Brother West (33 page)
M
Y STORY, LIKE ALL OF OUR STORIES
, is a work in progress. At several junctures and in several ways, it breaks down. That’s because, as a cracked vessel, I break down. I try to love my crooked neighbor with my crooked heart. I try to rid myself of prejudices, but always fall short.
I often talk about how all of us live on the edge. Catastrophes are a constant part of our lives on the planet. Disease is always a threat—disease of the body and mind. Staying sane in this world of ours is no easy task. You could lose it. I could lose it. Any of us could. To retain peace of mind and equanimity of spirit is no easy task. As the product of an oppressed, resilient, joyful people, I take refuge in my heritage. My heritage sees life through a tragicomic lens. The comedy is not without dire consequences and the tragedy is not without soul-saving humor.
I am encouraged by the ascendancy of President Barack Obama for whom I worked tirelessly—from campaigning in the cold days of Iowa through over twenty events in a two-day marathon in the swing state of Ohio. As he aspires to be the black Lincoln, I intend to be a blacker Frederick Douglass.
I am encouraged that racism, deep-seated and long-lasting, did not overpower the worthiness of his cause. I am blessed to have lived long enough to see the end of the age of Reagan, the era of conservatism. Barack stepped out on faith and landed on something solid. I hope that the age of Obama is the age of empowering everyday people rather than a recycling of neo-liberal mediocrity. Like all of us, he’s got to keep on steppin’ too. He’ll need all the faith in the world. I believe that faith is that fiduciary dimension in the human condition where we admit that we can’t live on doubt. We can’t survive on arguments. Logic won’t do it. To get up in the morning and do the monumental tasks that face us, our labor is best fueled by love. That’s the only way we can move forward—with decency and dignity. That’s the only way we can turn our devotion to others.
Meanwhile, the empire continues to wobble and we all continue to waver. There are declines in our culture and decay in our hearts. As the Spinners said, we need a mighty love. We need a mighty healing. I look back at my life, knowing that without that healing love—from my grandparents and parents, from my brother and sisters, from my children and the women I have been blessed to know—I would have spun out a long time ago. This broken vessel would have plain collapsed.
So I say, thank you, Jesus.
I say, thank you, Lord.
I say, thank you for the breath in my lungs and the strength in my loins. May that strength endure so that I can serve you. And in serving you, may I serve others, especially the least of these.
At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark
from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep
gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.
— Albert Schweitzer
I
AM ONE GRATEFUL
N
EGRO
.
And I must express deep gratitude for Tavis Smiley. He is the younger brother I never had, and I am the older brother he never had. Tavis has also become an adopted brother to my siblings and a son to my mother. In a very real way, he has been incorporated fully into the West family. He and I are inseparable. Just as Tavis has expressed gratitude for whatever I might have taught him, I am equally grateful for all he has taught me.
Tavis and I have in common an undying passion for service. In our friendship, we’ve pledged to be faithful until death. But our faithfulness is not based on material or political gain. Our end and aim are unarmed truth and unconditional love.
On the deepest level, we are connected by our profound commitment to the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. That commitment is rooted in our Christian faith. Tavis, a Pentecostal, and I, a Baptist, meet at the cross. And it is at the cross where we find Dr. King—a devout disciple of Jesus Christ—whose spirit inspires us to serve and love a world in need.
The spirit of Martin lives on in Brother Tavis.
I
POINT TO THE UNIQUENESS OF MY
journey with the certain knowledge that all our journeys are unique.
In the case of intellectuals, we follow different paths, encounter different teachers and, if we do our job well, nurture students who themselves will carry on a tradition of loving service to others.
When I think back to the uniqueness of my journey, I’m amazed. I was strongly supported by the Ford Foundation during my graduate years and received the Prize for Cultural Freedom from the Lannan Foundation in recent years.
As a professor, it has been my policy to never apply for any money in regard to sustaining my work. I have never received any fellowship or subsidies. In fact, I have never even solicited one letter of recommendation in my thirty-two years of teaching, even though I’ve written thousands of them for others. My attitude may appear a bit crazy, but this is how I remain a free black man in the predominantly white academy.
I’ve also been blessed to teach and be taught in an incredibly wide variety of circumstances. There’s the on-the-ground teaching at prisons and churches and public schools. There’s Harvard, Princeton, Union, and Yale. There’s the University of Paris. And there’s a list of world-class academic figures with whom I studied closely as an undergraduate and graduate student. And because I dare to resist the condition of namelessness for those who have made such a rich contribution to my life, I take great joy in calling the roll.
John Rawls, Hilary Putnam, Stanley Cavell, Roderick Firth, Israel Scheffler, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Bernard Williams, Robert Nozick, Samuel Beer, H. Stuart Hughes, Talcott Parsons, Richard Rorty, Thomas Kuhn, Carl Hempel, Paul Benacerraf, Walter Kaufmann, Thomas Scanlon, Peter Gomes, Malcolm Diamond, Thomas Nagel, Sir Arthur Lewis, Gregory Vlastos, Terry Irwin, Sheldon Wolin, Richard Grandy, Raymond Geuss, David Hoy, G.A. Cohen, Joel Porte, Daniel Aaron, Thorkild Jacobsen, Paul Hanson, G. Ernest Wright, and, above all, Martin Kilson and Preston Williams.
At Union, the blessings mounted: my dear brother James Washington deepened my spiritual faith as did James Cone, James Forbes, Beverly Harrison, Donald Shriver (the president who hired me), Roger Shinn, Bob Seaver, Christopher Morse, Robert Handy, Ann Ulanov, and Tom Driver. I also received great wisdom and support from colleagues at Columbia: Edward Said, Paul Bové, Jonathan Arac, Sidney Morgenbesser, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz, and Margaret Ferguson.
In the spirit of call-and-response, it’s also been a sheer delight to co-teach in dialogical form courses in philosophy and the arts with magnificent colleagues like Eddie Glaude, Jr., James Cone, Nell Irvin Painter, Wahneema Lubiano, Eduardo Cadava, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Ronald Thiemann, Robert George, Peter Guralnick, Guthrie Ramsey, Serene Jones, Gary Dorrien, Constanze Güthenke, Leora Batnitzky, and especially Jeff Stout, the best teaching partner imaginable. Those Monday night dinners at the Stout house with Jeff and his lovely wife Sally were grand reprieves from my daily diet of hot dogs and potato chips. And for the remainder of my life, I will relish the precious memory of co-teaching at Harvard the last course in the distinguished career of Hilary Putnam, one of the few philosophic geniuses alive. However, the memory of giving one of the eulogies at Stanford for my beloved mentor Richard Rorty—the most influential American philosopher of our time—remains a moment I will forever cherish.
It was Daphne Brooks, my colleague at Princeton, who came up with the concept of celebrating one of the musical geniuses of our time, James Brown. Thanks to Daphne’s brilliant mind and profound scholarship, the James Brown Conference, the first of its kind, was a triumphant success and a beautiful way to honor a man the academy had both dismissed and demeaned.
My intellectual fire also was fueled by my humanist colleagues at Princeton: my dear brothers and sisters Peter Brown, Anthony Grafton, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Alexander Nehamas, Caryl Emerson, Sean Wilentz, Eric Gregory, D. Graham Burnett, and Danielle Allen. Needless to say, the sheer presence of the prophetic economist and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman is an intellectual delight.
My friends have also meant the world to me.
Michael Pfleger is one of the grand prophetic voices in contemporary Christendom. I am blessed to preach every February in his Chicago church, St. Sabina. How could I not love a white Catholic brother who has devoted his life to ministering in the black South Side of Chicago with such love and commitment to justice?
My two dear brothers with whom I shared rooms at Harvard College remain an active part of my life. Robert Gerrard and Neil Brown are exemplary human beings whose fusion of mind, heart, and soul inspire me. And we shall never forget Brother Roberto Garcia, our valiant Puerto Rican comrade and friend.
Even earlier, my friendship with Glenn Jordan, distinguished professor at the University of Glamorgan in Cardiff, Wales, changed my life.
Professor David L. Smith, the first black dean at Williams College, has been such a loyal and loving friend.
Reverend Michael Horton, novelist and pastor of two major Seventh Day Adventist churches in Chicago, and Lovell Jackson have been pillars of my spiritual life.
In the spirit of piety—my reverent attachment to those who sustain me—let me testify to two noteworthy young black intellectuals who died before their time: James Snead and Ulysses Santamaria. Snead, a literary scholar and jazz musician, carved new wood when it came to black intellectualism. He wrote on Faulkner, Mann, Joyce, Proust, and Baldwin. I was honored to co-edit, with Colin MacCabe, Snead’s classic texts,
White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side and Racist Traces and Other Writings,
on which we were joined by co-editor Kara Keeling. When Brother James died, he and I were working on a joyous and serious book, a semiotic analysis of black culture beginning with a close reading of Melville’s
Benito Cereno
.
Ulysses Santamaria was born in Mississippi, educated in Spain, trained in Paris and Frankfurt, and wound up teaching in Tel Aviv. He and I worked together in Paris on a special issue of
Les Temps Modernes
, the magazine of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He’s the most cosmopolitan brother since Paul Robeson. Snead and Santamaria were new kinds of black intellectuals. They didn’t have a trace of self-hatred or self-doubt. Had they lived, their reputations would have rivaled Stuart Hall, Orlando Patterson, Adolph Reed, Jr., bell hooks, Stanley Crouch, Gerald Home, Dwight McKee, Manning Marable, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Kwame Anthony Appiah, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Isaac Julien, Kobena Mercer, Toni Cade Bambara, Michael Hanchard, Kimberly Crenshaw, Peter Paris, Robin D.G. Kelley, Maulana Karenga, Molefi Kete Asante, Patricia Williams, Hortense Spiliers, Glenn Loury, Robert O’Meally, Carlos Broussard, Tricia Rose, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Sonia Sanchez, Darryl Pinckney, Houston Baker, Lewis Gordon, Haki Madhubuti, Paul Gilroy, Albert Raboteau, Farah Jasmine Griffith, Eddie Glaude, Jr., and Lamine Sagna.
Then there’s Brother Mark Ridley-Thomas. He and I met in 1980 when he was on the verge of becoming the executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles. When Mark and I connected, we dedicated our lives to let suffering speak. Mark has been someone who keeps the focus on the folks whose needs are urgent and real. He became an L.A. city councilman, then a state senator, then the first black man elected to the powerful L.A. County Board of Supervisors. I’m always blessed to spend time with Mark, his lovely wife Avis, and their twin sons, Sebastian and Sinclair.
Another dear friend from L.A., Wren Brown, is a national treasure, a highly gifted actor and brilliant orator who singlehandedly created the Ebony Repertory Theater right in the neighborhood where he grew up, creating a model of community service in the world of the arts.
In the same world, I’m grateful for having worked with Steve McKeever, visionary founder of Hidden Beach Records.
It’s hard to find words to praise those brave and good souls who travel with me week in and week out. Let me just say this: when it comes to facilitating my public appearances, I turn to Brother Raymond Ross, the grand master of the art form. He also taught my dear brother Whirlington Anderson well. Together, we have wonderful fellowship. And without my dear brother Jani Hameed I would never reach my destination.
I also want to thank the three agencies who have facilitated my speaking engagements—those led by Carlton Sidgeley, Charles Davis, Perry Steinberg, Tavis Smiley, and the inimitable Denise Pines. And I salute my dear sister, Kimberly McFarland, Tavis Smiley’s superb assistant, who keeps chaos at bay.
My life has been enriched by my friendships with Eleni Mavromatidou, Becky Fisk, Paula Mann, Susannah Cjernovitch, Yun Ja Lasser, Leslie Leventman, Kumkum Sangari, Christa Buschendorf, Margaret Haugwitz, Val Moghadam, Lulie Haddad, Eida Berrio, Maxine Leighton, Terri Reed, Kate Gillespie, Ann Bergren, Samuel Scheffler, Joshua Cohen, Susan Neiman, Leon Watts, Cecelia Rio, Christina Lopes, Rachel Emerick, Melanie Mashburn, Sacvan Bercovitch, Dwight McKee, Charles Ogletree, Anna Kirkland, Monika Lavkova, Karen Jackson-Weaver, Alexandra Buresch, Carla Hailey Penn, Valerie Smith, Petra Azar, Noliwe Rooks, Jonathan Demme, Joseph Buttigieg, Elnora Tina Webb, Linda Jamison, Philip Angelides, Russell Banks, Alicia Brown, Martha Rosler, Reverend Bill Howard, Peter Harvey, Richard Roper, and Harry Belafonte.