*Matt Viser Insults Black Intellectuals: *How? By including Cornel West
<http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2011/05/west_obama_a_bl.html>
among them.
Cornel West, a Princeton University professor and leading black
intellectual, is harshly criticizing President Obama, a candidate he
once supported but now calls "a black mascot of Wall Street
oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats."
West, a former Harvard University professor, said during an
interview with the website Truthdig posted yesterday that the
president has not been true to his race.
"I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free
black men," West said. "It's understandable. As a young brother
who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's
always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has
known culturally is white . . . When he meets an independent black
brother, it is frightening."
It is no secret that West left Harvard largely because then Harvard
president Lawrence Summers didn't think that West was doing /any/
intellectual work. (And from everything I have read, Summers was right.)
If that sample above doesn't persuade you that West is not even a
/trailing/ black intellectual, consider this
<http://www.thenation.com/blog/160725/cornel-west-v-barack-obama>, which
comes from the same speech:
Furthermore, West's sense of betrayal is clearly more personal than
ideological. In Hedges's article West claims that a true
progressive would always put love of the people above concern with
the elite and privileged. Then he complains, "I couldn't get a
ticket [to the inauguration] with my mother and my brother. I said
this is very strange. We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks
up my bags from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration. . . . We
had to watch the thing in the hotel."
There is, as you may have noticed, a small contradiction in that passage.
Real intellectuals, for example Thomas Sowell
<http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/> or John McWhorter
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McWhorter>, would have noticed that
contradiction in about a microsecond.
- 2:39 PM, 19 May 2011
*McWhorter* link fixed, thanks to an astute friend who spotted my mistake.
- 7:09 AM, 20 May 2011 [link]
<http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/May2011_3.html#jrm9903>
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