Cornell West: Shelley was right when he said
poets are the unacknowledged legislators of
the world.
Yes Percy, we appreciate that.
We understand that.
We know they published that after you died,
but we got the memo.
By poetry he wasn't talking about versifiers,
he wasn't talking about folks who write words
on a page; he was talking about all human
beings who muster imagination and empathy
to conceive of an alternative reality given
the nightmarish catastrophic driven realities
most of us have to come to terms with, which
means to live a life of a certain kind is
to be a poet, an artist of life, an artist
of living, one who through one's deeds and
actions and witness exemplifies an imagination
and an empathy that is subversive in terms
of relating to the past, which has fortitude
and courageous in the present to pass onto
the next generation, some wind at their back.
If you want to know what hope is just zoom
in on August of 1955 with Emmett Till's mother
when she's asked to speak before not just
public but the whole world, because the cameras
were there from all the various nations and
there's her baby in the coffin with the coffin
open.
They tried to make sure they kept the coffin
closed.
She said, “No, they're going to keep it
open.
We just fetched this body from the Tallahassee
River in Jim Crow gut-bucket Mississippi,
killed by cowardly hateful American terrorists,
white supremacists.
We're going to keep it open.
This is my only baby.”
What you got to say, Mamie Till, to the world?
“I'm not speaking on behalf of myself,”
she says.
“I’m not speaking on behalf of black people
or America, I'm speaking on behalf of the
best of the human species, which is what?
I don't have a minute to hate; I will pursue
justice for the rest of my life.”
That's being a hope, and it's an echo.
That magnificent moment in Reinhold Niebuhr's
1932 classic 'Moral Man and Immoral Society'
where Reinhold says: any justice that's only
justice soon degenerates into something less
than justice.
Justice must be rescued by something grander
and deeper than justice, mainly love.
Love, justice: not identical, but indivisible.
When Martin says, "Justice is what love looks
like in public," he's talking about it in
the legacy of Jerusalem, not the legacy of
Athens.
For Plato justice is a norm to giving and
having one's due.
But in Amos justice is a force.
It's a major force.
It's an answer to the question that Walter
Hawkins in his song 'What Is This?': 'How
do I account for this fire I have inside of
me that won't give me any peace?
I've got to somehow get it out.
And if I don't do something the rocks are
going to cry out.'
That's existential.
I wouldn't even call it spiritual because
we know religious folk have no monopoly on
it given the history of religious institutions
accommodating themselves to the most vicious
forms of bestiality and atrocity.
Be it against our Jewish brothers and sisters
in the history of Christianity, it can be
against Muslims, it could be against Arabs,
it could be against women and gays and lesbians,
black folk, whatever.
Thank god for the history of the heretics
and the blasphemers.
That's my crowd.
Look at the history of communism, my god:
every self-conscious Marxist find him or herself
usually having to leave the Communist Party
in order to be true to the best of Karl Marx.
Why?
Because of the ossification and petrification
of institutions in that way.
Hope is existential.
I keep coming back to that point.
And the issue of integrity that Du Bois raised
is quintessential.
Of course we live in an age—of what?
Cupidity: love of money.
I didn't say stupidity.
That's too easy—even though that's part
of the problem—but it's cupidity.
Because there wouldn't be a Donald Trump if
it wasn't for Wall Street, corporate elites
and a Republican Party that was so complicitous
and willing to adjust themselves to it, or
even a Democratic Party that's too milquetoast
and acts like they want to be part of the
resistance but usually have to be brought
in kicking and screaming.
Because the demos wake up and just hit the
streets the way the sisters did the day after
the inauguration, hit the airports the way
our precious brothers and sisters in solidarity
with and following so-called undocumented
brothers and sisters.
Those are the ones who have been in the Vanguard.
Those are the poets, the artists, the vanguard
of the species.
Integrity over against cupidity and venality.
And the saddest feature of our present moment,
and that's why you all are so visionary, because
you all came up with this during the age of
Obama.
See for a lot of people they didn't need to
talk about hope under Obama because Obama
was already providing the hope.
Of course I didn't get that memo, but that's
another lecture.
That's another lecture.
We're not going to get into that tonight.
No.
No.
Uh-huh.
I'm suspicious of anybody tied to Wall Street
military industrial complex, assassinating
American citizens without accountability.
I'm critical of anybody, anybody.
The top one percent get 95 percent of the
income growth, and 94 percent of the jobs
that you brag about are short-term, temporary,
precarious jobs and somehow you're going to
talk about the low unemployment rate.
Why don't you just take a look at these precious
folk in these communities dealing with these
two or three jobs trying to put it all together.
Start with the university with adjunct professors.
Don't brag to me about how wonderful the status
quo is and therefore audacity of hope, but
that's another lecture.
My point is this.
My point is this: that everybody is for sale.
Everything is for sale.
György Lukács was right: pervasive ubiquitous
commodification tied to militarization in
our relations with one another, in relation
to the police and local citizens, relation
of CIA and state department and Pentagon to
Yemen and Pakistan and Afghanistan.
In relation to undermining democratic regimes
in Honduras.
In relation to Libya.
In relation to the West Bank under Israeli
occupation.
In relation to poor Jewish folk inside of
Israel, given the increasing wealth inequality
within Israel itself.
Commodification, militarization and then,
of course, niggerization.
What is niggerization?
The attempt to make sure that those Sly Stone
called “everyday people” are so scared
and intimidated and afraid and feeling so
hopeless and helpless that they'll never straighten
their backs up.
They're walking around feeling as if they
can't make a difference.
Their voices don't matter.
You can hear brother Martin Luther King saying
from the grave: “Anytime ordinary people
straighten their backs up they're going somewhere,
because folk can't ride your back unless it's
bent.”
And that's an echo of Thoreau and Walden when
he talks about the sleepwalkers, and as they
sleep the folk are walking on their backs
and when they wake up and stay woke—and
not just stay woke the way our precious young
folk talk about Black Lives Matter—but stay
fortified as you are woke.
Then the folk who are walking on your back
find themselves in precarious situations.
That's called revolution.
Revolution in mind, revolution in values,
revolution in priority.
It's a transformation of self and community
and society, and there is no transformation
without—positive transformation—without
this dialectical interplay of love as a form
of death, from which hope emerges in the form
of action.
