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There ought to be a robust, uninhibited conversation in black America with different black ideological perspectives.

Cornel West

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Cornel West
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: June 2
Actor
Critic
Philosopher
Theologian
University Teacher
Writer
Tulsa
Oklahoma
Cornel Ronald West
Cornel R. West
Different
Perspectives
Robust
Ideological
Perspective
Conversation
Ought
Black
America
Uninhibited

More quotes by Cornel West

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We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property.
Cornel West
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Rap is just a movement within the larger culture of hip-hop.
Cornel West
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I love the academy in terms of the life of the mind and the world of ideas. I also love the streets. I love the churches and mosques and synagogues. I love the trade union centers. I love the community centers. I speak regularly at prisons and so forth.
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Jesus loves a free black man.
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I have some notions that have people conceiving of themselves as capable of changing the world. That's why, for me, the issues of self-love, self-respect and self-regard are preconditions for human agency and especially black agency, given the fact that we have been and are such a hated and despised people.
Cornel West
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Music is the very cement that has not just held the black community together but holds black selves together in a fundamental sense.
Cornel West
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Life is such a mysterious thing that you are up one day you are down the next day. A lot of the homeless brothers and sisters who were a success ten years ago, they are now on the street. Maybe ten years later they will be a success, but the crucial question is what is the quality of their life.
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The problem is not just affirmative action, though. The problem is poor people, working people and their children, and affirmative action for the most part doesn't even apply to them.
Cornel West
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Martin Luther King Jr's agenda was not to help Negroes overcome American apartheid in the south. It was to make America democracy a better place, where everyday people, from poor people who were white and red and yellow and black and brown, would be able to live lives in decency and dignity.
Cornel West
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There is no such thing as institutional conditions without any individual actions and no such thing as individual action without institutional conditions. So there is always personal responsibility.
Cornel West
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We've been talking about this for a good while, the immorality of drones, dropping bombs on innocent people. It's been over 200 children so far. These are war crimes.
Cornel West
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Wealth inequality has increased.
Cornel West
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There are three dominant tendencies in a neoliberal society: financialized, privatized, militarized. And when it comes to black poor people, we get all three.
Cornel West
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I like to be multi-contextual, which is much more important than being multicultural.
Cornel West
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My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination.
Cornel West
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Barack Obama has domesticated the left in such a way that we feel as if we have no alternative but him...I refuse to accept that.
Cornel West
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I think nonviolence and the mediation of conflict by means of respecting civility must be promoted. But being the kind of beings we [peoplep] are - wrestling with greed, and wrestling with fears and security, anxieties, wrestling with hatred that's shot through all of us - wars are here to stay.
Cornel West
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It's fashionable to be indifferent to other people's suffering
Cornel West
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We want to bear witness today that we know the relation between corporate greed and what goes on too often in the Supreme Court decisions.
Cornel West
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We're talking about a prison-industrial complex. We're talking about a war on drugs that's generating unprecedented levels of incarcerated folk. We're talking about dilapidated housing. We're talking about joblessness and underemployment.
Cornel West