[lbo-talk] Adolph on Cornel

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Tue Mar 22 08:57:54 PDT 2011


I forwarded some of this West thread to Adolph Reed, who comments (edited by me, I should say):


> What "100% black audiences"? That's not where he picks up those five figure checks for his performances. And what does "came out of the black church" mean? He went to Harvard, then Princeton before a drive-by job at Union. Since then he's done his "democratic freedom-fighting" at Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Princeton.... Do you note an implication that "secular" is a "white" property and its similarly essentialized reciprocal...?
>
> Cornel drops names and autodidactic, Cliffs Notes versions of “big ideas.” His act is intrinsically condescending to those non-intellectual audiences, which, by the way, has also long been an element of that black preacherly style — dropping little morsels of arcana that convey an sense of esoteric knowledge. How does Cornel’s running off a string of names “John Coltrane, Toni Morrison, John Dewey, and of course the master Chekhov, etc, etc” communicate anything to any fucking one?... Is wanting to feel good about the black guy really that fucking powerful?



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