Cornel West (1953 - )

Tue Jun 02, 1953

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Cornel West, born on this day in 1953, is a philosopher, socialist activist, educator, and public intellectual whose works include “Race Matters” and “The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto”, co-authored with Tavis Smiley.

The son of a Baptist minister, West’s political thought focuses on the role of race, gender, and class in American society. A radical democrat and advocate for social democracy, West draws intellectual contributions from multiple traditions, including the black Christian church, Marxism (although he identifies as a non-Marxist socialist, believing the Christian faith and Marxism to be irreconcilable), and transcendentalism.

Among West’s works are “Race Matters” (1994), “Democracy Matters” (2004), and “The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto” (2012), co-authored with Tavis Smiley. In this last work, Smiley and West provide a broad, multi-racial look at the history and experience of poverty in the United States, concluding with a twelve-point program to address this poverty.

West has served as honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which he has described as “the first multiracial, socialist organization close enough to my politics that I could join”. He has also described himself as a “radical democrat, suspicious of all forms of authority” in the Matrix-themed documentary “The Burly Man Chronicles”.

West was arrested on October 13th, 2014, while protesting against the shooting of Michael Brown and participating in “Ferguson October”, and again on August 10th, 2015, while demonstrating outside a courthouse in St. Louis on the one-year anniversary of Brown’s death.

“To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak. That is, it creates a vision of the world that puts into the limelight the social misery that is usually hidden or concealed by the dominant viewpoints of a society. ‘Intellectual’ in that sense simply means those who are willing to reflect critically upon themselves as well as upon the larger society and to ascertain whether there is some possibility of amelioration and betterment.”

- Cornel West

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• Date: 1953-06-02
• Learn More: www.cornelwest.com, mirror.explodie.org, en.wikipedia.org.
• Tags: #Socialism, #Marxism, #Birthdays.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org