Criticizing Cornel

>>>>> "vlamas" == vlamas  <[email protected]> writes:

  vlamas> what a piece of shit. 

Well, I guess that's a kind of critique, though not very useful.

          I'm neither a racist nor a
  vlamas> right-winger, which to you is both I guess, but I've tried
  vlamas> to read West's books. 

On the contrary. I spend a depressingly large amount of my explicitly
political activist time criticizing *left-wingers* for being
racist. And neither Larry Summers nor The New Republic are
*right-wingers*, though I don't consider either of them leftist
either.

So, no, I don't equate racist and right-winger.

  vlamas> They're pap, and so is he. 

Should I just take your word for that? Care to *back up* that
assertion with some evidence?

Let's take two examples. The first is _Post-analytic Philosophy_
(Columbia: 1985), edited by West and John Rajchman. It contains essays
by a totally *non*-pap array of philosophers and other thinkers,
including a concluding essay by West, "The Politics of American
Neo-Pragmatism", which may or may not be to your liking, but pap it
ain't. (To say nothing of what's involved in co-editing a collection
of impressively brainy philosophy essays...)

Second example: _The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of
Pragmatism_ (Wisconsin: 1989) examines pragmatist strands of American
thought in the 19th and 20th centuries, taking up Emerson, Peirce,
James, Dewey, Hook, Mills, Du Bois, Reinhold Niebuhr, Lionel Trilling,
Quine, and Rorty. *Hardly* pap; it's 200+ pages of closely argued
prose in an interesting and not (at the time, anyway) overly crowded
part of American philosophy.

I'm not sure if you know it, but West has taught at Princeton, Yale,
Harvard, Duke, and several other very highly regarded institutions --
these places *hardly* just give out appointments to any
pap-spewer. He's written or edited 30+ books. How simple do think that
is?

I suspect by 'pap' you mean you've read some of his popular work, and
while some of that is not to my tastes, calling it 'pap' without any
further evidence or qualification is simply a non-starter.

          Just
  vlamas> becuase someone criticizes West you call them racist. 

No, in fact, that's not true. Earl Ofari Hutchinson wrote what to my
mind was a really stupid criticism of West (re: the Harvard flap), and
I haven't called him a racist. One of my fellow Monkeyfist authors,
Bijan Parsia, has criticized West's Marxism (or, perhaps more
accurately, repeated Bernard Boxill's criticisms of it to me), and I
called neither Parsia nor Boxill racist.

In fact, I didn't call TNR or Larry Summers 'racist' per se in my
piece. I think Summers *is* a racist, but that's clear simply from his
comments about it being most cost-effective to offload pollution onto
third world workers (the vast majority of whom are people of color)
than onto American and European workers (most of whom are White). 

What I do is call *racist* criticism of West 'racist'. But what's
wrong with that?

          Don't
  vlamas> overuse that word; you starft calling everybody who
  vlamas> disagrees with you a racist, then the word will lose its
  vlamas> power. 

Ah. So I use the word and that's overuse? Sounds like any use of the
word would get labeled 'overuse' by you.

While I see that you've said you're neither racist nor right-winger,
you should know that both racists and right-wingers, among others,
often challenge any use of the word 'racist' as *over*use. It's a
common and transparently unhelpful move.

I think there is something to be said for balancing the various social
costs of marking or mismarking racist discourse and practice, which is
something I've written about a little bit in public.

But then it doesn't seem that that's *really* what you're interested
in... But I could be wrong, of course.

          I mean you call Bush a racist when he has a more
  vlamas> diverse cabinet than Clinton did. 

If having a 'diverse' cabinent was the only determinant of whether a
president was racist or not, the world would be a very strange
place. In fact, I don't think the diversity of the cabinet really
matters much at all, especially since at least one member of his
cabinent, Colin Powell, helped the Bush administration sabotage the
World Conference Against Racism in Durban last summer. His being
non-White *hurt* other non-Whites moreso than if he were White.

          His National Security
  vlamas> Advisor is an African-American woman! 

So? And I bet he has a lot of black friends, too. What's your point?

          Yet you call him a
  vlamas> racist. 

Actually, I didn't call Bush a racist, certainly not in the piece I
wrote about Cornel West. In the most recent piece I *co-wrote* with
Bijan Parsia, I suggest that Bush's use of a well-known racist slur,
'paki', *in the light of his subsequent refusal to apologize*, was a
racist act. But that's not the same as calling him a racist per se.

However, since you seem so concerned with my views, I will say that I
think Bush *is* a racist, if for no other reason -- and there are
other reasons, perhaps many of them -- than that he's White, and I
think that most, if not *all* White Americans, over, say, the age of
13 or 14, are racist (or have been socialized to be, and it's very
rare for a person individually to resist that process), unless they've
otherwise rigorously and reflectively worked to rid themselves,
insofar as possible, of racist beliefs, attitudes, values, and
political commitments.

Bush shows no signs *whatever* of having done so. But I would
certainly entertain an argument to the contrary; in fact, I'd welcome
it since it would be very curious and interesting.

          Give me a break. No wonder no one takes you
  vlamas> seriously.

Perhaps so, but you certainly took my article seriously enough to
respond, though perhaps not seriously enough to have read it very
carefully, alas.

Kendall Clark
-- 
Jazz is only what you are. -- Louis Armstrong