Hi, I'm Hermene Hartmann with Indigo Studio.

Today, a very, very special guest.

The one and only the doctor, the eminent professor, Doctor Cornell West.

He's a member of America's academic community, having authored and coauthored 20 books and still writing.

He's a professor.

He's been a professor at Union Theological Seminary, Harvard, Yale Divinity, and the University of Paris, amongst them at Princeton.

He created a new department, Department of African American Studies.

He's been called the best in the world.

His intellectual discourse as a critical thinker has received applause but also critique.

He's been likened to another Harvard professor, doctor W.E.B.

Du Bois, and Henry Gates claims him to be the preeminent African American intellectual of our generation.

So I'm here to let my precious brothers and sisters and siblings know that when I think of where I come from, we're every generation.

We have lawyers who are willing to live and who are willing to die.

Martin Luther King Junior said, I'd rather be dead than afraid.

I'd rather be a corpse than a coward.

We need courage.

So when you hear the lies that.

Hide and conceal the crimes, remember what Brother Martin used to say.

No lie can live forever.

Truth crushed the earth shall rise again.

I see it in your faces.

I see it in your eyes.

I see it in your heart.

I see it in your bodies.

Cozy conversations drop The knowledge That's for real... Funding for this program was provided by Illinois Student Assistance Commission, the Chicago Community Trust, Commonwealth, Edison City Colleges of Chicago, Broadway in Chicago, and Governors State University.

He himself well, he describes himself as a religious, intellectual, freedom fighter.

He's a progressive intellectual.

He's a professor of divinity, history, and philosophy.

And he's an independent candidate in the 2024 presidential election.

And the late fashionista Andre Talley says he's one of the best dressed men in America.

Well, I consider him to be a jazzman through and through because in his writing and I think his most prolific book, Race Matters, he compares race to jazz, improvization and fluid ness.

Let me read something from the book for you.

This is what he writes.

He says, I use the term jazz not so much as a term to describe music, but as a mode of being in the world and improvization mode of protein, fluid and flexible dispositions towards reality.

Suspicion of either or viewpoints, dogmatic pronouncements or supremacy ideologies.

And I wonder what he was doing when he wrote that he just came from church, he told me, and to be a jazz freedom fighter is to attempt to galvanize an energized, world weary people into forms of organization with accountable leadership.

I must tell you, as I do public speaking, that my opening line is, I say, Doctor Cornel West, say it.

Now figure that out right now.

Doctor West, thank you, thank you, thank.

Blessing to be with you.

Thank you.

A joy to have a conversation with you.

Thank you.

And your honor.

Me so.

And your honor, my mother and my father.

What does.

Powerful words.

Words of powerful.

I must say, listen.

But use such a force for good in this channel.

Is so blessed to have you.

When you talk about jazz, you, your uncle Johnny Hartman, the one and only last Life with John Coltrane, is the greatest collection of ballots where the instrument and the word.

And here you are part of that rich tradition, part of that rich legacy.

I want to we're going to we're going to talk about a lot of things.

If we start talking about jazz now, if we don't, So, Doctor West, we are in an unusual moment of history, a precarious position, almost as we see states for the school system banning books, as we see, an attempt to even rewrite history, African American history, to say the slaves benefited from slavery.

What?

What is your thinking?

To ban, James Baldwin, to ban your favorite author, Toni Morrison, from from from what should be traditional reads, particularly in the South.

What's your thinking on that?

What's what's going on there intellectually in scholarship?

Well, it it disturbs me deeply because I try to be committed to the truth, and the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak.

But for so long, America at its worst, has been predicated on the efficacy of lies.

America has been afraid of the truth.

They don't want to hear the voices of those who have suffered, those who have been enslaved, Jim Crow, Jim Crow, degraded and demean.

Why?

Because it's a challenge.

And and to keep the lies in place is to keep these little silos of comfort and convenience rather than being unsettled.

Not education is about what being unsettled learn selling your mind, learning.

And when you learn something, you are challenged.

So what's the challenge?

The challenge is, is that we've got to make sure that the truth is made available to our fellow citizens, which means we got to bring power and pressure to bear on those who want to ban who, those who want to preserve the lives.

We've seen something happen that where you taught.

And that is professor, Doctor Claudine Kay resigning from her position after six months.

What's your thinking on that?

Yeah, I think we're at a moment now where big money tries to dictate educational policy, because a lot of it had to do with a threat.

You see, these folk got together and said, we're not going to give you this big money unless the board does X or Y lets the board get rid of her same thing happen.

University of Pennsylvania.

Right.

Same thing.

Now.

Is it a threat to diversity and inclusion and equity as we have experienced it?

Oh, absolute.

Absolutely.

But it's also a threat to truth and justice because as important as diversity and equity and inclusion are, they've got to be subservient to truth and justice because the educational system has got to be predicated on a fallible quest for truth.

He thinks she should have resigned.

No, no, I think she should.

I think she should have fought it.

Now, where.

Is black America 2024?

You know, black America always has is magnificent geniuses.

Talents create creative, courageous folk.

There's always a cloud of witnesses out there going back to Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, all the way up to the Toni Morrison's and the Johnny Hartman's and John Coltrane's and Lena Horne and Nina Simone's and others.

But at the same time, too much of black America is is is in confusion.

Because.

Because the we're in a desperate situation.

Very much so.

But we've always been in the desperate situation for hundred years and you see but when you're in a desperate situation and at the same time you have a leadership that's not courageous enough because they look into spokespersons and leaders to provide some clarity and provide some example of integrity.

When you say leadership, what leadership you talking about presidential leadership or.

Black leadership, black leadership roles, the boy church MOS, the educational leadership, political leadership.

Absolutely think Martin Luther King junior think Malcolm X think Fannie Lou Hamer I think with the high levels.

Jesse Jackson these are the ones who loved us so that all the children were willing to live and die for it.

That's leadership.

When you ask young folks these days who's willing to die for you because they love you enough to tell the truth?

Tupac.

Tupac gonna.

Who else?

What?

They got a few out there, but not too many when you and I were coming along.

That's a long line.

It's a long.

Line.

We got Stokely.

We got Diane Nash, we got James Lawson, we got Huey Newton, we got Angela Davis.

It goes on and on.

And there were different folk.

It wasn't all in one church, but no one politics.

We had Harold Washington.

We can go on and on and on.

We got Dwight McKay.

We got folk who love us enough to tell the truth with a smile and style and say, I want to empower you.

You think that's gone?

Isn't that gone?

But is we?

But we bounce them back because the younger generation is hungry for a better hunger.

Oh, that's the important thing.

We got some young brothers and sisters out there who are hungry for the truth and justice of what I want to call the real thing.

So you have chosen to become a presidential candidate 2024 election.

Why?

Just want to bear witness.

Tell the truth, pursue justice.

It's the same tradition I've always been a part of.

It's just spilling over into politics.

Now let's look at black leadership in short order.

Yes, yes.

I'm going to give you some names.

I want you to tell me how they change the course of America.

Oh, yes.

Frederick Douglass.

Oh, my God, I don't have a language for better.

Frederick Douglass oh, his deep love, courage.

He was the greatest, orator of the 19th century.

And that include the enslaved, non slave, the citizens, Europeans, Africans, Asians across the board.

How could a brother be born enslaved and African.

Be.

The deepest orator?

He put a smile on Cicero's face.

Cicero wrote a great book on the Harvard.

To the greatest orators of Greece demand stands, and other than Rome, and.

In credit Frederick.

Douglass well in Frederick Douglass took that tradition to the height.

Yes, but he used it as a form of weapon tree to empower poor people.

Doctor Martin Luther King.

Lord have mercy.

He's the greatest love warrior and freedom fighter of the middle part of the 20th century.

Paul Robeson.

Paul Robeson, Lord have mercy.

He paid such a major cost.

He was the most famous Negro in the world.

In 1839 with our fellow in London.

And he ends up on the house arrest, 4645 Walnut Street, in his sister's house in Philadelphia, because he brought a critique to bear on the United States.

So to the United States, to the United Nations for the violation of human rights and said, we charge genocide.

Genocide.

December 17th, 1951.

That's not bad, brother, but look at the cost That's not bad, brother, but look at the cost that he had to pay.

Oh, Lord Malcolm, in.

Malcolm was the freest black man other than Richard Pryor of the 20th century.

Other than Richard Pryor.

Yeah.

Richard Pryor was a free black man.

He was way out here.

He was free as he can be.

No different kind of freedom.

When Malcolm X had much more of a political bend and a moral bend and Richard Pryor, Muhammad Ali was in that special little group, too, of a free black man.

Repeat that.

For me.

He was only ever him.

Reverend Jesse Jackson.

Or as that towering figure tied and in the movement for not just black freedom, but for oppressed people all the way.

Now, Jesse Jackson's a rhetorical genius.

It's hard to find somebody who could bring the language together in such a way, but do it with the style that really touches brothers and sisters on the block.

You see Frederick Douglass, his style was very classical.

So that, you know, he's using some words that some of the brothers and sisters in the barbershop beauty salon, they had to go to the dictionary for Reverend.

Jackson's.

Or the Jesse Jackson, the rhetorical genius of a different car, because he knows that language.

But he also can speak the language that touched the hearts and minds and souls of those I still call everyday.

Peggy, break it down.

Break it down.

That's that's it.

President Barack Obama, Brother Barack Obama's historic figure, being the first head of the American empire, the first president of the United States.

He himself actually is a fine speaker.

I don't think he's at the level anywhere near but Douglass and so forth.

Lecture of it's more of a lecture because he taught University Chicago here at the law school for many years.

Very much so.

Donald Trump has changed politics in America, not just the Republican Party.

How what is the Trump factor?

What is you know, the Trump factor is the gangsta factor that he's made being a gangsta fashionable and faddish so that you can lie chronically, you could trash your foes chronically, and you can do it in such a way that you become part of the mainstream thoroughly.

And that is part of the, the poison in the culture.

We've always had that.

But when that becomes, so evident and so flagrant and it's predicated on one thing, I can do it with no accountability.

No accountability.

I can say and do anything I want with no accountability, no responsibility, no answer ability whatsoever.

Do you see him as a threat to democracy?

Oh, sure.

Absolutely, absolutely.

How did the ratings go up in spite of indictments, in spite of possible jail, in spite of fortune being lost and not being a practice?

Real estate?

Compare that it's not a majority of fellow citizens, but it is a significant slice.

But it's predicated on two things.

One is that I mean xenophobia and white supremacy is as American as apple pie.

Part of American democracy.

You realize you push that button, you already got a certain got a following no matter what you see.

But in addition, though, the alternative, you see that Trump emerges at a time in which the Democratic Party itself has become so arrogant and become so haughty in terms of poor and working people, as is become the party of the professionals and the educated class.

And Trump presents himself as always, pointing out the hypocrisy of the educated class.

The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and so forth.

The elite, the elite.

Absolutely.

And that elite has become hypocritical.

It has become condescending.

If you can't treat the brother and sister, whatever color on the block with respect, something's wrong.

So let's, let's, let's push forward and let's say you win presidency.

Name the three things top of your agenda.

What would you.

Do?

Well, first thing I do is abolish poverty.

Oh, we abolish abolitionists, just like Douglass.

And I had it be Wells Barnett from Chicago.

abolition.

They want to abolish Jim Crow idea and Frederick wants to abolish slavery.

I want to abolish poverty.

I don't want one homeless mother system.

I don't want any poor people whatsoever.

I want basic income.

I want to make sure they have access to quality education.

I want education to free education.

I want free health care for everybody.

And I want to zero in on specific needs of those who need medical care.

Because, you know, a lot of times black women have different kinds of treatments.

Did other women.

Well, we got to make that a priority.

Why?

Because I come out of Matthew 25.

What you do for me is what you do for the least of these, and the least of these are who precious human beings catching hell, who deserve care and satisfaction of their need.

Number two.

Second thing would be I want to bring back significant numbers of the 800 military units around the world.

I want to dismantle the American Empire such that we don't need to be an empire, that other nations differ.

I want the United States to be a decent, dignified nation among nations.

We don't need to have a military budget bigger than the next ten countries combined.

So you want the leaders, the leader of the nations.

I want to live as the nation.

I want to disinvest significantly from military and reinvest in people in education.

Health care is.

This doctor King Poor People's.

Campaign?

That's exact.

That's the legacy.

That's it.

Number three.

I would leave it up to the folk to make a choice between how we come to terms with ecological crisis in the fossil fuel industry and the oil and coal industry.

On the one hand, and on the other hand, I would want them to help me wrestle with the power of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

When you get 1% of the population that has 41% of the, wealth, three individuals who.

Want to cut into the economic system and the.

Struggling.

So I want to.

Turn do you want to turn that.

Bad down?

That's exactly right.

When you teach because you are a teacher, whatever else you might be, that's true.

You are a teacher.

For you to hit that nail on the head.

That's really what.

That's what you.

Are.

You absolutely right.

What do you want your students to learn?

I want my students to follow the Negro National anthem, which is to lift every voice.

But first, in order to lift it, they got to find it.

You got to find your voice in your own.

Define your voice by learning how to think for yourself critically.

Love for yourself, intimately critical.

What you think about the critical race theory.

Oh, it's a beautiful thing.

It just simply says that you never understand American history unless you understand the voices of those who have been enslaved Jim Crow, Jim Crow, lynched and discriminated against.

And you got to be critical about it.

You got to be critical about it.

That's you see, what's so controversial about that?

How could that be a country unless you're not interested in the truth.

And you're not interested in critical race.

Theory?

just even critical thinking.

There you go.

In the first place.

That's right.

That's exactly.

Right.

Right.

So what's your next book?

What's you working on?

I'm giving to gift lecture at University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

It's like kind of like the Nobel Prize of Philosophy with John Dewey and William James and Alfred North Whitehead and Gabriel Marcel and others have given.

And it's called a jazz soaked philosophy for our catastrophic time from Socrates to Coltrane.

So we start with Socrates, and we end up with the greatest tradition of the 20th century, which is the black musical tradition with its artistic genius, spiritual for attitude and moral courage.

This is a lecture that is going to become that's going to develop into a.

Book six lectures.

A series.

That's right.

We're going to tape them.

Oh, Lord, you absolute know.

What's the name of it again?

A jazz soak philosophy for our catastrophic times from Socrates, to cold train.

Where are you teaching at now?

Union Theological Seminary.

And what a great James Cone, the founder of Black liberation.

Black liberation theology.

We taught together for many years.

He was there for 50 years.

We have seen media in America, in the world really change.

I say for the first time we have had real communications because before social media, the communication was really dictatorial, because you couldn't talk back to it.

What do you think about a media as it exists today?

Well, I think it's a beautiful thing in terms of allowing different voices to be heard, but it could be a very limited thing in terms of allowing too many echoes to be heard.

If it's just an echo from a silo, somebody hate And somebody emotion and you don't have any critical reflection.

But if it's a real voice, people working things through, trying to think critically, trying to communicate honestly, to come through that come through.

So let me ask you this.

I went to New York for, holiday this year, and I visited the exhibit of Jay-Z at the Brooklyn, library, and something disturbed me.

Jay-Z is purporting himself as a God, as dangerous.

Or very.

Dangerous.

You might have read Michael Dyson, our friend.

And, New York Times wrote an article on Beyonce being a religious experience.

God, Jay-Z.

Beyonce.

They were they.

Are we taking that too far?

What do you think about that assessment?

Well, I mean, they described themselves.

One was talking about Jay-Z.

He's artistic genius.

But the brother ain't no God.

Okay.

Thank thee.

We worked together.

We had dialogs together.

One thing I can testify, he's a genius, but he ain't a God, okay?

He's a human being, just like me.

Okay.

and the second thing about Beyonce, the Beyonce thing is a great entertainer.

We've had great entertainers in our history, a good guy who we think Jackie Wilson was.

Is it a religious experience?

But yeah, it's it's it's it's it's it's it's cultural and it has a spiritual element.

If it's deep, me Al Green can take you to some places that are spiritual.

Ain't no doubt about that.

But when you start talking about religious as if it's God centered, no, I radically call that into question two.

Did you read?

Did you read?

I read the article.

Yeah.

Dyson was extravagant.

It was excessive.

He went too far.

Oh, thank you so much.

Oh, absolutely.

But he meant when you said that I interviewed her in the back.

So he becomes.

He becomes an embedded journalist, which means what?

You're so biased, you don't want to tell the full truth.

So what do you think?

Today we say we journalism challenge and journalists are now storytellers.

We think about their.

Well, when our greatest journalists had to be Wells Barnett, she told some powerful stories.

Always put a bounty on her head.

Thousands and thousands of dollars.

Right.

Tennessee.

Chicago, working with Thomas Fortune in New York, New York, Gage.

but stories come in a variety of different forms.

So it's a different it's a is is still journalism?

No, that's my question.

That's what I challenge my colleagues with you doing storytelling.

But are you doing journalism.

Yeah.

It took a journalism.

Got to do that.

Be about reporting now okay.

That's better reporting.

That's good storytelling.

Can reporting.

And can be journalism.

And can be journalism.

But there are forms of story.

And in that journalism.

That's right.

And there are forms of journalists who view themselves as journalists, but they haven't met the criteria yet.

This is what Trump has conquered.

Oh, well, he's trying to.

Tell a story that.

It's in the form of a lie.

That's tell a.

Story in retailed.

Not to say true.

That I.

Sell store.

No it's true.

Well, can you read about that?

That was you are profound.

You are prolific.

I think you are a genius level.

And I thank you so much for sharing your thoughts, your intellect with us.

And I don't speak in a spirit of hatred.

I speak in a spirit.

Of love for oppressed folk.

Don't get it twisted.

We trying to have some.

Space of morality and spirituality in a moment of overwhelming barbarity.

I can hear the voices of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.

I can hear the voices.

They not just isolated names.

They are forces in history that constitute our souls so that we can straighten our backs up.

In Brother Martin, you say any time, every day people straighten their backs up, they're going somewhere because folk can't read your back unless his beard.

Or backs are straight or backs already we are fortified.

Are we ready to fight?

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Funding for this program was provided by Illinois Student Assistance Commission, the Chicago Community Trust, Commonwealth Edison City Colleges of Chicago, Broadway in Chicago, and Governors State University.

In the dance studio.