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No light in his attic
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Oct. 11, 1999 |
In spite of this -- even because of it -- West is a star of an academic world that is progressively left and politically correct. In addition to his professorships in theology and African American studies at Harvard, he has been on the faculties of Yale, Princeton and the University of Paris. His income is in the six-figure range, and his books are required texts in college curricula across the nation. Only 46 years old, West has been called -- if only by his publisher -- "the pre-eminent African American intellectual of his generation." His work has elicited White House invitations and more requests as a speaker, blurb writer and distinguished guest than any individual could possibly fill. In a market in which it is increasingly difficult for genuine scholars to get an academic monograph in print, West has written or edited 20 books published by commercial publishers -- 16 in the last 10 years alone. Even more remarkable, except for a thin volume of rambling opinions on issues of the day called "Race Matters," none of West's books sell sufficiently to justify the commercial support his work has received. They are put into print (as one of his publishers informed me) as "prestige" publications to bring credit to the house. One reason for the failure of West's books to gain intellectual traction is that while his writings combine the philosophically grandiose with postmodern frou frou, they are singularly lacking in the intellectual power that would sustain either. His first effort, published when he was 29 (and old enough to know better) was titled "Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity." Then followed "Prophetic Fragments," "The American Evasion of Philosophy," "The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought," "Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times," "Prophetic Reflections," "Keeping Faith" and "Restoring Hope." David Horowitz David Horowitz's column appears on the News site every other Monday.
If the subject matter implied by these titles suggests intellectual airiness, their style recalls a Jesse Jackson riff without the rhymes. Thus we learn from notes West has supplied for the new Cornel West Reader that "prophesy" (which appears to be his academic specialty) means injecting Marxist clichés into religious dogmas: "These introductory remarks to my second book, 'Prophetic Fragments' (1988), convey my moral outrage at the relative indifference of American religion to the challenge of social justice beyond charity." The excerpt from the book that appears in the Reader is more explicit (the style pompously typical): "The principal aim of 'Prophetic Fragments' is to examine and explore, delineate and demystify, counter and contest the widespread accommodation of American religion to the political and cultural status quo." A few years ago, Leon Wieseltier wrote a cover feature for the New Republic on West's oeuvre called "The Decline of the Black Intellectual." West's productions were, in Wieseltier's mortifying words "monuments to the devastation of a mind by the squalls of theory." Surveying the corpus of West's academic work, Wieseltier concluded that the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. Harvard professor was an intellectual empty suit whose writing was "noisy, tedious, slippery ... sectarian, humorless, pedantic and self-endeared," and whose works were "almost completely worthless." As Gertrude Stein once said of the city of Oakland, there is no "there" there. Ironically, it is the very emptiness, even incoherence, of his intellectual persona that West has managed to turn into a career virtue. One of the early catalysts of his rise into the cultural stratosphere was his plea for racial harmony. As a Marxist black radical he was almost unique in saying that it was not appropriate for other black militants to hate all whites and Jews. Yet he has endorsed the radicals grouped around the magazine Race Traitor, which calls for the "abolition of whiteness," and two of America's most notorious black race haters. While West is known as the most prominent radical among African-Americans preaching ecumenical healing between blacks and Jews, he is a friend to Louis Farrakhan, the most influential anti-Semite in America. Recently, as Bill Bradley's advisor on blacks, he encouraged the presidential candidate to meet with Al Sharpton (whose own senatorial candidacy West supported). This is the same Sharpton who incited black anti-Semites to boycott a Jewish-owned store in Harlem, which was then torched by a deranged member of the group and set on fire, killing seven people. West can maintain this oxymoronic position -- racial healer and bedfellow of racial extremists -- for the simple reason that no one takes him seriously. He is the quintessential non-threatening radical, an African American who can wave the bloody shirt to orchestrate the heartstrings of white guilt, while coming to dinner at the Harvard faculty club and acting as a gentleman host.
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