On the Conversation
with Cornel West, Michael Moore & Esther Armah
The Beginning
is Near conversation with Cornel West and Michael Moore presented by the Brecht
Forum at Hunter College Friday night, really should’ve included more of Esther
Armah’s voice. Although simply the
moderator who for the most part sat silently poised between the two entertaining
men (each for very different reasons obviously)—Esther Armah, a tall and rather
glamorous woman clearly had much to say.
The WBAI radio host, international journalist and playwright (Esther
wrote Saviour? the play that tackled the difficult topic of white privilege, produced
by Voza Rivers at the Dwyer Cultural Center last year) is not only a brilliant
conversationalist but she certainly has the courage to push through complex,
hot button topics with prominent public figures, like white rage &
privilege, both pretty controversial in the Obama era of politics. Thanks to Esther, those of us in the audience
got the honor of watching Michael Moore squirm as he slowly arrived at his own
understanding—an “epiphany” of sorts— of what it means to be a white male in
America. It was equally captivating to
observe Cornel West zigzag over the subject and return to a more comfortable
mode of race talk which examines (and often criticizes) people of color for
having “sold out,” or having forgotten their moral (and racial) obligation to
fix things.
Why are discussions
of white privilege so hot tempered and even more so in the age of Obama
politics? Is it because Obama is really half white and half black, but touted (and
self-identified) as the first black president?
Or is it because it’s about shifting our focus from the victims to those
who have benefitted from racism & white supremacist policies? According to Francis Kendall, diversity consultant
and author of Understanding White Privilege (2006), whites have created and
sustained a pathological system in which their positive sense of self is based
on the negative sense of someone else.
Therefore, says Kendall, it’s important that whites take responsibility
to understand their individual and collective role in maintaining a system of
white superiority. That is the first
thing. Then, there’s linking this responsibly
to individual and institutional practice and policy. It’s asking whites to fix it. This is new territory for many and often dismissed
as left wing rubbish. In a recent online
dialogue I participated in on the retention of people of color in the work
place, I was slammed when I brought up white privilege. I was told (by a white, male diversity
professional) that white privilege has nothing to do with retention issues,
that a conversation about white privilege makes people of color feel unwelcomed
and would be interpreted in an organization as “trying to make white people
feel guilty.” No wonder discussions of race
focus solely on the effects on those who are oppressed and not on the
oppressors or beneficiaries, almost as if they don’t even exist.
Back to the
68th street assembly hall. Overall the
conversation with Cornel West and Michael Moore was a stimulating voyage into
the minds and worlds of two distinct gentlemen, each coming from completely
different backgrounds, opposite in every way; from physical appearance to
personality to political strategy—and yet, the juxtaposition of them both on
stage personifies the juxtaposition of themes that continue to stir the debate—a
debate that we “liberals” like to call “Occupy Wall Street.” While I personally harbor conflicting opinions
about the Occupy movement, I do credit it for giving us a popular
all-encompassing name, a hashtag if you will, or better yet—a unifying platform
from which so many can coalesce and coexist.
And that was the point, I gather of bringing Cornel West and Michael
Moore together for the evening. We need a
unifying platform in spite our diversity.
Let me give
you a metaphor: Clink, clink, clink, draaaag, clink, clink, clink. It’s the sound of a fork hitting against the
sides of a ceramic bowl as eggs are being whisked, tiny bubbles begin to froth
at the sides, each flick of the wrist causes some spillage then a pour and sizzle…followed
by a flip. The conversation was
fantastically organically scrambled, multiple messages trying to blend, quick,
inevitable, hits and misses, ending in an imperfect mound of yellow which
ultimately became the centerpiece for a delicious and hearty breakfast. What a better way to mark the “beginning” of a new day?
Spillage. Like
Michael Moore’s rage directed at Obama.
Moore’s generally mellow voice reverberated throughout the assembly hall
as he screamed into the mic, “What part of the equation didn’t Obama
understand?” He was referring to the
fact that Obama’s bi-partisanship agenda has backlashed and consequently pissed
off millions of voters who got him into office, many who would have then
identified themselves as leftist. (I
wonder what they would call themselves today.)
“I want the black Obama not the white Obama in the White House,” Moore
yelled. If my memory serves me
correctly, this was even before Esther brought up the topic of race, and maybe
it was Moore’s comments that compelled her to do so, but either way I couldn’t
help wince when Michael bashed Obama politics and deployed the old “oreo cookie”
metaphor—black on the outside, white on the inside. That is— if he were really black, he would be
an honest liberal, or in the very least a true democrat. Are blacks born into a political party or as
Moore reiterated later in the conversation—are blacks intrinsically more
conscientious and more likely to stand up for human & civil rights? Is the white half of Obama pulling him down? Really?
What is it about our perception of race that skews our expectations of
people and their moral obligation in society?
Do we expect more of Obama’s presidency because he’s black when in a
different arena, say the classroom or the boardroom, we expect less because of
the same profiling?
Although
Dr. West has been criticized for his disdain for Obama’s centrist politics
which he similarly links to Obama’s “fear of free black men” due to his “white cultural
formation,” he did end up responding diplomatically to Moore by explaining that
blacks have historically been at the forefront of revolutionary politics
because of their history of oppression, that any person or group continuously oppressed
will inevitably react accordingly.
Unless… unless they are victims of the “dumb down culture,” aka “weapons of mass distraction.” Many black folks,
just like many Jews, according to Dr. West—have forgotten their suffering. They no longer remember history, are “up for
sale,” and very unlikely to challenge the status quo. “Our young people no longer have a sense of
three dimensional time, past-present-future,” West said and then added, “We
must remember those who suffered so that their afterlife is at work.” Cornel West who is now in New York teaching
at the Union Theological Seminary in Harlem and touring with Tavis Smiley to
increase awareness on poverty, leaned over into the audience and said in his feast
of poetic rap-rhythm, “It’s about having compassion for those who’ve been
crushed but not destroyed.”
Did it feel
like we were talking about many different issues at once? Yes, absolutely. But it’s not surprising since any real
conversation about the current state of affairs, the role of capitalism in our
country, the Occupy movement and the corporatization of our democracy— will unleash
this volcanic lava, pressured and sometimes sealed, but ultimately ready to
explode at any given moment. It is
inevitable as we are now witnessing the culmination or “the beginning,” if you
will, of civic discourse rooted in the great intersection of identity politics:
race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion— to name a few. And I haven’t even mentioned how this
convulsion of variables is systematically twisted, dismembered and reassembled
in today’s media. Neither have I
discussed the role of education in the mix, because just as Cornel West said—what
about the youth? Out of what appeared to
be an overwhelming response from the audience handing in questions on small
index cards (there must have been at least a hundred questions!) the topic of education,
the privatization of schools and the systematic slashing of arts & critical
thinking programs were at the top of the list.
But, I will
save that discussion for next week.
Until then, I leave you all with a few questions: Who are the dominant voices in the pundit
community that shape how we understand the issues surrounding race, politics
and education? What does it say about which voices we value as a society? How do we validate them? And finally, how can we prepare youth in our
schools to enter the conversation, navigate this flailing public discourse to have
an impact on these important issues?
____________
“We do it with the old perennial reality of love.”
~Cornel
West
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