Dr. Cornel West praises Richard Pryor’s raw authenticity—arrested in 1963 for assault, serving 35 days while paying just $7—and contrasts his legacy with modern artists’ superficial spectacle, citing Race Matters (1993) as a timeless critique of systemic oppression. He frames Trump’s presidency as an empire in decline, rooted in settler colonialism and slavery, while celebrating Beyoncé’s Homecoming for its soulful tradition and Gary Clark Jr.’s Hendrix-like guitar mastery. Soulful music, like Prince or Coltrane, thrives on self-giving kenosis, but oligarchic industries now stifle collaborative artistry, leaving voids even in hip-hop’s resistance. Joy—not pleasure—fuels resilience against oppression, from Malcolm X’s intellectual courage to Standing Rock’s multiracial victory over corporate greed, proving art and moral example remain vital tools for transformation. [Automatically generated summary]
It was strange to be in the room with him because when I was a 14-year-old boy, my parents took me to see live at the Sunset Strip, and I could not believe that anybody could be so funny just talking.
That was my first experience with stand-up comedy.
Other than that, I'd seen people perform on The Tonight Show and things along those lines.
But you can see the power of art, and it's connected to freedom, because I've always viewed Richard Pryor as the freest man in the 20th century, certainly the freest black man, along with Muhammad Ali.
He's the freest black man in the 20th century.
He is so self-determining.
The choices that he makes has to do with his own sense of self.
He doesn't care what other people think.
He's looking for other people's approval, recognition.
He's gonna be who he is, and he pays a major cost for that, of course.
Anytime you're that free in a world of such unfreedom, you're gonna pay a major, major cost.
No, but the violence against Andy's sister is wrong, but prior, though, my man, he was wild, free, cruel, tender, genius, crazy, wrong as he could be, right as he could be.
He's a human being.
He's a complicated human being.
I never met him before, but his spirit means the world to me.
It goes back to those early comics in the history of the West who were willing to tell the truth, especially as it related to the everyday experiences of ordinary people.
Plato's text itself, you know, the Republic, was grounded in an imitation of the comic writers who were the first to really delve into everyday people's experiences, not the well-to-do.
That was tragedy.
Tragedy only had to do with the nobility and the aristocracy.
But it was comedy that dwelled into the lives of everyday people.
Then Plato takes the whole form and shifts it into the dialogue and makes Socrates, of course, the grand hero.
But it was Aristophanes, at least in the West, who initiated this with the clouds.
And frogs and so on.
And it goes all the way through from Jonathan Swift to Mark Twain to Nathaniel.
Wes to brother Ishmael Reed.
I mean, these are the great American comic writers.
Twain, Wes, Reed.
And see, comic writers are different than the tragic ones of Dostoevsky and Kafka's comic in its own deep way, too.
Oh, no, no, because I know you're serious intellectual too.
You do your homework.
But I'm just saying this in terms of just enhancing all of our lives.
I mean, the comic writers, the comedians of various sorts, be they on the stage or be they on the page, are, I think, vanguards of the species in a very deep way, you know, because we as a species, We have to objectify our grief and our pain and our sadness and our sorrow.
And it begins with moans and groans and you transfigure those moans and groans first into song, but song then moves into language.
And the language is not rational language or philosophy and dialectic, but it's a language of stories, especially the stories that are self-critical.
We laugh at ourselves, not at others.
We laugh with others rather than just at others.
So it's not that sudden glory that Hobbes talks about in regard to the comic, where you're looking down and condescending.
You see, that's an aristocratic conception of the comic.
You're laughing at the ordinary people who are so dirty and filthy.
It's profoundly anti-democratic, right?
As if...
Well-to-do folk, don't fart.
Don't do number one and number two and fall in and out of love and act a fool and live lives of inconsistency, right?
But act when you get these democratic forms of the comic.
See, that's you and Pryor and Roseanne and Monique and George Carlin and all of that.
That's free spirit, though, brother.
In most of our lives, you see, we're dealing with a whole history of a species.
Of structures of domination, oppression, that's the history of the species for the most part.
And there's moments in which there's breakthroughs, in which there's a freedom of spirit.
And then you have some institutionalization of that, which is democracy.
That's why democracies are so fragile and usually don't last that long because it cuts so radically against the sense of really wanting to be free.
I mean, Dostoevsky's right.
Most people really are afraid of freedom.
They want to defer to authority.
They want to conform.
And when they're introduced to freedom and it really catches hold, they say, oh my God, it's a tremendous cost to be paid, but I like that.
There's something about that.
And they can hear it in the music.
They can see it in your comic art, the priors and others.
And it allows these effects and consequences in people's lives to really enrich their lives before they die.
They're injustice and want to smile and walk around as peacocks rather than cut against the grain and have to bear witness and therefore end up on a cross or like Socrates, condemned.
Well, I can't recommend your book, Race Matters, enough.
And one of the reasons is because of your analysis of that.
Your understanding of the superficial aspect of the pursuit that so many people are locked into from cradle to the grave.
And you just encapsulated that so well.
And the way you worded it and the way you phrased it, it resonates so well.
And I really admire this lifelong pursuit that you have for not just understanding these things, but explaining them in such a succinct way where it's absorbable.
Like that book, it's in the 25th anniversary.
I wanted to talk to you about it because that's the one I read.
And it's so strange when you read something that's so current, even though it's 25 years old, it rings true.
And does that...
Sometimes does that feel futile, where you have the same issues that you spoke on 25 years ago, and there's very little change in those 25 years.
I appreciate the times that you spent reading Race Matters.
But no, it's never futile though, man.
It's never futile because you have a conception of victory that is not messianic or salvific.
You're not trying to save people.
You're not trying to be a messiah to bring some kind of grand victory.
You're simply trying to touch people's lives.
So when you enrich and enable a person's life, the way in which you've talked about that right there, you're already talking about the ways in which you were touched.
And love supreme is not love in the abstract, right?
It's a love of beauty in its concrete forms.
It's a love of goodness in its concrete forms.
It's a love of truth in its concrete forms.
Now, I'm a Christian, revolutionary Christian, so I got a love of God mediated through a Palestinian Jew named Jesus, but that's tied to a justice that comes out of prophetic Judaism, right?
And we know Judaism, Christianity, Islam, all of these religions for me have no wholesale monopoly On how we understand the world, because they all emerge at various historical moments.
But when it comes to this love that allows us to persist in a world in which cruelty and envy, contempt, manipulation, dishonesty, and that's shot through all of us.
We're not finger pointing the name card.
Oh, no.
You know, I've called up brother Donald Trump a gangster over and over again.
And I say that because there's a gangster inside of me.
I got to reconquer it every day.
So I know gangsters when I see them.
And gangster is not a subjective expression.
It's an objective condition.
If you grabbing a woman's parts, that's gangster.
You stealing somebody's oil in another country, that's gangster.
You lie and say, these people have said that America's garbage.
Quit lying.
That's gangster.
They got a critique of America.
You did, too, in American Carnage in your inauguration.
Or you're talking about the four sisters in Congress saying, well, evil Jews.
No, they haven't said evil Jews.
They said evil doings of Israel.
Every nation state has done some evil things.
If there's a Palestinian state, which I hope there is, they're going to do some evil things.
Every nation state has to be accountable.
U.S., Ethiopia, Guatemala, Israel, China, and so forth and so on.
And every nation state has been associated with certain forms of barbarism.
We know that.
But there's some good things.
Some wonderful things about Israel.
Some wonderful things about Palestinians in formation, creating a state.
There's wonderful things about America.
I mean, a lot of people say, even Brother Trump, they hate America.
No.
They love American comics.
They love American music.
You ask Sister Tlaib, you ask Sister Priestley, y'all love Aretha?
Aretha Franklin means the world to me.
What about Mary J? Mary J means the world.
Mary J and Aretha are as American as Donald Trump.
Even more in some ways, because they've been here longer.
Their people have been there 10 generations.
Donald Trump's grandfather just arrived.
His mother, straight from Scotland.
Precious Mary Ann.
1930 she arrived, right?
And so in that sense you say, wait, wait, quit lying.
Let's just be honest and candid, just like the comics.
Let's just be honest and candid and recognize.
Because what is the definition of comedy?
It is first drama, which is conflict emotionally felt and critically reflected upon.
But it's that conflict that's rooted in incongruity.
Things don't fit.
So that's the possibility of hypocrisy, right?
And we know hypocrisy is the tribute of vice to virtue.
So that there's standards and you fall short.
So you can laugh at it.
Now when it's really deep comedy, it's talking about the human condition.
See, that's a deeper thing.
Now see, that's where you get Chekhov and Shakespeare and Joyce and the blues.
Because deep comedy is the recognition of limits and incongruity at the highest levels of the mind, heart, and soul.
That's a different thing.
So, I mean, you can start with comedy with, you know, the clown who's walking around slipping on bananas or the sophisticated professor who doesn't realize that he got a banana hanging out the back of his pocket when he's lecturing with the students.
Everybody laughing.
He don't know what's going on.
Well, that's bodily-based comedy.
You know, farts and bananas and so forth.
And it's important.
But high comedy is...
The highest levels of human dignity, love, thought, music, mathematics, metaphysics, and then recognize all of those are incongruous.
They're broken.
They're fractured.
There's dramatic conflict of incongruity at the highest levels of who we are as a species.
Now that's deep stuff.
That is deep stuff.
Oh, Lord, Lord.
And one of the most fundamental questions of Western civilization is, how come Socrates never cries and Jesus never laughs?
I think one of the beauties of what you're saying here one of the beautiful things about what you're saying here is the complexity of human beings and When you're dealing with the situation between these girls that call themselves a squad and Donald Trump and you deal with these very simplistic Things like these chants of send her back or lock her up or they hate America or you know this this is simplifying things and Is so attractive to some people and so attractive during political discourse,
right?
During these times when you're trying to rally up a campaign and get the audience behind you.
This is when these simplistic things resonate.
But as a human being, we know that things like...
I don't...
I don't subscribe to this idea that human beings are good or bad.
I mean, the first thing that Trump was able to do was to expose the prepackaged commodities that we call politicians, that he came across as somebody who was just himself.
I've been at the same weddings and so forth, because that's how the elites circulate in the American empire.
But then when they discovered, lo and behold, now he's posing himself as some kind of oppositional figure, and yet He's tied to big money, tied to big military.
When he gets in, he brings in the old-school militarist people.
He's still dropping bombs on the nine countries that have been dropping bombs for the last number of years.
Tax cuts sound exactly the same than Mitch...
And McConnell and others wanted...
We thought we had something different here, you see.
And it has to do with the...
Well, it's a larger story.
We have to be honest about this.
See, we live in...
Both a very fragile and precious experiment in democracy.
And we live in an empire that is experiencing profound decline, decay, and deterioration.
Simultaneous.
See, from the very beginning, the United States was really, in some ways, much more tied to gold and resources and land.
And so, this very crucial democratic experiment is predicated on the monstrous crime against indigenous peoples that we've never come to terms with.
So you get a lot of neoliberal chatter about America's original sin is slavery.
That's a lie.
The original sin was we had to decide whether we were going to coexist with indigenous peoples or dominate them.
And the decision was, for the most part, genocidal effect in terms of domination.
So it's a settler colonial society, a colony of Britain, you see.
Then we enslaved the Africans who become the basis of our economy.
And the vast majority of prophets made We're actually tied to slavery.
That's why so many of the presidents, first presidents in America, were slaveholders and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court were slaveholders and so forth.
That doesn't mean that certain democratic practices were not being enacted, but it was enacted for white brothers with property.
The white brothers who had no property, they couldn't vote at all.
The women, of course, couldn't vote until 1920. So they had domestic households in which they had to find some sense of fulfillment.
That's what history of patriarchy and misogyny, in part, are connected.
And then tremendous efforts come to expanding it.
Expanding it.
And this is why even when Brother Trump talks about socialism, he doesn't realize the Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy, who was a socialist.
The song America the Beautiful, which is one of the most beautiful songs.
Ray Charles sing that song.
It'll take you to a different place.
I mean, he's seeing things that we can't see, and you know he's blind.
You know what I mean?
America the Beautiful.
Elizabeth Lee Bates.
Socialist.
Professor Wellesley.
Who was our greatest poet?
Walt Whitman.
Deep ties to socialism.
Who is our greatest philosopher?
John Dewey, democratic socialist his whole life.
Helen Keller, deaf, mute, blind, graduate of Radcliffe, socialist.
Reinhold Niebuhr, the greatest Christian thinker of the 20th century.
Democratic socialist, moral man in the moral society.
Martin Luther King Jr., democratic socialist.
Ella Baker, democratic socialism is as American as apple pie.
But with the communists and the communist threat and the Soviet Union and all of its repression and regimentation and violation of liberties and killing of the culottes and so forth, in the American mind, socialism becomes associated with communism.
He looked like a cartoonist version of Joseph McCarthy.
They're all communists.
They're all communists.
And you see, what happens is in a neo-fascist discourse, it's true anywhere around the world.
If you can define a community as pure, And then characterize those on the outside who are threatened as impure and then view yourself as those coming to the rescue to preserve the purity.
It can be based on race.
It can be based on religion.
It can be based on politics.
Preserve that purity.
We saw it in the 50s with the hysteria.
The communists were what?
Smith Act.
They're deported.
Or are they taken to jail?
I mean, the first city councilman from Harlem, Benjamin Davis, went to jail because he was a communist, you see, because they were the impure.
Now, communism needs to be radically called into question.
In terms of its dominating forms like the Soviet Union and China on the mile and so forth and so on.
But at the same time, when you look at Karl Marx and his critique of capitalism, this is prior to Lenin, prior to Stalin, he says capitalism is tied to this obsession with profit that puts profit before people And it will generate oligopolies in which there will be grotesque levels of wealth inequality and the only way that poor and working people will be able to gain access to any resources through organizing and mobilizing.
Now you can accept that Marxist insight without being a Marxist.
But there's so many people that find the idea of socialism attractive because it combines this idea of a community with a nation and that we're all tied together.
And we obviously have some socialist aspects to our civilization in terms of, like, utilities and taking care of the road.
There has to be some kind of governmental control.
But the problem is this, that we have to view democratic socialism as a moment in the larger movement of democracy.
My dear brother Jeff Stout, who's one of the great philosophers and thinkers of democracy, calls them egalitarian freedom traditions.
And that's simply a way of saying That if you look at the world through the lens of the masses of people who are poor and working people, what are the conditions under which they can have security from domination?
What are the conditions under which they can have dignity by holding forms of oppression at arm's length?
And for me, it's not an ism.
You see, if capitalism vis-a-vis feudalism can generate liberties and freedoms, I'm for it.
And that's precisely what the middle classes did when they broke from feudalism in Europe or broke from feudalism in other parts of the world, right?
You had to overthrow kings and queens in the name of personal liberties.
But those personal liberties were confined too often to white brothers with property.
And the white brothers with no property?
They're either trying to hold on to their whiteness or they become like the white brothers with property, or they make moral choices and say, I want to be a person of integrity.
I want to fight with the folk who are being excluded.
And this is one of the problems in talking about race and white supremacy in America, because, you see, we think too often in monolithic categories.
There's never been a white supremacy without fighting against white supremacy and that includes white brothers and sisters.
There's a tradition From Ann Braden, from Miles Horton, you know, of Highlander Center, you got that wonderful picture of Rosa Parks.
She was at Highlander Center four months before she was arrested, before she sat down on a bus in order to stand up for justice.
Right there at Highlander Center under Miles Horton.
Who was Miles Horton?
A white brother who brought black folk and white folk together, went to Union Seminary, trained under Ryan Holt Niebuhr.
He had cousins in the Ku Klux Klan.
So his Thanksgiving dinners were very complicated.
But that's true for a whole lot of white brothers and sisters who fight against white supremacy.
And Braden, Rabbi Abraham Joshua, Edward Said, you have a whole tradition of white brothers and sisters who've been fighting against white supremacy.
You get it in the music.
Beck Speiderbeck, he's sitting at the feet of Louis Armstrong, and he's a great artist.
Louis is genius of geniuses, right?
And that middle class brother from Iowa, you ask him about white supremacy.
You ask Brubeck about white supremacy.
You ask any of the, Paul Desmond, all of these folk who are connected to traditions in which black humanity, brown humanity is seen and affirmed.
You had a point in the book Race Matters that resonated with me that I never really thought of before.
And what you said was that because of the fact that the United States has this deep history of slavery and the slavery of African Americans, that white people became white people instead of Polish and German and Italian.
Instead of it being like most other countries where the Italians think of themselves as Italians and the Greeks are the Greeks, those were white people.
Neil Payne is one of the towering ones, but it goes all the way back to Brother Alexander and David Roediger and some others who've been talking about the way in which whiteness was created.
Take, for example, an Irish brother who goes to Ellis Island.
His people have been dealing with 800 years of vicious British colonialism and imperialism, vicious attacks, various famines that were in some ways created or at least enabled and so on.
They get to New York.
And they told that they're white and they said, no, no, because we know the British are white and we're not British.
And so in that way you can see the discourse of whiteness, blackness, brownness, redness and so forth become so deeply rooted in American law, American structures, American perceptions and this is why the arts are so crucial because it's primarily in the music And in the arts, where the breakdown of white supremacy begins to take place in the country.
It's not the politicians.
It really isn't.
It really isn't.
There's no accident that the first massive form of entertainment in the United States is what?
The minstrels and blackface.
And you say, well, what was going on with blackface?
Well, Eric Lott and others have talked about the love and theft.
On the one hand, there's a fear of black freedom.
Because black freedom somehow means less freedom for whites.
There's a fear of black creativity because that means maybe white supremacy is a lie.
Maybe they're human just like us.
Maybe they're just as creative, imaginative, intelligent, just like us.
Then they hear the music and they say, ooh, they got something going on on the black side of town that we don't know.
It's like you're going to see Pryor, right?
If somebody had told you, oh, Brother Joe, White supremacy America tells you that black creativity, black intelligence, black genius doesn't exist.
And you go see pride with your parents and you go away thinking, this Negro's a genius.
Somebody lied to me.
I got to recognize that.
And then you recognize, oh, there's a whole tradition of prior, and we can go on and on from the Coltrane, Sarah Vaughn, and on and on and on, right?
And so people begin to think, especially white brothers and sisters, our parents have been lying to us when it comes to black intelligence, imagination, and genius, and humanity.
And yet the structures make it difficult for us to come together.
We're talking about up until 1960. That's a long time though.
1776 to 1964 and 5. That's a long time for both slavery and neo-slavery to be in place.
And here we are now, 54 years later, trying to create a multiracial democracy, which is a beautiful, beautiful thing.
And it's already been enacted in the jazz groups, Sly Stone's bands, multiracial.
The comedies, the studying of the comedies that you all have.
You sit down with comics, you all talk about the genius across race and gender as if it's a natural thing.
That already shatters.
The white supremacist and male supremacist categories of whiteness, blackness, all in different silos.
But it's so hard to do it on the ground.
See, part of the problem of talking about race in America, that's why I've been very critical of a number of contemporary black intellectuals, because white supremacy cuts so deep in the culture, people begin to think it has magical powers, and somehow it just floats above American history as if it's just part of our DNA in a biological way.
But all conceptions of race in the modern world are grounded in predatory capitalism.
So that the talk about whiteness and blackness becomes a way of rationalizing social structures like slavery and Jim Crow.
And it has to do with trying to extract labor resources.
It's an attack on their humanity and identity.
But it's tied to economic structure.
So to talk only about race means we hide and conceal the social structures that are generating unbelievable suffering for everybody.
Everybody, you see.
And so the last thing you want is to talk about race.
I'd say the same thing about gender.
In a way, gender is much more complicated because gender has been around for so, so long.
Every culture that we know almost.
But in modern conceptions of race are tied to modern conceptions of predatory capitalism, here and abroad, which includes imperialism, which includes empires.
So the United States comes out of the British Empire.
We engage in a heroic, courageous revolt against the British Empire.
It was a magnificent struggle.
That's what I like about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
Because I'm an anti-imperialist.
They were anti-imperialists.
They're urban guerrillas.
They're picking up guns.
They're fighting.
I don't go that far.
But they're also white supremacists.
So as soon as they overthrow or push back the British Empire, what do you get in the Declaration of Independence?
Beautiful words about equality, but you also get savages.
Do you think that much like this country is an experiment in self-democracy, a very recent experiment, when you look at human history, right, the hundreds of thousands of years that we've been human, there's really only been a couple of years, a hundred years of this.
Do you think that that's maybe the lens that we should look at something like democratic socialism through?
Not that it can't work, but that it hasn't been implemented correctly before.
See, what makes not just the United States, there's been democratic experiments all around the world in various circumstances.
We become central stage because we become a world power that understands itself as a democracy with all the contradictions that go hand in hand with that.
Begin as a settler colonial enterprise.
Still got slavery, patriarchy.
Workers don't have the right to engage in collective bargaining in the United States until the 1930s.
Argentina had it in the 1830s.
Argentina is not known to be on the cutting edge for social justice.
Love you down there in Argentina.
But they know that.
But they had collective bargaining.
Why?
Because our robber barons and our power elites were so popular.
Powerful.
You see, Rockefeller and Company had private militias that were bigger than a lot of public armies to make sure workers were not able to engage in collective bargaining.
I was in San Francisco just yesterday at the Commonwealth Club, which is now lodged in the Longshoremen's Association, which is fascinating.
The Commonwealth is a well-to-do ruling class.
Harry Bridges, Longshoremen, strong union.
Jack London, another great socialist there in Oakland, right?
And what were they trying to do?
They were just trying to ensure that ordinary people gain access to jobs with a living wage, decent education.
This is one reason why I spend so much time with my dear brother Bernie Sanders, right?
Because it's a democratic project that simply says, how come poor children can't have access to some of the things that the children of the well-to-do have?
They have the same value.
And of course, as a Christian, for me, they have exactly the same value.
So how will they get it?
Well, here comes socialist movements that say, first thing they want to do is, we're against child labor laws.
That's the jungle.
That's Upton Sinclair.
He's a socialist.
Tried to be governor of California, right?
And what were they doing?
What were these capitalists doing?
They're hiding these kids at six years old, seven years old.
They were dying at 30. There were no laws against child labor.
Ended working seven days a week.
So the labor movement brought us the weekend.
And I'm not talking about the singer from Canada.
God bless him.
I'm talking about the two days we have off.
Because if we didn't have that from the socialist movement and the labor movement, they'd have been working young kids seven days.
They did that year after year, decade after decade.
There's a narrative that you get from poor people often or people that are lower middle class that are against the concept of socialism because they equate it with people that want a free ride.
And it's a strange narrative when you consider all the things we talked about already, like what we need with the fire department and the police department and all the different ways that socialism does form utilities and all the different ways that socialism does form a part of our culture and our community.
Why do you think that that is this narrative and how does that narrative get reshaped?
Because that narrative of that the only reason why people want socialism is because they want a free ride.
But the one is that first we have to listen very closely to our right-wing brothers and sisters and conservatives and middlers because oftentimes, I mean, they're human beings like anybody else, and they've had their own arguments.
I don't think they have strong ones, but they have their own arguments.
So the first thing you'd say about that is, What makes you think that the well-to-do don't have free rides?
What is the connections of getting into the prep schools and the Ivy League schools and so forth, even though they work, it's still a kind of free ride.
So if they're preoccupied with this issue of being free ride, we tell them, let's make sure that people do work hard and sacrifice and therefore in some way deserve what they have.
Now, if just based on that principle, The upper echelons of American society would be indicted.
Yes.
And it's not a matter of hating the rich, because I don't believe in hating anybody individually.
I hate greed.
I hate injustice.
I hate white supremacy.
I hate anti-Jewish prejudice.
I hate anti-Palestinian prejudice.
I hate patriarchy and so forth.
But the human beings where these ideologies filter through are still human beings.
See what I mean?
So that's the beginning of it.
Now, of course, part of the question here has to do with...
They'll say, well, we wasted this money on the poor.
You say, well, wait a minute.
Donald Trump just passed a $750 billion dollar military budget.
Democrats voted for it, too.
How much waste is in the military?
Why is 60 cents of every one dollar coming out of the federal budget tied to the military?
Why is there no close oversight and accountability of it?
How come American people don't know about the four countries that we're bombing or assisting other countries in bombing?
I was on the plane the other day, and the pilot says, I hope you all are able to take a few minutes of your time, because we've got a family outside waiting for the body of someone just killed in Afghanistan.
I was an Italian family in Chicago.
One of the saddest things you ever want to see in your life, man, is a family lined up and they're bringing the body out.
And you say to yourself, "How come there's no public spotlight on that?" And you see, when I was growing up in the '60s, Walter Cronkite, Vietnam, we saw the Well, during the Bush administration, they made it illegal to take photographs of flag-draped coffins.
The American dream says, I'm going to work hard, sacrifice, and get mine, and live large in some vanilla suburb, maybe with a trophy spouse, and feel good about myself.
You say, nothing wrong with wanting to gain access to resources.
Nothing wrong with working hard.
Nothing wrong with living where you want to live.
But then the question becomes, now you're successful.
But you're not great.
Greatness has to do with he or she who uses their success for something bigger than them.
Service to others.
Service to the least of these.
So that the great ones, like the Richard Pryor's, Not a matter of how much money he made.
It's a matter of his soul in his comedy and the love that he left in his legacy.
Martin Luther King Jr. died.
Basically a broke man.
Gave every penny that he won from the Nobel Prize to the movement.
Malcolm X only had $150 in his pocket.
Who cares about the richest black person in 1968 and 1965?
That's ephemeral.
We're talking about deep joy, deep love.
We will remember those who raised their voices and said, in the name of something bigger than my ego and my narcissism and my hedonism, and we all have it.
We all have it.
So, you know, we have to always be self-critical in that regard.
We all fall short.
You know the great Samuel Beckett, another great comic writer.
Try again, fail again, fail better.
That's the story of our lives.
Try again, fail again, fail better.
But even in failing better, we can at least raise our voices.
And try to connect it to movements and organizations and structures.
And thank God we still do have a significant number of decent people in the American empire.
Well, there's this conversation that's happening now, right?
And there's a conversation that's based on the information of recognizing the fact that so many people have wasted deep aspects of their lives, long, long lives pursuing meaningless things and recognizing that there is a lot of injustice in this world and that people are afraid of admitting that injustice because then they would somehow or another be complicit in the enactment of that injustice.
I think it's one of the things that people are terrified of when you talk about doing something to reinvigorate poor and disenfranchised communities.
That's right.
They start talking about the welfare state or this is not how things should be done and people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, not recognizing that everybody is in the same starting line.
There's a concept that I've been talking about, that if you really cared about America, you would want less losers.
If we have these disenfranchised parts of this country that have been that way forever, there's a guy that's been on this podcast who was a police officer in Baltimore.
His name is Michael Wood.
And he talked about how when he was a police officer, he recognized the systemic racism and how crippling it was.
And one of the things that he recognized was they found a piece of paper that was a blotter report of all the different various crimes that were committed from the 1970s.
It was some year in 1970. It was the exact same crimes in the exact same communities that he was dealing with them.
Recognizing the redlining about the fact that there was areas where black people were not allowed to buy homes, that they kept them in these communities, the same crimes kept occurring in the same places, and all they were doing was going in there and arresting people.
And nothing changed and nothing was fixed.
And as a police officer, he was realizing and just becoming aware of the fact that he's a part of this system.
He didn't want to be a part of the system anymore, but he was a part of this system that is creating this problem.
When you address that though, the people that don't suffer in those communities that aren't a part of that community, there's a natural inclination to resist.
You see, now John Brown was killing innocent people.
I think that's wrong.
I don't believe in innocent people no matter who they are, no matter what color.
But at the same time, John Brown had a love of black people much deeper than many black people have of themselves because he's willing to die for black people.
But the same is true within, let's say, black communities.
You've got, okay, 1% of the population in America who own 41% of the wealth.
You've got three individuals who have wealth equivalent to 160 million fellow citizens.
But within the black community, the top 1% of black folk have over 70% of the wealth.
So that means you've got a lot of precious Jamals and Letitias out there.
Who are told to live vicariously through the lives of black celebrities.
So it's all about representation rather than substantive transformation.
You get that in politicians.
You got a black president.
All of y'all must be free.
Isn't that a beautiful thing?
Live through him.
Live through the family.
Beautiful achievement.
Magnificent achievement.
But it's not about symbolic representation only.
This is about fundamental transformation.
So it's a challenge.
Mary Ellen Pleasant and others, and Martin King and others, are challenges for those of us who do have some resources to still raise our voices.
Because you can be black, We're highly well adjusted to injustice, economically, in terms of race and so forth.
And the same is true.
You can be brown, you can be rich.
So it's not just a matter of looking for that one individual who represents.
It's a matter of connecting that representation to fundamental transformation.
If there's no fundamental transformation, you end up with a whole generation of peacocks.
Look at me, look at me, look at me.
All about foliage.
And what does that do?
That falls directly into the culture of superficial spectacle.
Last thing we need is just spectacle with no substance in that way.
And this is a battle within the communities of peoples of color because it's not going to be a matter of just pointing out white supremacy.
Of course, white supremacy is a fundamental foundation in part of the country.
It's not the only foundation.
Because you got resistance to white supremacy.
You got Lydia Maria Child.
She wrote a book in 1834 called An Appeal for That Class of Americans called Africans.
It was deeply influenced by one of the greatest works ever written at that time by David Walker, Appeal to Colored Citizens of the World.
She's a white sister.
She is as vanilla as Doris Day.
In the 1830s, fundamental part of the Black Freedom Movement, right?
Well, you see, those folk need to be lifted up because what does that do?
That exposes our humanity in terms of the choices we make, not just the skin color we have.
And I would say the same thing in terms of gender.
The brothers who are fundamentally concerned about breaking the back of patriarchy.
Even we know patriarchy is shot through us because we grew up in the 1950s and 60s.
No man escapes it.
But you try to reconquer it all.
And the same is true of our precious gays and lesbians and trans folk, you see.
To be decent human beings who make moral choices.
I believe in the primacy.
Of the moral and the spiritual, the centrality of the artistic, especially the musical and especially the comics, as the vanguards who represent a freedom and a courage and a vision to connect us as human beings.
Because you can't really be a comic with a wholesale Nazi ideology.
Now, you can be a Nazi genius like Martin Heidegger, who was a great philosopher and a genius and a thug when it comes to politics, you see.
But a comic has got to be able to be open enough to deal with the incongruity and inconsistency and the sheer absurdity of it all.
You talked about moments of freedom earlier, and I recognize that as one of the greatest things you ever see when someone's on stage and they're killing.
There's moments where everyone's together.
They're all together, locked up in the laughter, and they're all together.
There's a sense of community that you share with the people that are in the room.
It does bring people together, even if it's for brief moments, for a few seconds or as long as it takes.
And see, in a democracy, you see, it's those moments that constitute the memory of what could be as opposed to what's in place.
You know, the great August Wilson, the great playwright, black playwright, deeply influenced, he said, by the blues...
Baraka and Bearden, Romain Bearden, the great painter, and Mary Baraka, of course, from Newark, like yourself, just like Sarah Vaughan and Philip Roth, right there from Newark.
He used to say that performance authorizes alternative realities for the audience that gets them to unsettle their conventional perceptions of the world.
And that's what great artists and great comics...
But that's what you do in strange times, though, brother.
That you bring in the fact that we're living in such a grim moment, what I'd call, you know, the American empire in decline.
And we all need to call for its regeneration, its democratic revitalization and regeneration.
Only by example, man, because there's a difference between what the great Roberto Unger calls biographical time and historical time.
All of us are born in circumstances not of our own choosing.
We're only here for so long.
We all have insecurities, anxieties, and fears knowing that our bodies will undergo extinction one day very soon.
And therefore, to deal with those insecurities and fears and anxieties, you have to have certain structures of feeling and value that give you some sense of worthwhileness as you move through time, from mother's womb to tomb, right?
And it's only in biographical time, because we only got one life this side of the Jordan, and there's no person who's a messiah.
Now, people will tell you they are, but you say, okay, just call it.
Be self-deceived and drink your coffee.
Yeah, I can keep moving.
Because there's no messiahs out there.
There's no saviors out there.
There's no messiahs in groups.
There's no messiahs in collectivities.
There's only lives to be lived.
We back to check off again.
Lives to be lived.
Acknowledging things were in place before we arrived.
So therefore we ought to have gratitude for the love that we received.
That's how I begin my whole life.
I am who I am because somebody loved me.
It's mom, it's dad, it's my brothers, it's my sisters, it's my friends, right?
And I don't deserve it.
And I have to somehow follow in Ashford and Simpson when they say, send it like a puff of smoke.
You got to let it go.
Spread whatever love justice by example.
Examples are the go-cart of justice.
That's a wonderful line in Kant's critique of pure reason.
Examples are the go-cart of judgment.
The judgments we make are predicated on the examples that we have.
And we must have examples of greatness.
If you're going to be a classical composer, You better study some Ludwig Beethoven.
If you're going to be a serious artist of musical theater, you better study a genius who's still alive named Stephen Sondheim.
From West Side Story to Company to Sunday in the Park with George to Passion to Sweeney Todd across the board.
Not to imitate, but just to know what greatness is in your genre.
If you're in hip hop, You better study some Rakim.
But that's one of the more important parts of being a person, right, is to...
Really, your diet of what you take in, in terms of whether it's your art or whether it's your education, try to take in the best and most inspirational and the most spectacular versions of human endeavors.
Yeah, I mean, and you understand the role of excellence with the Greek score, I tell you, that plays.
But to be able just to turn on our television and see Brother LeBron James do his thing, that's another context that cuts across race, class, gender, and so forth.
But he just took it to a height and leave the country and so forth.
Yeah.
And with Muhammad Ali, you know, you got someone who was just himself in the context of a social movement that was taking place at the same time.
So he would associate himself with the Black Freedom Movement called the Civil Rights Movement.
He joined the Nation of Islam under Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
They became very close to Malcolm X and had to deal with the split in its own way and ultimately becomes a more orthodox Muslim, but at the same time recognizes his political consciousness was tied to the Nation of Islam and so forth.
And for him to do that, I mean, to be associated with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, The Nation of Islam probably had about 0.1% approval in the country and probably about 4 or 5% in the black community because at that time black folk and black Christians were just afraid of the black Muslims.
But it was Malcolm X who in all of his genius made it so broadly conceived that even Christians like myself, I'm a Jesus loving free black man, but I can't live my life without Malcolm.
Mm, you see.
And he's Muslim to the core.
He's praying five times a day, you know what I mean?
But don't you feel that when you walk off the stage, man?
When you walk off the stage at Strange Times, man, you're giving everything.
All that Joe is at that moment.
Now, what is that?
You see, that is the example of a love supreme that is there to serve the people.
Now, you're going to make a living, too.
They're going to get paid.
You're going to get paid and so forth.
But that's not the primary thing.
That's not it.
See, when Curtis Mayfield sings his songs that the radio won't play, when he's told not to go to the rallies and he shows up with his guitar anyway and plays We a Winner, That's self-giving, self-emptying.
And I tell that to the young musicians these days, because a lot of, you know, in the culture of spectacle, nowadays, you get these performers, they just show up and think they ought to get a standing ovation for 10 minutes, say, no, Negro sang a song first, man, shit!
This ain't no spectacle.
You're saying something that's going to stir our souls the way Sam Cooke and Johnny Taylor and Lou Ross when the soul stirs did.
Now, we respect that genius and so forth.
See, Beyonce is fascinating in this regard because she's a genius.
There's no doubt about it.
I think she's the greatest entertainer.
Of our day, I've been very critical of her because there's a sense in which she's still tied to the cultural superficial spectacle in terms of the way she looks and girls in formation and so forth.
But at the same time, she's also grounded in the tradition.
Oh, just because I'm very concerned about young folk.
You know, I've made three Smoking Word albums with Prince.
He would not allow any of his music to be sampled by hip-hop artists.
He was very hard on hip-hop.
But when we asked him for spoken word, he said yes, and thank God we did.
Same is true for the greatest soul singer of his generation, Gerald LaVert, who really deserves so much more attention, who's on the album and so forth.
So I spent a lot of time at Young Folk in studios.
Just did a thing with Tef Poe, one of the great artists coming out of Ferguson and the American Empire on Black Julian 2.
E40 coming out of Leo, I have great respect for.
I've been blessed to do a number of things with the Young Folk.
But I tell them, I say, I'm old school, y'all.
You need to know that.
See, we're into originals, not into copies.
You see, that we're into lifting every voice that's soulful so that we stir souls.
We don't want to just titillate bodies.
We don't want just stimulation of body edges.
Now, I'm not a Puritan, so, you know, I believe in body stimulation at the right time.
You know what I mean?
I ain't got nothing against orgasm.
But the thing is, you can't just orgiastically move through life.
You got to have context.
You got to have tradition.
You got to stir souls in that way.
And so I put a lot of pressure on them.
One of the things that I bring a lot of critique to bear is, see, I am deeply shaped by...
The dramatics, the delphonics, the main ingredient, the whispers, lakeside, James Brown's band, George Clinton Bootsy's band, I'm shaped by the emotions, I'm shaped by the Jones girls, the miracles, the temptations, marvelettes, all those were groups that expressed their soulful self-emptying in a form of sweetness.
See, I believe in sweetness and kindness.
And we're losing that.
I go to the young folk.
Where is your dramatics?
Why is it we don't have large numbers of groups that sing in tune with a beauty and a sweetness and a gentleness and a kindness?
When you hear the voice of David Ruffin sing Ain't Too Proud to Beg, the vulnerability, the flexibility of it, the intensity of it, And it goes straight to your soul.
That's why the people keep listening to David Ruffin from Why Not Mississippi.
I would say the same with Ted Mills of Blue Magic.
I get the young folk, let's just stop.
Let's just listen to Ted Mills of the Blue Magic.
Let's just listen to Russell Tompkins Jr., the stylistic.
Oh, Brother West, you just old school.
You just nostalgic.
No.
Love, sweetness, gentleness.
Never go out of style, as my brother would put it clear.
Never go out of style.
Everybody needs sweetness, kindness, gentleness.
Black music used to be the fundamental conveyor of that sweetness.
So that the Bing Crosby's, the Frank Sinatra's, these are great, great geniuses themselves.
You ask Frank, who were you inspired by?
Billy Holiday.
Oh, you talking about the genius from Baltimore City, Billy?
That's right.
You Italian working class brother from Hoboken?
That's right, because I'm tied to excellence and sweetness.
Now, Frank Sinatra, he sings some sweet, gentle songs now.
But the younger generation these days, they've got him and some others who are beautiful, don't get me wrong, but it's smaller and smaller.
But it's partly a matter of the oligarchs in the recording industry.
See, Boyz II Men, in a way, is the last great group singing performative act that connected to the dramatics and delphonics that I'm talking about.
You say, well, what happens?
Well, they think they could make more money with just one Negro with a microphone running their mouth.
So you get a genius like Kanye, deeply confused politically.
We won't go into that right now.
Oh, this Trump connection.
We need some serious pushing on that, brother.
But they'd rather have an individual isolated, easier to control in the industry.
And the same oligarchs run live performance, radio, and the music, and the products.
You know how they've now undergone this fundamental transformation in the industry, especially given the new technology and social media.
So I tell the young folk, I say, you know...
I could not have grown up without the sweetness of those rhythm and blues groups.
Now, I know the circumstances are different, but where do you get your sweetness from musically?
What will be the soundtrack of your freedom movement?
I mean, Pendergrass, he had his sharp cars, but when that genius got into the studio and saying, love TKO, you don't give a damn what kind of car he got.
He's going to touch your soul.
You know what I mean?
And it's not just on the black side.
You got vanilla bluesmen like Bruce Springsteen and the Jewish Brothers genius Dylan from Minnesota, Robert Zimmerman.
All of these folk were involved in the kenosis activity of self-emptying, but they were deeply shaped by...
The Sun Houses, the Robert Johnsons, the Muddy Waters, the Ma Rainies, the Bessie Smiths, the blues tradition.
I mean, when you have the very creative marriage of technique and vision of craft and imagination mediated through sound, the vibrations that are sent, Just beyond language.
You know, the great John Coltrane had a whole philosophy of vibrations.
Sun Ra was part of that dialogue as well.
Eric Duffy, some of the old geniuses of that time, you know.
And these vibrations are just, they're as real as a heart attack, but you can never see them.
Charles Baudelaire defined a materialist as someone who is obsessed with utensils and afraid of perfume.
Because perfume, you can't touch it, but it's as real as a heart attack.
Well, the vibrations of deep music, Mozart to Miles.
Or Mary Lou Williams or Jerry Allen or any of the great artists.
I was blessed to have dialogue with B.B. King on a number of occasions.
He was really the king in a lot of ways.
King, not because he was the greatest blues artist, but because he was a great blues artist who, through his personality and through his generosity, was able to create such a presence that he becomes the king in that way.
But he used to say that the blues was a kind of high school vis-a-vis the jazz.
Who are those who went to college?
And by college, he meant just studying with Byrd, with Armstrong, with Duke, with Rutherford and Mary Lou Williams and the others.
And I always tell him, I said, I don't know about that because, you know, genius and excellence comes in a number of different forms.
Most jazz musicians don't have the genius of a Robert Johnson.
And yet, you know, Charlie Christian's guitar is more complicated in a variety of different ways than Robert Johnson, too, so that You have to be able to be flexible enough to see the differences, the development, building on the genius of those who came before.
So you can end up being a very good guitar player who plays some unbelievable chords that Jimi Hendrix created.
And here again, you see, you have that common humanity that cuts across color.
There's a lot of controversy these days about cultural appropriation.
Can white brothers and sisters really...
I'll be part of a black genre and so forth and so on.
I had a dialogue at my class at Harvard this spring where I teach a course on black intellectual tradition, and I include some white intellectuals as part of it.
There's a strange career, Jim Crow, for example, by the great C. Van Woodward.
History of Jim Crow, which is the Bible.
Martin Luther King said it was the Bible of the Civil Rights Movement.
Woodward was a white Southern brother.
And I asked him, they said, we don't understand completely, Brother West.
I said, well, let me ask you this.
Is Eminem a part of the hip-hop tradition at the highest level?
Yes, he is.
Yes, he is.
That's what we're talking about.
You see, you had to be a fool to deny the genius of Eminem.
The momentum of culture is so strange, because Thailand's a great example of that.
It's like, they're so different.
And the momentum of culture, like, I just got back from Italy.
They're so different, but yet they're so similar.
There's a momentum of the way they live their lives.
It's very unique and unusual, and I think that's one of the great things about traveling is you get to see, oh, well, the way we live here, especially here in Los Angeles, which is preposterous.
I mean, one of the sadder features of our moment, given all the joy of reveling in each other's humanity and music and so forth, is that you've got impending ecological catastrophe, escalating nuclear catastrophe.
Economic catastrophes of grotesque wealth inequality all around the world.
Spiritual catastrophe in terms of intensifying forms of depression, suicide, wasted lives, lack of self-respect, not believing in oneself and thinking that the only way you can really make it is by imitating the mainstream forms of conformity.
And then the political catastrophes of right-wing movements all around the world.
And by right-wing movements, what I mean is the rule of big money, big military, and then scapegoat the most vulnerable and try to convince the most vulnerable that it's their fault that they're in the subordinate positions that they are, rather than giving them a fair chance, you see.
And that's the makings of new forms of fascism and so on, you see.
And you say to yourself, you know, how do we hold on to some sense of hope?
And there is no hope without wrestling with despair.
If you're afraid of despair, you never have hope.
You've got to wrestle with it.
Not allow it to have the last word, but you've got to wrestle with it.
When you're talking about your concern about nuclear catastrophe, impending nuclear catastrophe, are you talking about what's going on right now with Iran?
Well, I'm thinking about Russia, Russia, China, U.S. missile heads, Iran, North Korea, the possibility of war, U.S. bombing, precious Iran.
Iranian brothers and sisters are as precious and priceless as anybody else.
They just happen to be under Iran.
An authoritarian rule that does need to be changed and transformed, there's no doubt about it.
But you think, you know, all the hell they've been through, man.
They had eight years when the United States was on the side of Saddam Hussein.
And they were all alone in the world.
I mean, very much like our Jewish brothers and sisters felt in 1973. They'd already undergone a genocidal attack.
One out of three precious Jews killed.
And in 1973, they're in the world...
All by themselves other than the U.S. Empire.
And you say, oh my God, who can I rely on?
And that brings out the worst in people, the worst in people, because it's all about in crowd, in group security.
Authoritarian on the inside and distrustful of the whole world on the outside.
And this is why it's so difficult to have a discussion about the Israeli occupation with our precious Palestinian brothers and sisters, because to try to be able to cast a light on how an underdog, because that's the history of Jews, 2,000 years, is basically underdog.
And how they become top dogs, tied to the U.S. top dogs.
Now you always have, again, those Jewish voices and organizations.
That are critical of Israeli occupation, critical of any actions of human beings, including Jews, that need to be called into question.
But it's hard to keep track of the rich and priceless humanity of Palestinian brothers and sisters under occupation, second-class citizenship, when it's very clear that Jews have been so viciously treated for 2,000 years in the history of the West as well as the history of the Middle East.
And yet we have a moral duty to keep track of the preciousness of Palestinian babies, just as we ought to keep track of the preciousness of Jewish babies.
And Gaza and Tel Aviv must have a spotlight in terms of what those human beings are going through on both sides of that divide, as it were, even given the asymmetric relation of power and And that structure of domination called the occupation.
I'd say the same thing about Tibet.
I'd say the same thing about Kashmir.
I'd say the same thing about Western Sub-Sahara under Moroccan domination.
There's so many examples that we human beings generate that require our moral and spiritual witness and our analytical attention and our artists who can authorize an alternative.
To me, one of the uplifting features of being rooted in the arts and music is that no matter how ugly and vicious and hateful things are, it never suffocates the human spirit.
Somebody gonna tell a joke and make you laugh.
Somebody gonna sing a song and touch your soul.
You know what I mean?
And it's almost a way of saying, I love you, not in a sentimental, Hollywood, stereotypical way.
But you know that song by Stevie Wonder, these three words?
Listen to Stevie, man, because he's talking about how an aching heart can be kindled to smile and open and connect.
In a world overwhelmed by hatred and distrust that is shot through all of us, and we all contribute to it.
We all contribute to it, you see.
I mean, that's one of the reasons why even when I talk about, you know, Brother Trump as the gangster, I call him, we have created a fascist Frankenstein, and he's the creation of the worst of America in the way in which Martin King represents the best, and they are both America's apple pie.
But any critique of anybody ought to begin with yourself.
Ought to begin with who we are, because we all got gangster elements inside of us.
No way around us.
Do you know Trump?
No, I've never met him.
I met him one time, I think, at the end of a Nita Baker concert in the casinos.
Atlantic City, way back in the 80s.
And it was interesting.
He was there with Mike Tyson, I think.
And it was interesting because it was a chocolate affair, you know what I mean?
He owned the vanilla brother there.
And you know, one of the first things that come across to the brother is that he's just so glad to be there hanging out with the black brothers, cool and so forth.
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You could just tell he's just as square as a rectangle.
And it's a cultural dynamic because he was the richest one in the room, though.
And Mike Tyson got a lot of money.
Don King got some of that money, too.
But it was a different kind of dynamic.
And so it's a context in which you embrace.
We embrace them because that's the best of black culture.
We embrace every.
You know what I mean?
If Donald Trump's mother shows up from Scotland in 1930, black people been here nine generations, we ain't going to say, go back where you come from.
Come on in here, sister.
Be part of this democratic experiment.
We're on the other side, the chocolate side of town, but we welcome you.
But don't say nothing about our brown brothers and sisters coming in from Mexico.
Because if anybody's definitive about what is America, it's going to be red and black people.
Because they're the ones who undergo the monstrous crimes against humanity, the genocide, the stolen land on the one hand, and the stolen peoples and the human bondage on the other.
Those are the pillars, the worst pillars of the country.
Then you've got democratic visions coming not just from Thomas Jefferson, but they're coming from the slaves like Frederick Douglass.
The border crisis is a very interesting one right because it's it represents the fear of people from the downtrodden countries where they don't have opportunity.
Trying to get into this country.
Yes, but then it also represents the fear of criminals of drug dealers and gangsters and gang members make cartel members making their way across and victimizing our citizens And both things are human.
And it's so, you know, it's so sad because here's a brother who speaks his whole personal identity on being a Christian.
And you say to yourself, like, Brother Michael, I mean, as a fellow Christian, I'm not trying to call into question your Christian faith or nothing.
I don't have authority to do that.
But the Bible says in part, by thy works you shall know thy...
And, you know, nowadays you've got commodified Christianity and a commodified culture of a declining empire.
And you get Christian evangelicals, 91% or so pro-Trump, 79% say he's doing the best possible job.
And you say to yourself, Wow, Christianity seems to have lost meaning of the cross and has become so accommodated to the Empire.
And it was the Roman Empire who put Jesus to death.
The Roman Empire.
You had some neo-colonial elites who cooperated, but it was the Roman Empire who put Jesus to death.
It was the greatest empire of its day, very much like the Persian Empire.
The largest, greatest empire of its day with Cyrus the Great.
Now you got the Roman Empire putting Jesus to death.
And here Jesus is sent there by the crowd, by the mob.
And you say to Brother Michael Pence, so you're going to accommodate yourself to Donald Trump?
You're going to accommodate yourself to policies that are so inhumane and barbaric just to retain your position and try to then rationalize it as a Christian?
We need some music and some comedy to try to get in contact with his humanity to change him.
But most importantly, you just need a social movement.
Into the country, those who are eager and have energy, willing to work and sacrifice and the unbelievable contribution of voluntary immigrants to the making of America.
Now, America is not a nation of immigrants.
I don't like that language because it overlooks indigenous peoples and involuntary immigrants like black people.
And slavery was not America's original sin.
That's another neoliberal lie that you hear all the time on the corporate media, as if indigenous people's suffering has to be rendered invisible to highlight black people.
Social misery, and they still got their rich music and poetry and resistance, but the social conditions are just...
But they are the casualties of a settler colonial enterprise, and we'd rather act as if they don't exist.
I mean, we black people became central because our labor and our imagination and culture became central, and we had a barbaric civil war, 750,000 people dead, each life precious.
And that has been the central event in the shaping of America.
So when people talk about race, they go straight to blackness, as if indigenous peoples in redness is not integral to.
It's just that they've been really so invisible and the vicious attack has been so immense.
trying to put pressure on the Obama administration to ensure that a pipeline was not built that would violate the sacred lands and many of the sacred memories of indigenous peoples.
And it was magnificent because you had the coming together of indigenous nations, because part of the problem, this is true for all oppressed people, is fighting among themselves and the difficulty of coming together.
This is the first time you had the coming together of a significant number of indigenous peoples' nations unified against the greedy corporate elites who were trying to promote this pipeline through Canada all the way down to the southern section of the United States.
How did that resolve?
Well, first, we got an announcement right when we were there.