Amy Goodman Interviews Cornell West, Carl Dix
Democracy Now: July 22, 2009
AMY GOODMAN: In Massachusetts, Cambridge police say they're dropping the
disorderly conduct charge against the leading African American scholar,
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Professor Gates was arrested in his
home Thursday after he had to force his way in to overcome a jammed front
door with the help of his driver. A passerby called the police, thinking
Gates was trying to break in. When police asked Gates for identification, he
reportedly responded, "Why? Because I'm a black man in America?" He handed
them both his Harvard ID and his Massachusetts driver's license, which
listed his address. He was handcuffed, taken to the police station, and
charged. Cambridge police have called the incident, quote, "regrettable and
unfortunate," but Professor Gates is demanding a full apology. He says he
plans to use the incident to bring attention to racial profiling in the
United States.
The arrest of so prominent a figure as the head of Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois
Institute for African and African American Studies has reignited debates
about racism in the so-called "post-racial" era of Barack Obama's
presidency.
Well, last week, while the NAACP's hundredth anniversary celebrations were
taking place here in New York, I spoke to Princeton University professor
Cornel West and Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party about the
current state of Black America. They had just spoken the night before at a
public forum at Aaron Davis Hall in Harlem that was sponsored by Revolution
Books.
Cornel West is professor of religion and African American studies at
Princeton University, author of many books on race, his forthcoming memoir
called Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. Carl Dix, founding member
of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and he was one of six GIs in 1970 who
refused orders to go to Vietnam and served two years in prison for his
stand. In 1996, Dix co-founded the October 22nd Coalition to Stop Police
Brutality.
I began by asking Cornel West and Carl Dix to comment on the significance of
President Obama becoming the first African American president. This is Carl
Dix.
CARL DIX: I'm a sixty-year-old black man, which means I have decades of
experience with white supremacy. I remember when the Supreme Court ruled in
Brown v. Board of Education outlawing segregation in education, Baltimore,
Maryland, closed down the public swimming pools, because they saw the
writing on the wall, and they'd have to integrate them, and they could
not-they were not going to subject white kids to the indignity of swimming
in water that had touched the bodies of black kids. That's how thick this
racism has been, and it's continued on the way down. But that's just
something I remember from my childhood.
So I understand why people got into it, but I did see where this could go.
And see, a lot of people say, "Well, look, a lot of black youth are going to
get inspiration and hope from Obama being in the White House." But then, the
question I pose to them is, what will happen to that inspiration and hope
when it collides with the continuing reality of white supremacy, male
supremacy, imperialist, you know, overseas adventures, that remain the
defining reality of America?
And see, what is coming around on this is that black youth are more and
more being blamed for the situation that the system puts them in. And you
look at Obama's last two Father's Day speeches, he gets into this thing of,
you know, the youth got to pull up their pants. The absent dads got to be
involved in their lives. You've got-the parents got to turn off the TV and
make sure the kids do their homework. In other words, the onus for the youth
not achieving is being put on the youth themselves and their parents. And
what's disappearing in that are the continuing obstacles that this system
puts in the way of black, Latino and poor youth who want to achieve. So, in
other words, the people are being blamed, and who better than Barack Obama,
the first black president, to blame black youth for their plight? If George
Bush does it, people would say it's racist. But when the first black
president does it, it actually draws people into it.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you share that criticism, Professor West?
CORNEL WEST: Yes, I think Brother Carl Dix is hitting the nail on the
head. I think, at the same time, there's ways in which, at the symbolic
level, to break the glass ceiling at the very top of the American empire,
the White House. Powerful, symbolically. Brother Carl and I are saying
there's
too many brothers and sisters-red brothers and sisters on the reservations,
white brothers and sisters poor working class, brown brothers and sisters in
barrios, black brothers and sisters in chocolate cities-who are stuck in the
basement. You're stuck in the basement, you break the glass ceiling at the
top.
The obsession is keeping track of Obama in the White House, a white house
primarily built by black slaves. What about those who are still locked at
the bottom, when you have policy team-neo-imperialist policy in foreign
policy, neoliberal in economic policy-that's reproducing the conditions of
those stuck at the bottom across race? And at this point, you see, you can't
allow race and him being the first black president to hide and conceal the
very ugly class realities of poor and working people. And that's precisely,
I think, why we're trying to generate some motion, some momentum and some
movement.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you share Carl Dix's criticism of President Obama's
Father's
Day speeches?
CORNEL WEST: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I think that it's quite telling
that he would give personal responsibility speeches to black people, but not
a lot of personal responsibility speeches to Wall Street in terms of
execution. And when you actually look at the degree to which issues of
accountability for poor people-but where's the accountability when you're
bailing out these Wall Street elites, $700 billion? That's socialism for the
rich. That's your policy. Don't then go to these folk who are locked into
dilapidated housing, decrepit school systems, many on their way to a
prison-industrial complex, and talk about their fathers didn't come through.
And we know the fathers got problems. We understand that. But there are
structural institutional challenges that he's not hitting, hitting head on.
And I should say this, too, I think, in terms of style, that the Obama
administration is obsessed with the wrong Lincoln. They are obsessed with
the Lincoln who they think moved to the right and was trying to create
bipartisan consensus with conservatives, whereas we know there's no Lincoln
without Frederick Douglass. There's no Lincoln without Harriet Beecher
Stowe. There's no Lincoln without Wendell Phillips or Charles Sumner. That
was a social movement.
Lincoln supported the slave trade when he was in the House. He supported
the Fugitive Slave Act. In the first inaugural lecture he gave, he supported
the first proposed Thirteenth Amendment, which said there would be slavery
forever in America, the unamendable amendment. That was Lincoln. If it were
not for the abolitionist movement, the courageous black and white freedom
fighters, from John Brown to Douglass, who put pressure on Lincoln, we would
have been dealing with a white supremacist Lincoln.
Lincoln became great, because a social movement pushed him against slavery
in that regard. And Obama is looking to the wrong Lincoln. And if he doesn't
understand the greatness of Lincoln was responding to the social movements
of working people and poor people, he's going to end up with a failed
presidency, with a lot of symbolic gestures, but, on the ground, everyday
people, those Sly Stone called "everyday people," suffering still.
AMY GOODMAN: Where do you disagree with Carl Dix?
CORNEL WEST: I think probably I am a free Jesus-loving black man, and he's
my dear secular, atheistic, revolutionary communist comrade. So we disagree
on the God question. We disagree probably on what it means to engage in
revolutionary transformation of a capitalist society. I am a democratic
socialist; he's a revolutionary communist. I'm pink; he's red. So we've got
some difference in that regard.
But most importantly, at this moment, we come together and say, put poor
and working people at the center of the way you look at the world, not just
in the terms of the United States, but in terms of the American empire's
impact on those Frantz Fanon called "the wretched of the earth."
AMY GOODMAN: Carl Dix, what does it mean to be a revolutionary communist?
CARL DIX: Well, what it means, first and foremost, is to understand and to
act on the understanding that this capitalist imperialist system cannot-will
not, but can't even meet the needs of the overwhelming majority of humanity,
that it thrives and exists on the chase after profit for a handful of
super-rich capitalist imperialist exploiters, and that what that means for
humanity is exploitation, disease, misery, starvation-you know, because
Obama talked about, well, if those African countries would just get good
governance, end corruption, more democracy, they could work their way out of
it. Well, that will not happen, because as long as they're enmeshed in the
imperialist global entanglement of economic and political relations, the
wealth that collects in the metropols of Europe and the United States is the
other side of the misery that's going to continue spreading.
And then, acting on that means that what is necessary is to stop cold the
system of capitalism and imperialism, dismantle its institutions through
revolution, and put power in the hands of the people, build up new
institutions that are based upon the initiative and involvement of people
and will back up people to make the transformations that are made. And then
the core of revolutionary communists who are at the core of that authority
have to foster an atmosphere not only of involvement on the end of doing
work, but also on the end of figuring out what needs to be done, how it
should be done, taking up all the questions facing society. We have to put
that before the people and create an atmosphere where even the people who
disagree with the revolutionary authority feel free to raise their concerns
and disagreements, because that's the only way we're going to know enough
about reality in order to transform it in the desired direction-you know,
because Cornel talks about speaking truth to power, and I love him for that,
but the one thing about it is this power doesn't care what truth you bring
to it. They're still going to go ahead with what's in their interests. Well,
a revolutionary power would have to not only care what people have to say,
but listen to it and learn from it, even when it's coming from somebody
who's
saying, "Y'all is messing up."
AMY GOODMAN: At the Aaron Davis Hall at City College in Harlem, Professor
West, you talked about being Frederick Douglass to President Obama's Abraham
Lincoln. This issue of movements, Carl Dix, and what you think needs to
happen now, how most effectively to organize?
CARL DIX: Well, what really needs to happen now is that people need to
have their sights lifted, because for far too many people, including people
who have real problems with a lot that's going on now, they don't see an
alternative, so they think the best they can do is work within this setup.
And that is a deadly trap. You actually have to see that it's possible to
get beyond it. And that means we have to address questions like, how could
you get beyond it?
AMY GOODMAN: You wrote a piece after President Obama was elected called
"Don't Be a Buffalo Soldier." Explain what you mean.
CARL DIX: Oh, yeah.
CORNEL WEST: That was a powerful piece. That was a powerful piece.
CARL DIX: Well, what that comes down to, the Buffalo Soldiers were the
black, mostly former slaves who joined the Union army during the Civil War
and played a key role in defeating the Confederate army and ensuring the
abolishment of slavery through their military victory in the Civil War.
Then, for a while they were stationed in the South, actually militarily
enforcing the ending of slavery and the beginning of legal rights for black
people. But then the United States government took the Buffalo Soldiers and
sent them out west and had them fight in what is called the Indian Wars,
which was actually carrying out genocide and the theft of the land from the
native inhabitants, while black people were being re-subjugated in
conditions of near slavery as sharecroppers. So here you have people
oppressed by this system put into the military and then sent off by this
system to oppress other people for the system. So, that's what a Buffalo
Soldier is.
And what I was saying to people is-remember I had said earlier, the youth
were beginning to rethink America's wars, because Obama is now presiding
over them? Well, that was my message. Don't be a modern-day Buffalo Soldier.
Don't let this system, which continues to oppress and exploit you, along
with oppressing, exploiting many other people, turn you into a mindless
killing machine and send you off to help them tighten their oppression on
somebody else, while they keep oppressing you and others like you. So, that
was what I was trying to get at with that. And some people were delighted by
it; others found it to be too harsh. But I mean, my thing is like, if the
truth hurts, it's still the truth.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor West, you traverse many different worlds, from the
Ivy League institutions that you work in to the hip-hop community, speaking
in Harlem with the Revolutionary Communist Party leader Carl Dix one night,
the next night speaking at the NAACP, being the keynote speaker in its
hundredth anniversary. I want to talk about the NAACP for a minute-
CORNEL WEST: Sure.
AMY GOODMAN: -and its significance. And then, what are the different
messages you bring to different communities?
CORNEL WEST: Well, I try to say the same thing. You know, I try to say
that-speaking the truth as I understand it. The condition of truth is to
allow suffering to speak, to always make sure that the plight and
predicaments of those persons who are subjugated is at the center of how we
think about the world, so it constitutes a kind of challenge. Without the
organizing and mobilizing, it's still just language, but it's still a kind
of challenge. I'll do the same thing tonight at the NAACP.
You know, this week's been quite a week. We, Brother Tavis Smiley and I,
went to see Bob Dylan, Mellencamp and Prince last night. So we also have the
artists to keep us honest. The artists are very important, in terms of what
appears to be moving from one context to the next with no coherence really
is a matter of just bearing witness wherever you are, to speaking the truth,
trying to exemplify that truth by being courageous enough to cut against the
grain.
And so, people would say, "Well, good God almighty, you're working with
the Revolutionary Communist Party, when they support poor people and working
people, when they tell the truth, when they bring critique to bear on
oligarchs and plutocrats and imperial elites?" Absolutely. "How could you
also be working with the NAACP, bourgeois, mainstream, legalistic in its
conception of equality?" Why? Because rights are also very precious. In each
and every human being, it's precious. Those liberties need to be defended.
So, when they do that, I'm with them. When they are supportive of
imperialism, when the NAACP is supportive of class domination, they must be
criticized like any other set of elites.
And that was one of the reasons, of course, why I supported Barack Obama.
We needed to bring the age of Reagan to a close. We needed to bring the era
of conservatism to a close. We needed to initiate a new age. And we have now
inaugurated the age of Obama, and it ought to be the age of empowering those
Sly Stone called "everyday people." The problem is, Brother Barack Obama,
President Obama, is reluctant to step into his own age. He needs a social
movement to help him push for the empowerment of [inaudible].
AMY GOODMAN: So, how are you going to be the Frederick Douglass?
CORNEL WEST: Well, by working with a variety of others-revolutionary
communists to socialists, to progressive liberals, to prophetic Judaic,
prophetic Christian, prophetic Hindus and others-to constitute some motion,
raising voices, lifting the voices, which is the anthem of black people, and
then to create ways of organizing and mobilizing so that the Obama
administration does not remain mesmerized by the Wall Street elites and
seduced by neoliberal policy.
AMY GOODMAN: Have you been talking to President Obama?
CORNEL WEST: No, not at all. No, no.
AMY GOODMAN: Have you met him?
CORNEL WEST: Oh, I met him initially, in order to join the campaign. Oh,
absolutely, indeed. We met for four hours.
AMY GOODMAN: And now, since he's become president?
CORNEL WEST: Oh, no, no. I think he holds me at arm's length. And for good
reason, and for good reason. Because he knows that there's a sense in which
I would rather be in a crack house than a White House that promotes
neo-imperial policies abroad and neoliberal policies at home.
AMY GOODMAN: Why a crack house?
CORNEL WEST: Because a crack house, at least I'm in solidarity with folk
who are sensitive to a pain. It's just that they have the wrong response to
their pain. Instead of being in a crack house, they ought to be organizing.
But they're dealing with their suffering. They're just dealing with it in
the wrong way. The White House, escaping from the suffering, and that's why
I keep my distance. I'm not against people who work inside of the White
House; it's just not my calling. That's not what I'm here for.
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