Keynote Address: Cornel West | #MPC26

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Please welcome the Dietrich Bonhaofer chair and professor at Union Theological Seminary, Cornell Westing fulltime.

[00:00:17]>> Yeah. Music, playwright. Um, yeah, I'm having a good time.

[00:00:20]>> Awesome.

[00:00:20]>> Fantastic.

[00:00:22]>> Indeed. Indeed. Indeed. Get out.

[00:00:25]>> I just want to begin by saying that I have been treated with such kindness and warmth here. That makes a difference.

[00:00:35]Want to begin by saluting the captain of the ship, my dear brother Sandy. I see him there. Brother Bob, where is he?

[00:00:43]Where is he? Yeah, indeed. I salute you as well. I don't know brother whether brother David here he's the president who loves those colorful colorful uh coats but I salute him as well. And then I see brother Dennis Archer and the others.

[00:00:59]I'm in the right place.

[00:01:02]I'm in the right place.

[00:01:05]Sister Carla, Sister Andrea, a quest for common ground. And I think anytime you talk about common ground, we ought to start with what we all hold in common.

[00:01:20]>> That we are featherless, two-legged, linguistically conscious creatures born between urine and feces.

[00:01:33]We're human beings. Human beings.

[00:01:38]And we will soon be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.

[00:01:43]Quick move from mama's womb to tomb.

[00:01:47]All the talk about class, gender, sexual orientation, national identity, and so forth get in the way of acknowledging the ways in which we as human beings, you know, the English word human comes from the Latin humando, which means burial. When Socrates says the unexamined life is not a life for the human, he's talking about humando.

[00:02:11]And humano means burial. We're on the way to burial. We're vanishing creatures. We're disappearing organisms.

[00:02:18]And the question is always, what kind of human beings will we choose to be in the short time that we are here?

[00:02:28]That's the question.

[00:02:30]That's what Heraclitus understood when he said, "Not only everything flows, but character is destiny." That's what the greatest American man of letters, Ralph Waldo Emerson, meant when he said, "Character is destiny." And I'm just so very blessed because I come from a family, community, and a people that put primacy on character.

[00:02:57]We all are who we are because somebody loved us.

[00:03:04]>> Somebody cared for us. Somebody sacrificed for us. And I don't know about you, but I have a smile on my face when I think of Irene B. West, my mother. I'll never be one half the human being she was with a school named after her on the chocolate side of Sacramento, California.

[00:03:28]Clifton West, Clifton Cynthian Sher, Reverend Willie P. Cook, Shiloh Baptist Church, who baptized me when I was seven. And I intend to be faithful unto death, common humanity.

[00:03:52]Then I want to acknowledge the ways in which it's very hard to find people in the last 400 years who've been more chronically hated as black people and yet muster the courage to teach the world so much about love.

[00:04:12]John Cold Train's love Supreme is not just a song comes from the depths of his being wrestling with the dark corners of his own soul and then generating a sound that brings us together. Common starting point, common ground.

[00:04:29]And we haven't even got the love and needed love of that genius out of Sagen.

[00:04:33]Detroit claims him. He lives in LA. But the greatest love warrior of his generation, Stevie Wonder.

[00:04:40]Oh, that's Mottown right there.

[00:04:44]Those are not just songs.

[00:04:48]Those are people who looked hatred in the face and decided to become love warriors who looked terror in the face and decided to call for freedom for everybody.

[00:05:00]That's Frederick Douglas. That's Ida B.

[00:05:02]Wells. That's Fanny Liu Hmer. And we haven't got to Martin King yet.

[00:05:09]That's the people who've been traumatized for 400 years, but at our best decide to be wounded healers rather than wounded hurtters, wrestling with depths of sadness and sorrow, and yet deciding to be joy shares. It could be a Louis Armstrong or it could be a mom's maybe or Richard Prior.

[00:05:37]That's the tradition that puts a primacy on formation of character. We can call it soul craft and the way Plato talks about it in the republic. the ways in which you cultivate your virtues, you cultivate courage, you cultivate fortitude, you cultivate justice, but it's rooted in a profound love.

[00:06:00]And we are experiencing a profound spiritual and moral crisis in this country, in this democratic experiment, in this empire.

[00:06:17]One of the great contributions tradition that I'm talking about of those black folk who chose integrity and honesty and decency and courage exemplified in the response of Imatiel's mother in August of 1955 as one of the greatest moments in the history of this country when it comes to the spiritual and moral life of the nation.

[00:06:46]You all recall brother EMTT was killed by cowardly white supremacist, cowardly white terrorist, 14 years old, dropped his precious body in the tally Hatche River thinking nobody would ever recover it. She recovered it. Brought his body back to Robert's Temple Church of God on the west side of Chicago. Kept that casket open. All of the cameras in the country and the world were there. What did she say when she stepped to the lecturer and quest for common ground?

[00:07:16]Oh, Miss Teal, what you got to say?

[00:07:19]Speak on behalf of the best of not just black people, not just America. Speak on behalf of the best of the human spirit.

[00:07:27]She leaned over and looked at her baby, her only baby. His head was three times the size of his ordinary head. And she kept that casket open.

[00:07:38]Brother Johnson of Jet Magazine and Ebony magazine put that picture so that every black beauty salon, every black barber shop could see it for themselves.

[00:07:49]She leaned over with tears in her eyes and she said, "I don't have a minute to hate.

[00:07:57]I will pursue justice for the rest of my life."

[00:08:02]What goes into the shaping and molding of a character and a soul and a high quality person? We're not talking about skin pigmentation.

[00:08:15]Is it a long history of black gangsters and black thugs and black cowards like I got a lot of gangster in me. Pray for me.

[00:08:27]I was a gangster before I met Jesus and I'm now nothing but a redeemed sinner with gangster proclivities.

[00:08:34]Pray for me.

[00:08:39]Just like you, I'm a crack vessel. As the great WH says, we're trying to love our crooked neighbor with our crooked hearts.

[00:08:46]Yes. business, trade union activities, freedom movements, churches, moss, synagogues, temples where human beings trying to shape each other and enact qualities of character.

[00:09:07]Virtues cultivated with the benchmark of spiritual and moral maturity, which is what? humility.

[00:09:19]That's the benchmark.

[00:09:21]One of the reasons why we're living such a moment of such organized greed and weaponized hatred, institutionalized cruelty, routinized indifference. And the great rabbi Hessha was right when he said indifference the evil is more insidious than evil itself comes ways of lives modes of existing but we turn our back to the weak. We turn our back to the vulnerable.

[00:09:59]That the legacies of Martin King and Fanny Liumer which is always greatness is defined not in terms of Alexander the Great and conquering and military victory. No, it's defined by that tradition. And it comes out of prophetic legacy of Jerusalem. That hesset that Hebrew sc Hebrew scripture talked about spreading that loving kindness and steadfast commitment to the orphan and the widow, the fatherless and the motherless. And then Jesus of Nazareth himself, what you do to the least of these. I want to know what's happening with the poor children, no matter what color. I want to know what's happening with the elderly. I want to know what's happening to working people. Not because it's a question of trying to fit it into your political discourse, because you choose to be a human being of integrity, honesty, decency, and courage, and you're willing to cut against the grain, not in a spirit of self-righteousness.

[00:11:00]>> It's no accident that the best of the black experience is one of a jazz sensibility.

[00:11:08]And jazz ain't nothing but the combination of improvisation and swing and blues.

[00:11:14]But you start with the blues because the blues is catastrophe lyrically expressed and artistically transmuted and honestly confronted. So the catastrophe is something you wrestle with, but you never deny it.

[00:11:29]If you're living in a state of denial, you're never going to be able to reach common ground.

[00:11:36]The rhetoric will be empty. It'd be sounding brass and tinkling simple.

[00:11:41]But if you're serious about your humanity, then you learn how to listen to other voices.

[00:11:50]It's no accident that the anthem of black people is lift every.

[00:11:55]It's not lift every echo, is it?

[00:11:59]Thank God that the Johnson brothers, I didn't say brothers Johnson.

[00:12:04]We love those brothers and they guitar.

[00:12:07]Thank God for Quincy Jones.

[00:12:09]But we talking about James Weldon and Rosamar.

[00:12:13]What does it mean to raise your voice, not your echo? We live in a time of not just polarization and fragmentation, but massive spiritual sickness and more decrepitude and political corruption where people don't want to find their voices. They just want to be echoes of silos to reproduce themselves.

[00:12:35]No, you got to find your voice.

[00:12:38]If you a jazz man or a blues woman, if you haven't found your voice and you echo, you going to be in Mike's basement after dark. They're going to bring you on stage at 3:00 every morning when everybody's flying high in the friendly skies.

[00:12:52]But no, when you find your voice, you ready for the Apollo.

[00:12:56]You ready for Carnegie?

[00:12:59]To find your voice means to be a person who puts the primacy on integrity. Look at our dear brother Sunonny Sunonny Rollins who we just lost 95 years.

[00:13:12]Discipline, practice, cultivation, formation, maturation in mastering his craft and his technique. Not because he wants just to make money, but because he wants to use his music to touch the souls of others. and always remember his best friend, the inimitable John Code Train.

[00:13:36]What a tradition.

[00:13:38]And it has practical implications that we all know that if black people had formed a black version of the Ku Klux Clan, we wouldn't be here experiencing the magnificent joys of this beautiful, beautiful island.

[00:13:59]in a civil war every generation.

[00:14:03]Civil strife every week.

[00:14:07]Moral and spiritual leadership was produced by these hated, traumatized, terrorized black people.

[00:14:16]But we rather have character and be defeated for the moment than be triumphant and just be a gangster >> like anybody who wants to manipulate others. and obsessed with the 11th commandment. Thou shalt not get caught.

[00:14:35]No. Thank God for Irene Cliff, Reverend Cook, Martin King, Fanny Liu, Haymon. I tell my vanilla brothers and sisters, when you see black people, you ought to just give them a standing ovation. We thank you for Martin. We thank you for Fanny Lou. We thank you for Frederick Douglas. It didn't have to be that way.

[00:14:56]We couldn't even have this democracy even as new immigrants in the 1880s with our precious Jewish brothers and sisters pushed out of Europe. Even as our new immigrants from Muslim countries, the old ones from Mexico. They couldn't even come to a country if you didn't have some moral leadership, spiritual exemplars. That's what we're about. A quest for common ground. Thank you so very much for having me here. And we're going to have dialogue now with my dear brother Devin.

[00:15:28]Common ground. Common ground.

[00:15:36]>> Please welcome journalist and author Devin Skil. Amen.

[00:15:41]>> Get that bar up there, baby.

[00:15:50]I know you're new to this public speaking thing, but I think you ought to I think you ought to stay with it. It's pretty good. I >> You very kind, my brother.

[00:15:58]>> Well, I I I really didn't want to come out here. I feel like I'm interrupting pretty good flow, >> I got to say.

[00:16:05]>> No, we appreciate the work that you've done over the years, my brother.

[00:16:08]>> I appreciate it.

[00:16:08]>> Give it up for our brother. Give it up for brother de >> Thank you.

[00:16:12]>> Give it up for brother Deon.

[00:16:13]>> Thank you.

[00:16:15]Um, you've given us all already a ton to think about. I'm going to spend months thinking about the fact that I emerged between urine and feces. Uh, how has no one ever explained that to me before? Um, >> but that's that's that's what George Clinton means by the funk though, brother.

[00:16:34]We emerge in the funk, but it's love in that funk. It's freedom in the funk.

[00:16:40]There might be a little stink and stink in there too, but that's what the funk is.

[00:16:45]And if you deodorize the funk, it means that you're denying the love, denying the reality, denying the flow.

[00:16:57]>> Oh yeah.

[00:16:58]>> Oh yeah, we love Booy Collins and George Clinton.

[00:17:01]>> All right. James Brown is the master of def. But no, I know we got to have dialogue here.

[00:17:08]We got >> I knew it was a risk to bring it back up. Um, in fact, while we're on that topic, I want you on on the topic of music, I want you to expand a little bit on I'm someone who happens to believe that Detroit is the greatest music city of all.

[00:17:28]>> Um, >> well, you you got a strong case. Got a strong case.

[00:17:32]>> I'm not a native Detroititer. I don't say that as a homer. I have just come to appreciate uh it's unbeliev I I accept no I entertain no debate on that >> but I I I I want you to expand on so you said uh you were talking about Mottown you said those are more than just songs >> yes >> songs like um what's going on by Marvin Gay >> yeah absolutely >> can you talk a little bit about Detroit's place in in in the dialogue >> oh I mean I live in Harlem and I remind my brothers and sisters in Harlem that Detroit has been the cultural al capital of black America when it comes to the levels of musical expression. Now, I don't want to put Chicago down because Detroit has Artha and Stevie, but Chicago got Curtis Mayfield. So, >> oh, I don't want to go too far with this thing.

[00:18:21]>> No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

[00:18:23]>> Oh, no, no, no. But New York, you know, Luther, Luther and Sunny Rollins, they we don't have Artha and Curtis, you see.

[00:18:33]Uh-huh.

[00:18:33]>> You know, I grew up in California. We got Sly Stone. So, we won't get into a regional battle on this thing.

[00:18:38]>> We can we can go down now for a couple hours.

[00:18:40]>> I know you from Kansas and Oklahoma. So, you got the gap band.

[00:18:44]>> That's right.

[00:18:45]>> Greenwood, Archer, and P.

[00:18:46]>> That's right. That's right.

[00:18:47]>> Like Wall Street. That's why I was born in Tulsa. You know, I was born in the same hospital as uh the Wilson brothers.

[00:18:53]>> Oh, no kidding.

[00:18:54]>> His mother and my mother dropped us same month. No, the same same year within six months.

[00:18:59]>> How about that?

[00:19:00]>> Men, they burned it down. Y'all know about Black Wall Street, right?

[00:19:05]>> That's why I I told I told I told Dr. West before, it's extraordinary that he was born in Tulsa in that that huge uh so often unspoken chapter of black life in America. I want to talk a little bit though now about our our theme and the quest for common ground.

[00:19:20]>> Absolutely. Um, anybody who has watched you over the years in your many many appearances on on various programs, people love to pitch you against somebody that they know um, you don't have much common ground with. And I know that people have driven you crazy over the years. And you have somehow you've done your best to try to find respect and civility for positions that I have to believe you don't really have a ton of respect for. Have you done that?

[00:19:48]No, I mean I just I learned in vacation Bible school Christian hatred and Christian hatred means you hate the sin and still try to love the sinner.

[00:20:02]Yeah. And I take that very seriously because I believe each and every one of us are wretched.

[00:20:08]just looking at you.

[00:20:12]But also wonderful because you have the capacity to change.

[00:20:18]You have the capacity to go another way.

[00:20:22]You have the capacity to be better. You had the potential and possibility. And so I like to stay in contact with the humanity of others. I had this in Charlottesville when I had some very sick white brothers. was a clan and the neo-Nazis walked up to me with gun and had their mask on and ammunition pointed at me and say, "You're that brother who always calls everybody brother on TV." I said, "Yes, brother."

[00:20:50]Because I come out of a tradition where I don't ask for anybody's permission as to who I love and how I laugh.

[00:20:58]I'm a Jesus loving free black man.

[00:21:01]You see, and so when I'm told to love everybody, love my neighbor, love my enemy, it doesn't mean I love what they do.

[00:21:10]It means they have a dignity. They have a sanctity that's been given to them by a living and a loving God that the world didn't give them and the world can't take away.

[00:21:19]>> And I try to stay in contact with that sanctity and that dignity which gives them the possibility of being better.

[00:21:26]>> Yeah.

[00:21:27]>> And that's not a political strategy. I understand that because you have to deal with power and the operations of power.

[00:21:33]But if all we have is military and economic and political power and have no morality and spirituality, we sliding down the slope to chaos.

[00:21:45]>> Yeah.

[00:21:46]>> Spiritual death.

[00:21:47]>> Um if my if my math is correct, it's been 33 years since you wrote Race Matters.

[00:21:56]>> No, you're right though, brother. a third of a century. I'm really curious to ask you, so what you set out to write and say, what you hoped the impact might be 33 years ago, where are we today?

[00:22:12]Well, I never thought it would get this bad. I say I really didn't. But you just don't know because because you know the great TS Elliott says, "Ours is in the trying. The rest is not our business."

[00:22:24]He says that in the four quartets and it's a profound formulation that no one of us are in this business of trying to make the world better assuming that we're in control and therefore it's always on the up and up.

[00:22:38]>> Yeah.

[00:22:38]>> You bear witness.

[00:22:40]That's Hebrew 12:1. The cloud of witnesses to bear witness. Run your race. Do what you're called to do. And that's all you can do. No one of us a messiah. And so I'm never surprised by evil. I'm never paralyzed by despair.

[00:22:58]I wrestle with despair every day. But there's retail despair and there's wholesale despair.

[00:23:05]There's Good Friday and the death of God on Saturday. And then something happens on Easter. Oh shucks.

[00:23:13]Surprised by joy.

[00:23:15]You see? So that in that sense there was some break you know we had some progress regress we had that in the 1860s and 70s in this country right >> and civil rights voting rights black folk lieutenant governors Louisiana head of Supreme Court in South Carolina then all of a sudden boom what great Nina Simone writing playing that song written by Langston Blues at Langston Hughes called backlash Ash blues is that massive backlash that takes place and it's up to all of us as human beings. We're not talking tribally.

[00:23:56]We're not talking clanishly. We're talking about human beings making moral and spiritual choices who attempt to be forces for good. Well, do have you come to believe though that you can be an agent of seeing progress or are you Seephus pushing the rock up every day and it rolls right back down to the bottom of the hill.

[00:24:17]>> No, Cphus is too Greek for me, brother.

[00:24:21]>> It's true. One sister, >> you may want to give me a better cultural coralary. I'll take >> I know Albert Kamu is crazy about him, too. But no, Sephus comes from the from the uh the Kingley class, you I'm I'm with Sly. I'm with everyday people.

[00:24:36]James Cleer, I'm with ordinary people.

[00:24:38]And it's not even a question of just pushing it up because he's being punished because he's been such a cruel king. That's part of the Greek mythology of >> Sephic. You see, >> whereas I'm thinking of people who have tried to do what's closer to Job. It is no accident that the major figure in negro spirits was the 257 that were we have recorded doing barbaric slavery on barbaric plantations with those barbaric slave ships and auctions. The favorite figure was Daniel. Moses was number two.

[00:25:06]Daniel was number one.

[00:25:09]>> You see >> what it means to be in the lion's den and still be able to smile.

[00:25:14]We thank Charlie Chaplan for that cuz he understood catastrophe on the vanilla side of town.

[00:25:22]It's true. The way Eugene O'Neal, the way Steven Sonheim does, it's it's it's a human thing. I was talking to my brother from Finland with the with with the CESU. I don't know if he's here, but teach me that this morning. Fortitude in the face of overwhelming catastrophe, >> right?

[00:25:41]>> And that's something that we need. Yeah.

[00:25:44]>> And the best of America has always enacted that. And part of our challenge and this is part of the crisis of uh of America these days. You see there's been 70 empires in the history of the species. United States number 68. Thomas Jefferson called us an empire of liberty. Well that's fascinating formulation >> because it's magnificent in terms of the anti-colonial struggle against the British Empire. But you got indigenous peoples here their land. You got enslaved Africans here. the labor, the precondition of the democracy. You see, so you had to have a dialectical read.

[00:26:22]You keep track of the magnificent breakthrough. You keep track of the under side of it.

[00:26:28]>> Yeah.

[00:26:28]>> And when you keep track of both of those, it means then that cloud of witnesses, that great tradition of people who never caved in, never gave up, never sold out, tried to be the best that they could be in their respective context and in their lanes. No one of us should be imitating and imitating each other all.

[00:26:47]>> I know I'm not a politician. Well, I ran for for office. I shouldn't say that too loudly, but I know I'm not a politician.

[00:26:54]I have a calling.

[00:26:56]>> You ran for president.

[00:26:57]>> Yeah, I did run for but I was running for Jesus and justice. It just spilled over.

[00:27:03]And it's true.

[00:27:06]It just spilled over cuz I I wanted the younger generation for them to see a campaign that was really trying to tell the full truth. The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak.

[00:27:18]Everybody's suffering. So we had to have a discussion on poverty. We had a discussion on mass incarceration. We had to have a discussion on drones dropping bombs on innocent people of whatever parties and so forth and so on. So that we didn't get locked into partisanship.

[00:27:32]We got locked into the quest for truth and beauty and goodness and as a Christian a holy too.

[00:27:38]>> And young folk need to see this because they are so overwhelmingly disenchanted with the narrowness, the truncated quality of the discourse. They're looking for people who in the language of the great Ashford and Simpson team.

[00:27:54]This is Nick. This is Val.

[00:27:57]Ain't nothing like >> the real thing. That's Detroit.

[00:28:03]That's Detroit. Um, that's Detroit. They They come out of White Rock Baptist Church of Harlem, but they recorded it in Mottown.

[00:28:12]>> Oh, yes. Ain't nothing like the real thing.

[00:28:15]>> I love the musical references. This is just great. And people forget all the time that Charlie Chaplan wrote Smile.

[00:28:20]That's >> Isn't that a beautiful song?

[00:28:22]>> Smile. Even though you're >> And then you get Nat King Cole singing it.

[00:28:26]>> Yeah. Chicago, right?

[00:28:28]>> Well, he's Alabama, but that's right.

[00:28:30]Well, he buy it. Yes, >> that's exactly right.

[00:28:32]>> Um, I I wanted to make sure in the time that we had left, I'm really We have a really interesting fight for Christian turf right now in America. We actually have a White House at war with the Pope, which is a really interesting place to be. Now, I I back to Chicago with the Pope.

[00:28:52]>> That's right.

[00:28:55]>> It looked like he got a little melanin, too.

[00:28:58]>> So, But that doesn't determine his morality and spirituality. He just has Louisiana connection.

[00:29:06]>> So give me your thoughts on the fight for literal high ground in America.

[00:29:13]>> Well, this is a very important one. I mean, the one between the Pope and uh and brother Trump, the president, you know, you don't it doesn't take a whole lot of ground to have higher ground than Trump, >> you know. I mean he he's not an exemplar of integrity, honesty, decency, spirituality, morality. I think everybody can agree with that. I think people inside of his circle understand that. People inside of his family understand that because he makes certain kinds of choices. He's still a human being. He needs accountability like all of us. So that the pope does have that higher ground in that regard. Uh but the pope's not Jesus either.

[00:29:51]I'm not saying that just cuz I'm Baptist.

[00:29:55]But he Baptist, we stumble over some truths sometime.

[00:29:59]And so that in that dialogue and when he's talking about the same kind of things of love and justice, sensitivity, solidarity with the weak and so forth and so on, that is a critique not just of Trump, it's critique of a whole wave of our precious fellow citizens. And uh I think we need a spiritual revival. We need a major moral renaissance. Young people need to see examples and exemplars of people who are willing to pay a cost and bear a burden in order to do what's right and to love and serve others no matter what the consequences and the results are overnight because that's what went into us. I sit here because those who love me so poured some things into me that I've got to pour into others. I was told if the kingdom of God is within you, then everywhere you go, you ought to leave some heaven behind.

[00:30:58]And that's a grand way of being in the world.

[00:31:01]>> It is.

[00:31:01]>> It really is. Look at that smile you got on your face.

[00:31:04]>> I'm so Oh, you know what I'm talking about.

[00:31:05]>> I do. And I am >> You know what I'm talking about.

[00:31:07]>> I am so glad you came to here to to Macau this year.

[00:31:12]>> Dr. Cornell West.

[00:31:13]>> No, I God bless you, man. Oh, bless you too.