Race Matters

"I love this book. It was written a year after the L.A. riots, in 1993. The L.A. riots took place in 92. This is also the book that put Cornel West on the public intellectual scene, all his other books were primarily academic. It’s a collection of essays responding to a moment in which lots of people were very angry, and were rioting, and when many people misunderstood that anger. He wrote this book both to explain what was happening, and to offer a guide telling us what we should do. It’s a book produced in response to black rage. What I get from this book is an understanding of racism . He begins by looking at what racism can do to you, before he even gets to the anger, because he doesn’t talk about black rage until he gets to the final chapter. But he constantly leads us there from an existential standpoint. He talks about how, given the racism that’s happened there, there’s a nihilism felt by many black Americans. He’s going to the soul here. He’s also talking about our relationships with each other. If we want to talk about solidarity, solidaristic emotions, how do we tackle black-Jewish relationships, for example? What is the goal or what should be the aims of black leadership, if we want to end racism? Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But what’s important—it’s my favorite chapter—is chapter eight, “Malcolm X and Black Rage.” He’s writing this in the 90s. I don’t know what it was like in London during this time, but I remember in the 90s, Malcolm X was resurrected by my generation. There were songs about Malcolm X, rap songs, employing his image, there were Malcolm X hats. Then Spike Lee came out with a movie about him. And West understands that Malcolm X’s image is being revived for my generation. And, as a result of that, Malcolm X’s rage started to be attractive. West is writing in response to black rage in relationship to the riots. And I what I think he’s trying to say to our generation is, ‘if this is the figure, Malcolm X, who’s inspiring to you, then it’s important that we have a full understanding of who he was so that we won’t just take his rage and think that that’s all this story is about.’ West’s fear is that we’re going to misuse it. So one of the things he says, going back to the love issue, is that if we don’t understand that Malcolm X’s rage came from a sincere love for black folk, then not only are we not going to be able to do something productive with that rage, the soul of it is going to be missing. He takes the reader into the depths of who Malcolm X was, his political philosophy, his existential philosophy, to remind us there is more to Malcolm than just an outrageous kind of rage. It’s okay for us to be angry. He challenges us, though, that with that anger should come love, should come care, should come compassion. He even cites bell hooks as being a model of what that actually looks like. It’s the first book that spoke to this moment that was just out there. I loved the way that he was compassionate to young people. It wasn’t condescending, it was affirming. And he gave us a full picture of what anger should look like and the existential and spiritual elements and tools that we should have alongside it. There’s no doubt that that is the picture. He won a Nobel Peace Prize for a reason, so anger wasn’t the defining emotion when we think about King. But that is not to say that he was never angry. It is not to say that he never used that anger. When the church in Birmingham was blown up and four little girls died, when he received information about the open letter the white clergymen delivered to him while he was in a jail in Birmingham, he talks about how he was furious about that letter. And he wrote the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in a cell, and it was fury that led him to write that. If we look really deep into his biography, there are moments when people witnessed his anger, and they witnessed what he did with that anger. I talk about this in my book. I think from a leadership perspective, there were strategic reasons why anger wasn’t or shouldn’t have been the defining kind of emotion when we think about King. But we ought not to reduce that to thinking that he was an individual who never felt anger, nor that he never used it. Most importantly, when we look at the work of King before his death in the late 60s, when there was beginning to be a more radical movement among young people — if you think about all the riots and the rebellions and insurrections that happen during that period, young people are getting angry, and expressing their anger — King responds to it. But he never tells them that anger is useless, that you shouldn’t be angry. He basically acknowledges it and he encourages them to come over to the movement, to channel that anger. I appreciate that. In some ways he shares the spirit of what I was just describing in relation to Cornel West, of not speaking down to young people, not being condescending towards them, respecting the emotion that they have, but then giving them tools to do something with it. We find in his speeches that’s exactly what he’s doing for those young people, suggesting that, ‘yes, I understand why you’re feeling that anger, but come over to the civil rights movement , and I can give you a lot to do in order to channel that in the right ways.’ The two books that I just mentioned, I never read them in any of my courses here in the States. I found them in black independent bookstores when I was younger. Cornel was just a force and so those were in regular books stores. But I heard about most of the important work in this area through the grassroots. Being an active teenager I discovered these books, but I didn’t come across them in college, unfortunately."