeply with.

“But, I tell you, I have two deep, deep critiques of Douglass. And, in this sense, I’m very much more tied to the Black musical tradition than Douglass. On the one hand, Douglass comes out of such thick, vicious white supremacy that he felt he had to prove something to white folk, because the doubts that they were bombarding him with, were so intense.

“You get this also in the one and only Paul Robeson, when he talks about growing up with his father, with the Latin and the Greek, you gotta prove something. You get it in Du Bois, when the girl refuses his car. I’m going to prove to these white folk that I’m better.

“Hey, you think Charlie Parker ever had to prove to the white saxophonists that he was better? He didn’t give a damn. He just tried to be the best he can be. And he assumes that, within his own community, he’s got standards. So that the white normative gaze that is usually bombarding him with doubt and vicious attack and assault, that’s not part and parcel of what it’s all about.

“I used to talk to Sonny Rollins about that, just when he and Coltrane would talk, you know, when they had these reviews of Coltrane and Giant Steps. ‘He’s not playing fast.‘ ‘He don’t know what he’s doing.‘ ‘He’s just playing scales.‘

“And Sonny Rollins would ask, ‘Trane, does that hurt you?’

“[And Trane said] ‘No, I love these folks, but they don’t really know what they’re talking about. I’m trying to keep track of what Parker and the other folk, what Bud Powell and them are doing, and what the other jazz musicians are doing. And if I’m wrong, I’m wrong. But that’s not my point of reference.‘

“Well, for somebody like Douglass, it was his point of reference. It was inevitable, in some ways, that he had to prove himself, and even Robeson, too. ”

There’s America’s next president, ladies and gentlemen.

What he’s saying is that, although the U.S. was still a deeply racist country, the character of the racism had changed in the sense that the Black man no longer saw his only chance of success in relation to the White man, but in relation to peers of his own choosing.

He was still being discriminated against, but he had more artistic and intellectual freedom. The yoke wasn’t off, by any means, but it had a different shape and didn’t chafe in as many places as the old one did. The grip was loosening. The arc of history bends toward justice—but it ain’t gonna bend itself.