2014, Beacon Press, Boston, 253 pages
Black Prophetic Fire takes the form of a dialogue between Cornel West and Christa Buschendorf, preceded by an introductory essay by West. I know nothing about these people so was thrilled when my milk chocolate research assistant with those big—can I get you another margarita baby—eyes provided this sacred tome for my perusal.
Apparently West has over 20 honorary degrees. But all I know of him is from this book, which makes it clear what kind of thinker he is. West is a racial thinker who believes that only whites may be racist, but that the abused children of the white man—the African American brotherhood—may be guilty of imitating whites and practicing ‘reversed racism’. [Note the ed at the end of the first word.]
Being unfamiliar with the speaker—for these are recorded dialogues—I first looked for his fields of expertise and his blind spots. West is deeply read in the classics of the Western canon, going all the way back to Socrates. His modern expertise is in music of the 19th Century, other than that he is a religious thinker, he is endearing Hitlerian in his expressed belief in racial determinism, although he contradicts himself sometimes lumping un-racially designated poor in with blacks and spending much energy detailing the very ‘white’ behavior of the materialistic individualistic black of today.
Dogmatic figures like West are a lot of fun because they never divert from the sacred text that whites are genetically evil, even after they describe how peoples of other races behave in the same way. I suppose talking to West about black on black exploitation and crime would be like trying to convince a white nationalist that since lawyers Jew, and gentile, are all doing the same sleazy stuff, that we might be talking about cultural rather than genetic causality. For a perennial juvenile like myself who forces objective readings on his worn brain, there is something uplifting about the black who believes that white people are birthed with an urge to oppress colored races, just like whites who believe that Jewish infants literally leap from the jewess womb with claw like hands extended to sink nail into a mutual fund, revive my sense of the fantastically possible that keeps me reading and writing horror.
Cornel West writes a very strong short essay as a forward in which his main point is that the collectivest tradition of ‘Black Prophetic Fire’ has been abandoned by the vast majority of blacks who are just ‘chasing dollars’ in imitation of white people and have lost their racial identity. It is a point of endless fascination to me that white nationalists say the same thing about how whites have been seduced by materialism and have lost their identity. In fact, West makes many points that would appeal to the predominantly Caucasian masculinity crowd, goes onto “a wholesale indictment of the system led by a complicitous Black president”, and then spreads the umbrella of ‘Block Prophetic Fire’ into a multicultural gathering of white and colored heroes of the international Left.
Where West diverts from white identified thinkers is he believes in globalism, just not ‘white’ globalism. So while white nationalists see the global system as the conspiracy of a handful of Jewish bankers, West sees it as a conspiracy of a handful of white bankers. It is interesting that such opposed views can hold such close conclusions and still be totally at odds.
West’s ‘understanding’ of economics and war is about 6th grade level for the mid 1970s, which I suppose brings him up to our current university level of comprehension, wish is still inadequate for the task of understanding the world. Other than the fact that he makes the same broad assessments of current social woes and comes to the same specific conclusions as to who the enemy is, he still sees the world through the lens of a man regarding everything as the fault of those who wronged his ancestors, and those who look like them, and has conveniently forgotten that the father of the tradition of ‘Black Prophetic Fire was 50% Caucasian.
The book is organized poetically into six chapters:
1. It’s a Beautiful Thing to Be on Fire—Frederick Douglass, which provides nice sketch of my favorite African American
2. The Black Flame—W.E.B. Du Bois, which goes into depth as to the almost exclusive European influences of the best and most rejected black intellectual
3. Moral Fire—Martin Luther King, is such a fawning display of unmanning hero worship that I had to skip most of it
4. The Heat of Democratic Existentialism—Ella Barker put me to sleep three times so I gave up on it.
5. Revolutionary Fire—Malcolm X, is where West got into his own time and becomes an informative cheerleader making most of his statement on an articulate emotional level. This was a good read but left me wanting more and not very much better informed.
6. Prophetic Fire—Ida B. Wells, is the best chapter in the book, with West flexing his researcher’s muscles and laying out the nightmare of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow. This is his field and he is at home in it. He exposes the late 1800s as the time when America decided that there would be no working together between blacks and whites for their own separate good, but the honing of press, police, and politics into a social machine whereby the majority oppresses the minority. What he misses in conclusion, and fails to tie together in the following segment, is how this social machine became so efficient that it may now serve the minority to oppress the majority. This chapter remains very informative, with a passionate though accurate description of why African Americans have a culturally inculcated sense of persecution, and goes a long way to explain why black intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois are so rare, and become so troubled. What is amazing to me, is although West lays out the particulars of North/South white reconciliation, he does not seem to grasp that those vague banking forces he rails at today as an expression of white culture, stage-managed the entire affair for purely practical hegemonic reasons.
7. Conclusion: Last Words on the Black Prophetic Tradition in the Age of Obama, begins with, “The great irony of our time is that in the age of Obama the grand Black prophetic traditions are weak and feeble. Obama’s Black face of the American empire has made it more difficult for Black courageous and radical voices to bring critique to bear on U.S. Empire. On the empirical level of Black experience, Black people have suffered more in this age than in the recent past.”
One would think that this final observation by West might be coupled with the fact that poor and working whites in America are suffering the same exact fate, resulting in his abandonment of a racial view of things. But no, the poor whites remain to him—the feted and honored black intellectual—as invisible as they have always been to his white counterparts.
West again starts to dig up facts that he will ignore, that black living conditions stopped improving when blacks got into office. This fact might indicate to a mind that did not think purely along racial lines that politicians do not serve race, but, as with all divisions among humanity, race is simply another tool in the divisive kit of the politician. But the racial thinker misses all nuances it seems.
West concludes by criticizing some black interest groups for playing real politic. He is also, as a neo-Marxist, upset with the fact that middle class concerns now dominate the minds of middle class blacks—once again indicating that we might not be discussing race-based living conditions. Once again he ignores his own evidence, and continues on his Christian-Marxist-racial axis, “What does it profit a people for a symbolic figure to gain presidential power if we turn our backs from the suffering of poor and working people” [as white, brown and yellow middle classes have always done, Cornel], “and thereby lose our souls. The Black prophetic tradition has tried to redeem the soul of our fragile democratic experiment. Is it redeemable?”
I’d love to get a time folding mail box so this last statement could be mailed to Washington, Jefferson and Franklin.
Overall Black Prophetic Fire was a quick read, informative in terms of Wells and Du Bois, and also in terms of delusional thought at the highest levels of academia.
