CORNEL WEST BLASTS HARVARD, WALL STREET AS ‘JIM CROW, NEW STYLE’

Students at Harvard University have mobilized to slam Harvard’s refusal to consider the bid for the tenure of Prof. Cornel West, saying his tenure is “an urgent matter of equity and parity” and a blatant devaluation of Black scholarship that could lead to “a mass exodus of Black scholars.”

In an interview with Dr. George Yancy, an eminent Black academician, for Truthout, West said “when Harvard treats me in this way, that’s a sign of its spiritual and intellectual bankruptcy. Now, it could bounce back, but you have to call it for what it is. You have to acknowledge that there are new styles of Jim Crow in the life of the mind and the country. It’s just a fact.”

West is considered as one of America’s greatest public intellectuals who has condemned the Jim Crow in Harvard and Wall Street and even the New York Review of Books for being whiter than white, lacking the Beruf or calling to be fair and just, with no shred of kenosis or emptying that sheds the bias, the prejudice and champions the Hebrew concept of hesed, the love for the oppressed, the prisoners, the poor and the wretched of the earth, or Michel Foucault’s parrhesia or courageous speak.

"To be a Black man in a white supremacist civilization, where Black love is a crime, where Black hope is a joke … then I’ve got to fight … I’m going to fight for freedom and be willing to be crushed,” West argued. “It’s revolution in the spiritual sense, revolution in the political sense and revolution in the economic sense, which is a massive transfer of power, of respect, of wealth. It is a transfer that is not about putting others down, but it’s a democratizing, it’s a sharing of that respect, the sharing of that wealth, the sharing of those resources, and so forth. So that radical democratic end is informed by this intense commitment to vocation, finding voice, but always situating your voice in relation to a certain tradition, or what Antonio Gramsci called a ‘critical historical inventory.’ That’s Socratic, it’s self-examination.”

WEEKLY FEATURE : BONNER DYTOC SHOWS THE WAY IN STOCK PLAY