by Maina Mwaura, Urban Faith Contributing Writer | Nov 11, 2024 | Black History, Commentary, Headline News, Social Justice |
Maina
Man, one of my favorite authors, I mean, I just want to be blunt with you. Every time I see you on Meet the Press, Eddie, I’m always like, he is dead on about something. I don’t know where it comes from. So where were you when you said to yourself, “Self, I need to write a book [like] We Are The Leaders that We’ve been Looking For?”
Dr. Glaude
You know, this book is based on a set of lectures I delivered like in 2011. And I was so angry at that moment. Everybody was excited about the Obama presidency. And I was angry in some ways, doc, that people were reading Obama’s presidency as the fulfillment of the black freedom struggle. That that’s what the object of all that sacrifice was for, was to get a black man in the White House. And I just thought, that’s not true. What happened to love, what happened to justice, what happened to the moral dimension of the movement? I wanted to think through that. I wanted to figure out what were we relinquishing, what were we giving up in that moment. And then fast forward, all these years later, I returned to those lectures. And I returned to them because in some ways I had lost my footing. I was trying to figure things out because COVID had disrupted so much, I had lost two partners. I felt like I was unmoored, untethered as it were. And I knew these lectures were a moment when I was trying to usher in a new way of being for myself, a new way of thinking for myself, a new way of writing for myself. So I wanted to go back to that moment. And lo and behold, I saw what I was trying to do differently. So all of this happened in the summer of 2023. And I got to work. And then I submitted the manuscript to the editor at Harvard University Press and they were like, OMG, let’s get this out as soon as we can.
Maina
What would you say to people who feel the disillusionment of people who are going, “I don’t want to be the leader?”
Dr. Glaude
I think part of what I’m trying to argue is that when we outsource our responsibility for the house [of this country], when we say, well, I don’t want to pay the mortgage then we know what’s going to happen. And so we cannot outsource our responsibility for democracy any longer to so called prophets, to so called heroes, to politicians. We have to understand this is where Ella Baker, Miss Baker, is so important that we are our salvation in this instanc. Of course, that that doesn’t disregard one’s faith claims, but it’s what we do.And there’s a somewhat cliche at the heart of the book. And that is that if we are the leaders we’ve been looking for, then we got to become better people. We got to reach for higher forms of excellence. James Baldwin used to put it this way, the messiness of the world is often a reflection of the messiness of our interior lives. So if we don’t begin to do that hard work on becoming better people, then we can’t be the source of significant change. But I also should say this, doing the hard work of becoming a better human being must take place alongside of [and] within our ongoing effort to make a more just world. Because the world as it currently is organized gets in the way of us becoming better people. It’s almost like you’re rewarded to be selfish, you’re rewarded to be greedy, you’re rewarded to be mean spirited, you’re rewarded to be self-regarded. You’re not rewarded if you’re other regarded, if you’re not regarded if you have an I, thou relationship [with others as non-objects], you’re not regarded if you’re committed to justice, if you’re committed to the least of these, you see what I mean? If you’re maladjusted to an unjust world, you’re not rewarded. So we got to do the hard work of self-cultivation in pursuit of a more just world. That’s the heart of the book.
Maina
Which one of these people did you fall in love with the most? You’re taking some of the very, very best and you’re dropping them right in front of us and there are nuggets right in front of us. Which one did you go, “I am more in line with this leader.”
Dr. Glaude
It depends on what age you ask me. So when I was a young kid growing up in Mississippi, Dr. King meant everything. I remember checking out the album, show you how old I am. It was the vinyl of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It was the March on Washington. And I remember stopping it and learning it by memory from Mrs. Mitchell’s eighth grade history class. And Dr. King was so important to how I imagined myself. When I got to Morehouse, you’re baptized in King’s thought. You got the statue of him looking at you. And so King was so important for me at a young age. But then when I got to Morehouse, Malcolm became my guy. And I have my goatee to this day. I will never cut it off as kind of testimony from my first conversion experience, reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X. So here I am excited to be at King’s Alma Mater and my freshman year, this guy walks up to me and said, “You’re like a hand without a thumb. You don’t know who you are.” And he gave me Malcolm X’s autobiography. And I read it that night. And I found the language for my father’s anger. I found the language for how to imagine myself as a man, given the fact that I was so afraid because my father scared me to death. Malcolm became this hero of mine that I cut my political teeth on. And now here I am in my fifties. And Miss Baker is all up in me. It’s a more mature voice, I suppose, but we wouldn’t have a black freedom struggle of the 20th century if it wasn’t for her. And the way in which she has that wonderful line, “A strong people doesn’t need a strong leader.” And I said this once, I was speaking, I think it was in Chicago. I was like, “What happens when you have fans in the pews and a celebrity in the pulpit?” The church is dead. It’s done. I think we’re seeing a lot of that right now. What happens when you outsource your faith journey to someone else? And so part of what I’ve been trying to do is to live Miss Baker’s edict. Because the title of the book comes from her. We are the leaders we have been looking for. She says, “We have to convince people that their salvation is in their hands.” What we choose to do. Not what the preacher chooses to do, not what the politician chooses to do. So not what Malcolm inspired me to do, not what King leads me to do, but what’s coming from inside of my heart in light of the exemplars of excellence and love that inform and shape my own voice as I understand it. And that’s what I’m writing towards in the book.
Maina
You keep talking to me. So last question. Sure. Your spiritual faith journey, did that come into play in this book at all?
Dr. Glaude
It’s at work in all of my texts. To be honest with you, it’s me trying to understand what does it what does it mean to be decent and loving? What does it mean to exemplify the ministry of Jesus without it being overlaid with dogma and an institutional constraint. So when I call for a coalition of the decent, animated by the power of love, that is the exacting power of love. That is that is at the heart of my religious Christian witness, as it were. And there’s a moment in the book near the end where I’m going to invoke Jimmy Baldwin again. He has this extraordinary essay that is published after his after his death is entitled “To Crush A Serpent.” And in this in this essay, he is relentless in his critique of the Fallwells and the moral majority and the like. But he talks about what salvation involves, what it entails. And it’s an echo of an earlier essay, a talk that he gave at Kalamazoo in 1961, entitled “In Search For A Majority.” And he says salvation is found in effect in “the going towards.” Salvation is found in the going towards in some ways. And I want to suggest that salvation is found in the going towards and love is its carriage. So the short answer to the question is, is yes, me trying to figure all of this out, indebted to the Christian tradition, but not limited by it. Those lectures produced an uncommon faith. So the short answer is yes, all my books are or attempts to make sense of this complex journey that I’m making in terms of my faith.
by Christine A. Scheller | May 17, 2012 | Entertainment, Feature, Headline News |
Recording artist Bootsy Collins is one of many artists Cornel West has inspired.
I’ve only known retiring Princeton University professor Cornel West as a celebrity activist. I’ve never read Race Matters, his most popular book, or any of his others (though I’m off to the library momentarily with a list). I first encountered West, with no clue as to who he was, at the 2007 American Academy of Religion annual meeting in San Diego, where he and talk show host Tavis Smiley shared a stage. In what became one of the most popular articles ever published on my personal blog, I described that experience as an exciting “gospel pep rally.”
Even in the hallways at AAR, West had the air of celebrity about him. Perhaps it was his appearance in two of the Matrix films. As I passed him, he seemed to expect people to recognize and stop him. When he called out a question from the back of the room at a panel discussion of philosopher Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age, everyone paid attention.
I began paying attention too, both when he was campaigning for presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008 and since he’s become one of the president’s most vocal critics on the political left. Last year, I heard West speak eloquently and passionately about racism in the criminal justice system at the Princeton University Imprisonment of a Race conference with author Michelle Alexander.
Eddie Glaude, Jr. said Cornel West has been his "saving grace."
I’m aware that some Black intellectuals have a “What have you done for me lately?” attitude towards West’s academic achievements. Glenn Loury of Brown University and John McWhorter of Columbia University, for example, dissected his intellectual output in a Blogging Heads dialogue last summer. Their basic critique was that West hasn’t produced any substantive academic work in at least a decade and has chosen instead to be famous.
I’m also aware that West’s theology makes some evangelicals uncomfortable. Earlier this year, a nationally known Black Christian leader told UrbanFaith that West had been disinvited from a speaking engagement at a popular conference because West was perceived as too controversial. Our source said other Black leaders were upset about this and were in discussions with conference organizers about the situation. In trying to discern if it was a story worth reporting, I called West’s office at Princeton University and spoke to an assistant. She said they knew nothing about it, but confirmed that a video crew was coming to film a segment rather than having him appear live at the event. Of course, I thought. What better way to save face and control the message. North Park University, on the other hand, welcomed West to its Justice Summit with open arms in March.
Hip-hop artist Lupe Fiasco has referenced Cornel West on four projects.
West is retiring from Princeton University after spending 40 years on and off as a part of the community, first as a doctoral student and then as a member of the Religion and African-American Studies faculty. He’ll be returning to Union Theological Seminary where he taught early in his career. Last night, when I attended his retirement celebration at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, I didn’t go into the event as naively as I had the first time I heard him speak. But I knew it would be a good party, and it was. Musical performances ranged from gospel to show tunes to jazz to hip-hop to what my son described as trip-hop to funk. All the artists were stellar. What most interested me, though, was what people said about West.
Eddie Glaude, Jr., chair of the Center for African American Studies at Princeton, said West has “loved him to death” over many years. “As a deeply wounded young man from the coast of Mississippi, he has been my saving grace,” said Glaude. He also talked about the importance of West’s academic contributions, including how West “pushed and shaped how we think about Black liberation theology.”
Angela Groves spoke for many when she said Cornel West is a "master teacher."
“A generation of young African-American scholars found their feet in the expansiveness of Cornel’s intellectual imagination, reaching for his in-depth understanding of the western intellectual cannon and his profound grasp of the African-American intellectual tradition,” said Glaude, who also credited West with teaching him to stand in a tradition “defined by quality of mind and a disciplined practice.” On another personal note, Glaude said West once told him, “We’re all wounded and we have a choice. We can either be wounded healers or wounded hurters.” West, said Glaude, has chosen “to work at being a wounded healer.”
Princeton’s president, Shirley M. Tilghman, described West as a “prophetic Christian” who was raised in both the Black Baptist and the Black Panther traditions. She said his tenure as a professor at Harvard University (which ended badly) was a “period of self-inflicted exile” and recounted stories of West’s exploits both on and off the Princeton campus. Shortly after West returned to Princeton from Harvard in 2002, Tilghman was at an alumni dinner in Atlanta when someone asked a “querulous” question about West. “A young alumna stood up before I could even begin to answer and said, ‘You’ve got it all wrong. Cornel West was the most devoted teacher I had at Princeton and he changed my life,'” Tilghman recalled.
She talked about a group of graduate students in religion holding a marathon 11-hour seminar with West and about his generous response to a group of Black children that accosted him on campus. She also talked about walking down a Chicago street with him and realizing, perhaps for the first time, what a huge celebrity he is. Drivers honked their horns, taxi drivers stopped and offered rides, passengers in cars snapped photos. What all these people were responding to, she said, was “Cornel’s dedication to teaching, his wide-ranging intelligence, his enormous generosity of spirit, and his compassionate concern for the well-being of others.” “Princeton has been a far, far better place because he has been among us over the last 40 years,” Tilghman concluded.
Actor Harry Belefonte is inspired by Cornel West's public service.
Like the alumna Tilgham spoke of and the students featured in a video montage that played between musical acts, Angela Groves, Princeton University class of 2012, said West was a great teacher. “Thank you for showing us a manifestation of courage and faith. Thank you for igniting a fire under us to serve others, to fight for justice no matter the cost, to speak truth to power, and to constantly and fearlessly examine ourselves and examine the world around us. And thank you for showing us how to do all of this from a spirit of love and compassion,” said Groves.
The celebrities in attendance also spoke. Hip-hop artist Lupe Fiasco talked about West’s direct influence on popular culture, for example, and on his own music. He recalled hearing West say, “We have to make those things that are uncool cool and we have to make those things that are cool uncool.” The words stuck with him and found their way into his music. “This man is in love with love more than anybody I know,” said Fiasco.
Actor and activist Harry Belefonte said he had nearly given up on thinking there were any more “renowned figures” who use their platforms to put themselves “in the service of human need and struggle,” but then along came West. “Those of us who have been in the struggle a long time who have still got room to be inspired have been inspired by you.”
Like West and Fiasco, Belefonte has been an outspoken critic of President Obama. In that vein, he offered the only sour note of the evening, telling West, “I’ve been to the White House. These days you haven’t missed much.”
After being coaxed onstage, Cornel West embraced the opportunity to sing with George Clinton.
I was watching the show from the balcony and saw the stage manager try to coax West out of his seat to get up on stage with headliners George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic. West kept resisting until she and others pressed him into service. Later, when he finally took the stage to thank everyone involved in the celebration, he spoke briefly and humbly. “I want each and every
one of you to know that when you heard those words about me, you were honoring my father, the late Clifton West, and you were honoring my mother, Irene B. West,” he said. “I hope and pray that even though tonight the focus has been on me, that it’s so much about faith in something bigger than you. …If you’re a Christian, you know that that first century Palestinian Jew named Jesus of Nazareth died for you and he’s bigger than you. … Keep the funk real, keep the vision real, keep the love real, keep the justice real, but in a spirit of self-critical smiling and laughing.”
Whatever you think of the man’s theology or politics, there’s something to be learned from his life of service grounded in faith and his dedication to the next generation, not to mention his wide-ranging taste in music. Bon voyage Dr. West!
Photos courtesy of Explorations Media, LLC; sourced via Flickr. For video of George Clinton and Lupe Fiasco performing, see Explorations Media’s YouTube channel.
