sherman jackson and cornel west at princeton

I've posted an excerpt from this exchange before, but here is the full two hour conversation between Sherman Abdul Hakim Jackson and Cornel West on the Problem of Black Suffering. The discussion ranged from: the distinction between suffering and struggle, how do we wrestle with invisible systems of domination, Islam as a way to empower individuals to master their nafs, metaphysical suffering, inner-cities as war zones, the dangers of pragmatism, America as an empire, the Inner City Muslim Action Network as an example of "prophetic" Islam, why is Sherman Jackson a Muslim and Cornel West a Christian, the multireligious nature of Muslim Spain, the split between political and religious authority, Obama, and the indigenization of Islam in America.

The catalyst for the event seems to be the publication of Jackson's book "Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering" (I haven't read it yet) which is apparently an attempt at an Islamic response to William R. Jones' work Is God a White Racist?

The Problem of Suffering: Muslim Theological Reflections is a nice general overview from Sherman Jackson which appeared in Huffington Post on a range of Muslim answers (Ashari, Maturidi, Mutazilite and "Traditionalist") to the problem of pain.

also see Examiner: Cornel West: "Maybe I should consider being Muslim..."

cornel west and prophetic christianity

Here is a new interview with Cornel West from the newly reorganized Jesus Radicals site. In the hour-long interview with Eliacin Rosario-Cruz and Mark Van Steenwyk, West discusses a wide-range of topics including his recent disinvitation from this years Christian Community Development Association conference in Chicago due to an interview he gave to Playboy magazine, the ways in which Latin America challenges the Washington consensus, Puerto Rican independence leaders, how to chant down Babylon, how so many Caribbean activists joined the Black freedom struggle in the U.S., the Tea Party, some fierce but loving criticisms of Obama's presidency, but mostly he talks about how prophetic Christianity (and as an afterthought Judaism and Islam etc.) can constitute a counter-hegemonic force, voice and vision to challenge the American Imperial moment.


Some excerpts from the Playboy interview:

On President Obama’s shortcomings: "While he’s made some good, positive changes, I don’t think he’s a messiah or even a very progressive politician...It’s already getting late for him, when you have a chance to speak to jobs, homes, infrastructure and you end up bailing out investment bankers. They’re too big to fail? They’re too big to be managed! And what do you do? You allow them to get bigger! So you’ve got the same conditions in place that will reproduce the same catastrophe from which we’re still cleaning up from the Bush years. And you don’t speak to jobs, you don’t speak to homes, and again the poor remain invisible."

On President Obama’s inability to push a strong black agenda: "I wish [President Obama] could be more Martin Luther King-like. Set an agenda that at root is a black agenda, and it would also be the best agenda for the nation and the world. King did that. His concern for civil rights was also the best agenda for the country...By necessity, Obama has had to downplay his blackness to appease the white moderates and independents and speak to their anxieties. He knows black folk will support him anyway, so he doesn’t need to spend too much time on the chocolate side of town."

On Michelle Obama: "Somebody of her brilliance, somebody of her vision, somebody of her courage confined to keeping gardens at the White House, reaching out to military families, highlighting childhood obesity. I think she could be a great force for change if she could only set herself free. She can’t though. Black sister exercising her power, willing to take a stand, would be too much of a threat."

On corporate greed and "gangsterism": "Humans have always had the propensity to be gangsters...but for much of the past century you had sanctions in place. You had regulation. You had a stronger trade union movement. You had some balance between the rich and the poor. More of the wealth was distributed to working people. But what is it now? CEOs in the 1950s made around $25 to every $1 for an average worker. Now it’s about $275 to every $1, and the CEOs say, ‘No, we deserve it. We’re working harder.’ That’s a lie. They’re getting away with more by holding on to a larger percentage of the profits...When you read the business pages in the past three years, it’s just gangster activity, people getting away with anything they can—looting the Treasury, billions of dollars made on speculation. Those people knew it was wrong, but it was short-term gain, scandal, preoccupation with the 11th Commandment: Thou shalt not get caught. The result is, we’re feeling the aftershocks of moral bankruptcy, and it’s going to hurt us for a long time."

On the Tea Party movement: "The Tea Party might look a mile wide on Fox News, but it’s only a few inches deep...Tea Party folk are not crazy people. They’re just misguided. They’re deeply conservative people who see the corruption of government. They’re right about that. But they react by being antigovernment. They’re wrong about that. They see the need for individual initiative and entrepreneurial possibility. They’re right about that. But then they affirm a corporate agenda and don’t realize corporations are a big part of the problem...They’re much weaker than people like Glenn Beck think they are. But I’ll fight for the right of Glenn Beck to express his opinion. Even he has a right to be wrong, which he is most of the time."

On Glenn Beck’s preoccupation with black people: "Glenn Beck appears to have a certain preoccupation with black folk. Why is he so obsessed with black people? I notice he doesn’t give the Amish that much attention. [laughs]"

On eliminating poverty: "Given our wealth, we could create a society with no poverty. We could do it...Brother, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to eliminate poverty. Make it a priority. You allocate assets for everyone’s basic needs—housing, food."

On acknowledging race: "Some would like to believe we live in a postracial society, but that’s completely false. You’ve got to acknowledge race. Little kids notice it from the time they’re six or seven. ‘Dang, Jamal is darker than Johnny over here. What does that mean?’ Some people will try to say, ‘It doesn’t mean anything. We’re all the same.’ That’s wrong. That’s denial. We are different because of race, and we need to learn to embrace the differences, embrace the whole person...Then again, we have to make sure our awareness of our differences doesn’t translate into a hierarchy of how you treat people."

On the dismissal of his academic career: "My academic career is dismissed by means of invisibility. And I’m not the only one. If a martian came down to America and read The New York Review of Books, it would hardly know there were any black writers. There is a de facto segregation in the life of the mind in America, and black scholars, brown scholars, black intellectuals feel it every day."

On the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church: "Anytime you have people making claims of being virtuous, you have massive hypocrisy...Don’t project purity or an image of being pristine because you end up falling on your face. Or worse, you end up projecting a face of hypocrisy, as we see with the Vatican—a gay sex scandal among the people who preach against gay marriage and other deeply important issues. Not right."

On the things our culture is yearning for: "All across this culture I see a yearning for quality relationships, a yearning for integrity, a yearning for spirituality. But people—young people in particular—are manipulated by many forces to believe that what matters in life is something else: money, materialism, short-term gain, power and the kind of show that goes along with it."

On sexuality: "Sexuality is such a precious gift, but it does take on a life of its own. I see people who fall down the path of lust, seduction and temptation, and increasingly I sense this conquest mentality in which sex becomes almost another thing to acquire. How many women can I satisfy myself with? It’s a form of pathology, and it’s a sign of our deep spiritual malnutrition."

On white fear of black sexuality: "Historically, white fear of black sexuality was always a basic component of white racism. Black bodies, white bodies bumping against one another—it’s been one of the major forms of mobilizing white citizens...Ancient associations still linger about the sheer touch of black body against white body, of being disgusting, dirty, repulsive."

my last post (maybe) on rick sanchez

Ok, this will be the last (maybe) round-up of a few more articles/blogs which looked past the surface of the Rick Sanchez firing. Here are some of the highlights:

In Slate: Is it so offensive to note the effectiveness of the Jewish lobby? by the famously secular Jewish British author, Christopher Hitchens we read:

It's not that long since the late Yitzhak Rabin was complaining that groups like AIPAC had too much influence on Israeli policy. Is there any other lobby that exerts a comparable influence? Perhaps the National Rifle Association. And, of course, on the single issue of the maintenance of a failed embargo, the Cuban-American caucus and its funding base in Florida and New Jersey. (I wonder if Rick Sanchez would offer me an argument there.)

Coming to Sanchez, then, I ask myself if the world in which I have worked for so many decades—the intersecting and overlapping world of the news media, publishing, the academy, and the think-tank industry—is even imaginable without the presence of liberal American Jews. The answer is plainly no. Moreover, I can't think of any other "minority" of which this is remotely true, unless it were to be the other minority from which I can claim descent: people of British or Anglophile provenance.

In I, Sanchez Chez Pazienza gives a much more behind-the-scenes and personal account of her own experiences with Rick Sanchez and the CNN staff and why she believes we haven't seen the last of him.

The Black Snob piece: Rick Sanchez Gets Fired Over Most Epic "Jews Sux" Stupidity Ever (Rants) gives us a refresher course on the first two rules of American society:

Look. This is America and there are certain things in America that will guarantee you will get fired. One -- Be a white person saying the actual N-word in its proper context, as a dirty, dirty slur. You can be as racist as you want in America, but DEAR LORD! Don't actually SAY the word "nigger." It has magical powers apparently. So, you can make all the watermelon jokes you like. Just don't say that word in it's proper context. White people DO NOT LIKE THIS. The fact that black people also don't like this goes without saying.

Two -- Don't diss Jews.

Americans don't do criticism of the Jewish people very well. Unlike the black people, of whom you can smack around as much as you like as long as you don't say that dastardly word and mean it, you can't say anything that even looks like it might want to be wrongiddy-wrong-wrong about the Jewish people. Almost anything negative comes off as antisemitic, so you really don't have to say much to offend. Hell, just try to take the side of the Palestinians in the Middle East conflict and you could get called out as antisemitic even though you're criticizing a sovereign country with nuclear weapons ... not all sons of Abraham. Some folks, bless their hearts, don't know that Israel isn't the last word on Judaism, not even among Jews who are, wow, really critical of Israel at times.

But, whatever.

The most thoughtful and thorough discussion I've seen of the Rick Sanchez affair is in the Racialicious piece: On Rick Sanchez, Jon Stewart, and Why We All Lose Playing the Oppression Olympics by Latoya Peterson.

Peterson's piece is unique in at least two respects. First, hers is the only article I've found which didn't just take Stewart's (And Colbert's) non-racism totally for granted and actually questions the ways both shows use racial stereotypes to get a laugh (e.g. The Daily Show’s “Asian Correspondent” Olivia Munn, Dear Olivia Munn, The Daily Show Introduces Us to Gitmo, Open Thread: Cornel West on Stephen Colbert – Respect or Mockery?)

Second, Peterson's piece is also the only one I've seen on the Sanchez issue to actually take the time to debunk the idea that Jews run/own the media with any kind of evidence. She extensively quotes from a FAIR report The Jewish Media: The Lie That Won't Die and also links to Wikipedia's American Mass Media Owners

Of course, the ideal way to refute claims like Six Jewish Companies Own 96% of the World’s Media and put the issue to rest once and for all would be for someone to just do a survey or census of the media at the various levels (owners, executives, behind the scenes staff, columnists and anchors) and just deal with the issue objectively.

See also:
rick sanchez, jon stewart, jews and the media
cnn on rick sanchez
jews and the media

mos def & cornel west on the new world order

cornel west on the santa clausification of dr. martin luther king jr.

Recently, on Tavis Smiley's show, Cornel West made some timely comments on “The Santa-Clausification” Of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:
video clip on nobodysmiling.com
transcript from Tavis Smiley's website
I really liked West's comments but I also realize that, after hearing him speak several times and reading much of his work, his basic "rap" is pretty familiar to me so nothing he said was really surprising. But if you like West and haven't seen this yet, check it out. One important insight he shares (which I've tried to get across through many of the mlk posts here) is just that if you take him seriously, Martin's message of love is much more radical, demanding, "dangerous" and "funky" than most folks realize. Therefore his message is sanitized and deodorized for public consumption before it is allowed to spread.

More Cornel West from Grenada's past.
a philosophical view of easter
islam and the passion (for social justice)
that was kanye west, not cornel west -- kanye west
cornel west on katrina
"...he run venezuela"

islam and the passion (for social justice)

On YouTube I found an excerpt from a Coversation between Cornel West and Toni Morrisson which touched on the political implications of Mel Gibson's Passion (among other things). I was also able to find a fuller transcript of the conversation from The Nation's website under the title Blues, Love and Politics. The aspect which I found most intriguing is the distinction West makes between being a "Prophetic Christian" and a "Constantinian Christian" and it made me wonder about whether a similar distinction could be applied to Islam.

MORRISON: [reading] "I am curious about the language of religion, which has become more pronounced in this Administration. Can you comment on the manipulation of religious belief and language for violent ends?"

WEST: That's one of the most dangerous features of our moment, there's no doubt about that. We live in a society in which 96 percent of our fellow citizens believe in God, and 72 percent believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God, 71 percent believe that the Book of Revelation has an empirically verifiable potential and 71 percent believe in angels. I don't put that down, I'm a Christian myself, but I'm a different kind of Christian than a lot of these Christians.

[...]

WEST: [...] the other side of this thing is that here we are, living in the biggest empire since the Roman Empire. Now the underside of the Roman Empire is the cross; that's why political prisoners were put to death, those who had the courage to act against the powers that be. We're the legatees of Constantinian Christianity, after Christianity was incorporated into the Roman Empire and was the official religion of the Roman Empire, which went on persecuting Jews and others.

Now, you see, I'm a prophetic Christian, I'm not a Constantinian Christian. That's very important. Because I want to raise the question, well, if you're going to talk about Jesus, did you really talk about the empire that put him to death and what the connection is between that empire and the empire that we're a part of now, and what Jesus demands of us in this empire given what he was willing to sacrifice in his own imperial moment? And I say now, Gibson, what have you got to say? But, he says, no, I'm going to give you sadomasochistic voyeurism.

So does this distinction play itself out in Islam? If so, how are the lines drawn?

Some might be tempted to say that the so-called Progressive Muslims are perhaps the analogue of West's "Prophetic Christian" but ironically, a number of those who use this label (like Irshad Manji for instance) are only liberal when it comes to religious issues but are neocons in terms of their politics. And conversely, in the egalitarian face of islamic orthodoxy we have already seen some indication of how orthodox Islam is actually rather progressive, at least in terms of the economic aspects of social justice.

Some might be tempted to say that Sunni Islam is the "Imperial" Islam while Shiism is more the Islam of the persecuted powerless minority. But that would be a little bit too simple.

For example, for a while now I've been meaning to elaborate on the fact that each of the four great imams who established the foundations for orthodox Sunni law had spent some time in prison or otherwise punished by for principled disobedience to the state of their day.

And conversely, within Shiism, Ali Shariati makes the distinction between Red Shi'ism (the religion of martyrdom) vs. Black Shi'ism (the religion of mourning) each with their own attitudes towards monarchy and clerical power. Some Shias focus on Imam Hussein's noble sacrifices in the interests of justice while others, in a Gibson-esque way, choose to emphasize the blood and gore.

I feel like something more detailed should be said, but I think I'll just end up repeating a point I already tried to make clear in ideology and temperament; namely that if some Muslims have a greater concern for social justice than others, they will not be identified merely by ideological labels ("progresive" , "orthodox", "shia" etc.) but on the existential decisions individuals make in their everyday lives.

Other Grenada:
islam needs radicals
sushi revisited: part one
ali shariati

a philosophical view of easter

Today I picked my copy of The Cornel West Reader and reread one of the pieces called "A Philosophical View of Easter". In it, West engages in a rather sophisticated explanation of what he means when he says resurrection claims of Christianity are "true". He lays the foundations by giving a thoughtful critique of Hume and what he calls sentential reductionism ("the view that sentences have their evidence for or against their truth or falsity isolated from and independent of other sentences."). And then he questions the empirical foundations of modern science by pointing out that even things like electrons, magnetism and black holes cannot be perceived directly and are mere theoretical constructs which we only have indirect access to.

By the same token, for West, the truth or falsehood of Christianity isn't a matter of whether the tomb was empty the Sunday after the Crucifixion, but is also something indirect. As West puts it:

I am suggesting that the primary test for the "truth value" of particular Christian descriptions and their resurrection claim is their capacity to facilitate the existential appropriate of Jesus Christ. This means that any "true" Christian description makes the Reality of Jesus Christ available, that it promotes and encourages the putting of oneself on the line, going to the edge of life's abyss and finding out whether the Reality of Jesus Christ... can sustain and support, define and develop oneself in one's perennial struggle of becoming a fuller and more faithful self in Christ.

I think this alternative notion of truth is definitely interesting but it seems a bit of a cop out. I sympathize because I think I went through something similar in terms of my own path but in general, if you have to go through a great deal of mental gymnastics in order to justify a certain religious label to yourself, then maybe it is time to think about shopping for a different religious tradition? Just a thought.