On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 10:57 AM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> 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...?
>
Well, to be fair to myself, my own point was more about a left antipathy to religion, rather than about anything essentially religious about being black, as opposed to whites being secular. I never said anything about "the black church," although others might have and I missed that.
> >
> > 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?
>
This actually puts the finger right on my own discomfort with West. I'm actually convinced that he can really think, but most of the time that isn't what he does. He drops names, and not just intellectual rock star names, but pop music rock star names. He wants so badly to be one of them, it would appear. And he has at least one record, no? So it seems to work.