Race Matters by Cornel West
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Book Reviews of Race Matters
Book Review: West always shoots straight down the middle .
Summary: 5 Stars
Cornel West always shoots straight down the middle for all races. He will make you evaluate yourself because he addresses issues that are difficult. If an offense is taken, perhaps a need to re evaluate how we look at things is needed. Book is great for everyone.Book Review: Most read in the Obama America, excelent.
Summary: 5 Stars
With an Africanamerican in the White House, Race Mater is an excellent view of the black community and it leaders. PeaceBook Review: Race Matters
Summary: 5 Stars
Excellent look at race issues in America that apply today even though the book was written more tha a decade ago.Book Review: good food for sollid thought
Summary: 4 Stars
Regarding "matter" as verb and the fact that ethnicity, phenotype, genotype, color, gender and nationality are concerns race matters; it's about "matter" the noun when it comes to stuff concerning nationality, phenotype, regionality, color and accent; a few other burdens every one bears include stereotypes, assumptions, body type, dietary habits and sexual preference... all this relates to how seemingly subcultural gear interfaces with the supposedly dominant culture, how it can separate and divide, how at other times helps attract and cohere.
Especially in the race-aware, extremely socially stratified - yet almost as multicultural and multilingual as it gets - USA, Cornel West's arguments and conclusions are worth considering. As social scientist he deconstructs structuralists and behaviorists and like everyone else, realizes causality ain't all that clear cut or simple, nor are solutions. In his Preface 2001 Professor West explains "...The most immediate consequences of the recent experience of multiracial democracy is increasing class division and distance in American society and black communities. This is so primarily because the advent of the multiracial American regime coincided with escalating levels of wealth inequality." [xv]
Writing first in the 1990s and doing some revisions closer to present-day 2010, in Race Matters Cornel West laments how particularly in the (lower-case) black community (but is there a cohesive black community still to be found anywhere?) "We have rootless, dangling people with little link to the supportive networks--family, friends, school--that sustain some sense of purpose in life." [page 9] and asks, "How do we capture a new spirit and vision to meet the challenges of the post-industrial city, post-modern culture, and post-party politics?" [page 11] He perceives an "eclipse of hope and a collapse of meaning" [page 19] and describes "Nihilism [as] ... the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important), lovelessness." [pages 22-23] He could be talking about almost everyone who recently has been affected by what's politely called "economic downturn" folks who find themselves less structurally connected than they were, and especially less able to reconnect in ways that help rebuild a recognizable identity and reclaim a place in the world.
Money talks! Cornel West says there's "...a crisis of too much poverty and too little self-love." [page 93] When I lived and served in the inner city I observed ways people exist in many kinds of poverty, economic almost being the least, albeit often becoming the last straw. Race Matters doesn't mention how increased suburban racial and ethnic homogenization had left a permanent underclass living in neighborhoods like New York's Harlem and Boston's Roxbury, but in the olden days of racial segregation, African-American professionals were visible examples of financial and educational accomplishment and lived alongside single mothers on welfare. Teachers, attorneys, entrepreneurs and physicians were living example and inspiration to those less well-off who hadn't made it yet. In recent decades housing in general has become more economically stratified than than racially or ethnically.
More optimistically, Cornel West mentions current multicultural popular culture in the USA that has expanded almost to cover the globe (seen any recent news or entertainment clips about mainland China or Japan?) [page 121]. A sign of acceptability (within limits) and desirability (that has its boundaries), it also is a kind of cultural assimilation; Professor West mostly means the way sartorial styles and particularly musical genres that originated in the black ghettos have mainstreamed. I've blogged a definition of ghetto as "nothing much goes in or out of it that wasn't there the day before." However, historically most of the money that's spent in isolated ethnic enclaves does leave and doesn't return. Ever.
Providentially also, during the past decade a significant number of African-Americans have purchased and rehabbed residential property in the Roxburies and Harlems of this country, gone back there to live (or moved there for the first time, since some of them grew up in suburbia or exurbia) and sometimes opened their own businesses or established franchises of national entities.
Jazz is music and jazz is "a mode of being in the world." [page 150] As a musical genre, jazz can boast multicultural, multiethnic and multi-musical origins and most characteristically is rhythmically improvised over a particular harmonic ground. As a mode of being in the world, jazz living celebrates convergence of multicultural, multiethnic and multi-linguistic origins, with rhythms most characteristically and most authentically improvised over the particular ground we're on right now.
I'm writing after my second reading of Race Matters, and probably will reread it in a year or two or three; it is good food for solid thought!
Book Review: Much better than expected
Summary: 4 Stars
This book was, to my surprise, very well argued and thought provoking. I expected a left-wing rant against "white privilege," or some similiar nonsense. Instead, Professor West delivers a balanced, judicious appraisal of race relations and the condition of blacks in America. (Readers should keep in mind this was written a decade before Barack Obama's election). As a Jew, I appreciated his strong critique of the black anti-Semitism of Leonard Jeffries and Louis Farrakhan. To his credit, West deals fairly with black conservatives, even conceding them part (by no means all) of their argument. Race Matters is an excellent book and worthy of the praise it has received.