Are we witnessing the death of Black prophetic fire in our time? Are we experiencing the demise of the Black prophetic tradition in present-day America? Do the great prophetic figures and social movements no longer resonate in the depth of our souls? Have we forgotten how beautiful it is to be on fire for justice? These are some of the questions I wrestle with in this book.
Since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., it is clear that something has died in Black America. The last great efforts for Black collective triumph were inspired by the massive rebellions in response to Dr. King’s murder. Yet these gallant actions were met with increasing repression and clever strategies of co-optation by the powers that be. The fundamental shift from a we-consciousness to an I-consciousness reflected not only a growing sense of Black collective defeat but also a Black embrace of the seductive myth of individualism in American culture. Black people once put a premium on serving the community, lifting others, and finding joy in empowering others. Today, most Black people have succumbed to individualistic projects in pursuit of wealth, health, and status. Black people once had a strong prophetic tradition of lifting every voice. Today, most Black people engage in the petty practice of chasing dollars. American society is ruled by big money, and American culture is a way of life obsessed with money. This is true for capitalist societies and cultures around the world. The Black prophetic tradition—along with the prophetic traditions of other groups—is a strong counter-force to these tendencies of our times. Integrity cannot be reduced to cupidity, decency cannot be reduced to chicanery, and justice cannot be reduced to market price. The fundamental motivation for this book is to resurrect Black prophetic fire in our day—especially among the younger generation. I want to reinvigorate the Black prophetic tradition and to keep alive the memory of Black prophetic figures and movements. I consider the Black prophetic tradition one of the greatest treasures in the modern world. It has been the leaven in the American democratic loaf. Without the Black prophetic tradition, much of the best of America would be lost and some of the best of the modern world would be forgotten.
All the great figures in this book courageously raised their voices in order to bear witness to people’s suffering. These Black prophetic figures are connected to collective efforts to overcome injustice and make the world a better place for everyone. Even as distinct individuals, they are driven by a we-consciousness that is concerned with the needs of others. More importantly, they are willing to renounce petty pleasures and accept awesome burdens. Tremendous sacrifice and painful loneliness sit at the center of who they are and what they do. Yet we are deeply indebted to who they were and what they did.
Unfortunately, their mainstream reception is shaped according to the cultural icon of the self-made man or the individual charismatic leader. This is especially true for the male figures. This is not to say that they did not fulfill the function of leaders and speakers of their organizations. But I want to point out that any conception of the charismatic leader severed from social movements is false. I consider leaders and movements to be inseparable. There is no Frederick Douglass without the Abolitionist movement. There is no W. E. B. Du Bois without the Pan-Africanist, international workers’, and Black freedom movements. There is no Martin Luther King Jr. without the anti-imperialist, workers’, and civil rights movements. There is no Ella Baker without the anti-US-apartheid and Puerto Rican independence movements. There is no Malcolm X without the Black Nationalist and human rights movements. And there is no Ida B. Wells without the anti-US-terrorist and Black women’s movements.
There is a gender difference in regard to men’s and women’s roles assigned in social movements. This shapes their reception in history books and in popular culture. Male figures are prominent on the basis of their highly visible positions. They often are chosen to represent the movement, usually due to their charismatic qualities. Yet despite the charisma of many women leaders, it is difficult for them to be chosen to represent the movement. They are often confined to untiring efforts in organizing the movement. As a consequence, even when women give speeches, even when they contribute to the political thinking of movements, their words are not taken as seriously as they ought to be. One of the aims of our dialogues about the Black prophetic tradition is to bear witness to the fiery prophetic spirit of Ida B. Wells by presenting examples of her fearless speech and action, and to bear witness to the deep democratic sensibilities of Ella Baker, who understood better than any of the others the fundamental role of movements in bringing about fundamental social change.
This book becomes even more important in the age of Obama, precisely because the presence of a Black president in the White House complicates our understanding of the Black prophetic tradition. If high status in American society and white points of reference are the measure of the Black freedom movement, then this moment in Black history is the ultimate success. But if the suffering of Black people—especially Black poor and working people—is the ultimate measure of the Black freedom movement, then this moment in Black history is catastrophic—sadly continuous with the past. With the Black middle class losing nearly 60 percent of its wealth, the Black working class devastated with stagnating wages and increasing prices, and the Black poor ravaged by massive unemployment, decrepit schools, indecent housing, and hyperincarceration in the new Jim Crow, the age of Obama looks bleak through the lens of the Black prophetic tradition. This prophetic viewpoint is not a personal attack on a Black president; rather it is a wholesale indictment of the system led by a complicitous Black president.
The Black prophetic tradition highlights the crucial role of social movements in the United States and abroad. The Occupy Wall Street movement was a global response to the thirty-year class war from above, which pushed the middle class into the ranks of the working class and poor, and even further exacerbated the sufferings of working-class and poor people. The 2008 financial crisis, primarily caused by the systemic greed of unregulated Wall Street oligarchs and their bailout by the Wall Street–dominated US government, revealed the degree to which American society is ruled by big money. And the fact that not one Wall Street bank executive—despite massive criminality on Wall Street—has gone to jail, while any poor and, especially, Black person caught with crack goes straight to prison, shows just how unjust our justice system is. The realities of the power of big banks and corporations are hidden and concealed by a corporate media that specializes in generating weapons of mass distraction. This systemic concealment also holds for the military-industrial complex, be it the Pentagon or the CIA. Rarely are the death-dealing activities of both institutions made public to the American citizenry. And courageous whistle-blowers—such as Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, John Kiriakou, and Edward Snowden—who reveal to the public the corrupt activities of the US government are severely punished. Even the recent discussions about drones dropping bombs on innocent civilians remain confined to American citizens. The thousands of non-American civilian victims—including hundreds of children—receive little or no attention in the corporate media. The Black prophetic tradition claims that the life of a precious baby in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Haiti, Gaza, Tel Aviv, Lagos, Bogotá, or anywhere else has the same value as a precious baby in the USA.
The Black prophetic tradition accents the fightback of poor and working people, be it in the United States against big money, be it in the Middle East against Arab autocratic rule or Israeli occupation, be it against African authoritarian governments abetted by US forces or Chinese money, be it in Latin America against oligarchic regimes in collaboration with big banks and corporations, or be it in Europe against austerity measures that benefit big creditors and punish everyday people. In short, the Black prophetic tradition is local in content and international in character.
The deep hope shot through this dialogue is that Black prophetic fire never dies, that the Black prophetic tradition forever flourishes, and that a new wave of young brothers and sisters of all colors see and feel that it is a beautiful thing to be on fire for justice and that there is no greater joy than inspiring and empowering others—especially the least of these, the precious and priceless wretched of the earth!
—CW
It was November 1999. On the occasion of the publication of The Cornel West Reader, Harvard’s African American studies department honored the author for his outstanding academic achievements, and it was announced that Cornel West would give a talk in Emerson Hall, the home of Harvard’s philosophy department, in Harvard Yard. I was on sabbatical doing research in the Harvard libraries, revising a book-length manuscript on the US reception of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. I decided to seize the opportunity to hear one of the stars of the widely praised “dream team” that Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. had brought together. I had heard much about West, but I had read very little—and I was in for a great surprise.
In his talk, West directed the audience’s attention to the life-size portraits of Harvard’s Golden Age of Philosophy, which adorn the walls of the lecture hall. They include, among others, William James and Josiah Royce, who figure prominently in West’s book about American pragmatism, The Evasion of American Philosophy. Then, to my amazement, West started to talk about Royce’s lifelong struggle with Schopenhauer’s profound pessimism. Royce, he explained, was convinced that one had to come to terms with this philosopher’s dark yet realistic view of the omnipresent suffering and sorrow in human life. But, West claimed, as much as Royce wrestled with Schopenhauer, he would not give in to Schopenhauer’s hopelessness but, rather, would resort to the only option to Schopenhauerian pessimism: a leap of faith. I couldn’t believe my ears!
After the lecture I introduced myself to Cornel West and said that my work-in-progress was related to Schopenhauer (and to Royce, for that matter). He answered, “Well, I heard there is a woman in Germany who works on the reception of Schopenhauer in America.” “Yes,” I said, “that’s me.” “We have to talk,” he said. And since then we have been in conversation.
By now I am, of course, aware of the fact that given Schopenhauer’s focus on human suffering and his great compassion with all living beings, Cornel West’s interest in his work does not come as a surprise. Nor does his attention to Royce because notwithstanding West’s unflinching acknowledgment of the deep sense of the tragic in human lives, he has remained what he calls a “prisoner of hope.” In fact, West’s strong affinity to these philosophers derives from the fact that the questions they raised have been fundamental to his own thinking and, moreover, to his understanding of American democracy. After all, as West confesses in the lecture “Pragmatism and the Tragic,” he believes, like Melville, that “a deep sense of evil in the tragic must inform the meaning and value of democracy.”1 If, as West expounds in the same text, “a sense of the tragic is an attempt to keep alive some sense of possibility. Some sense of hope. Some sense of agency. Some sense of resistance in a moment of defeat and disillusionment and a moment of discouragement,”2 then who is better qualified to understand this than Black people? After all, as West reminds us, Malcolm X’s definition of a “nigger” is “a victim of American democracy.”3
But in contrast to Schopenhauer, Royce, and Melville, Cornel West is an activist not just of the word but also of the deed. This is why the twentieth-century Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci and his concept of the organic intellectual is a key figure in these dialogues on the Black prophetic tradition. As West has professed repeatedly, his own thinking and activism have been inspired by the Gramscian notion that intellectuals should be rooted in or closely tied to cultural groups or social organizations. Again, this is not surprising, for the practical counterpart to Gramsci’s theoretical concept is the long history of the Black struggle for freedom, in which the firm entrenchment of leaders in their group’s organizations has been a vital practice.
My own contributions to our transatlantic dialogue have been very much shaped by the theory of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Black prophetic leaders are clear-sighted observers of the various kinds of violence Black people experience as a group and as individuals. Consequently, they tend to look at the evils of their day through a lens resembling a sociological view, which allows them to lay bare the power imbalances deeply ingrained in society. Yet they do so without ever losing sight of the concrete suffering of Black people. To understand their “logic of practice” (a term coined by Bourdieu that refers to the need to overcome the binary opposition of theory and practice) and, more generally, to reach a better understanding of the situation of Black people in America, I have found Bourdieu’s concepts immensely helpful. Bourdieu assumes that there is a correlation between the structures of the social world and the mental structures of agents, so that divisions in society—divisions that, for example, establish and reproduce power relations between the dominant and the dominated—correspond to the principles of vision and division individuals apply to them. In addition to an insight into the thoroughly relational character of the social world, which implies a refutation of the myth of individualism, Bourdieu also offers precise analyses of mechanisms of power. One of the core concepts of Bourdieu’s theory is the notion of symbolic violence. Being soft and inconspicuous, this type of symbolic force is an apt means to naturalize the social order and thus sustain its inherent inequalities. There is a striking passage in one of Bourdieu’s major books, Pascalian Meditations, in which he draws on a passage from James Baldwin’s essay “Down at the Cross” in The Fire Next Time in order to illustrate the subtle psychosocial mechanisms of symbolic violence and their function and consequences in the socialization of a Black child. According to Bourdieu, Baldwin’s description shows how Black parents unconsciously pass on the dominant vision and division of the social world, as well as their intense fear of that dominant power and the no-less-terrifying anxiety that their child will be harmed by transgressing the invisible boundaries. Baldwin writes:
Long before the Negro child perceives this difference, and even longer before he understands it, he has begun to react to it, he has begun to be controlled by it. Every effort made by the child’s elders to prepare him for a fate from which they cannot protect him causes him secretly, in terror, to begin to await, without knowing that he is doing so, his mysterious and inexorable punishment. He must be “good” not only in order to please his parents and not only to avoid being punished by them; behind their authority stands another, nameless and impersonal, infinitely harder to please, and bottomlessly cruel. And this filters into the child’s consciousness through his parents’ tone of voice as he is being exhorted, punished, or loved; in the sudden, uncontrollable note of fear heard in his mother’s or his father’s voice when he has strayed beyond some particular boundary. He does not know what the boundary is, and he can get no explanation of it, which is frightening enough, but the fear he hears in the voices of his elders is more frightening still.4
Baldwin, himself a powerful prophetic voice in the Black literary tradition, addresses both the structural power imbalances and injustices of the social order, and the terror the dominant evoke in the dominated, who suffer from the violence exerted upon them be it physical or symbolic.
And so do each of the great six prophetic figures we discuss in our dialogues. Obviously, they are all prophets of the past who battled against very specific ills of their day. But though these particular evils may have vanished—owing in part to the very battles the prophets fought and the sacrifices they made—the power differential and resulting inequalities are still deeply ingrained in the social order, although they exist under a different name. To give but one example, the symbolic violence of signs reading “whites only,” which once divided social space into privileged and unprivileged sites and erected boundaries that served the functions of excluding, denigrating, and controlling the dominated, today is exerted in the practice of racial profiling called “stop and frisk.” Thus, though we have to contextualize the historic figures we talk about so that we may appreciate their merits, as well as understand their shortcomings, we should also be aware of their exemplary natures, which enabled them to transcend the horizon of their times and become relevant to us today.
Given that we touch upon current political events in these talks, we decided to print the conversations in the order they were recorded rather than in the chronological order of the historical figures we discuss.
As outstanding intellectuals, all the Black prophetic figures in this book offer astute analyses of the mechanisms of power that help us discern these very mechanisms in the different shapes they take today. As organic intellectuals and activists, they reflect on problems of organizing and mobilizing that may provide useful insights for today’s freedom fights. And as prophets who compassionately and fearlessly face both the evils of our world and the powers that be, they inspire us to do the same.
This is why we need to talk about Black prophetic fire!
—CHB