Cornel West Turns His Gaze On Ta Nehisi Coates

My thoughts regarding Cornel West's schooling of Ta Nehisi Coates.

Recently Dr. Cornel West's critiques of Ta Nehisi Coates have spilled into the public sphere. For some background you can check out Michael Harriot's piece in The Root. 

Dr. West views the American Empire through a Marxist/Christian frame. From this frame to demand redress of oppression, to demand justice and equality from that empire as one who is oppressed by that power is to legitimize the existence and authority of the empire. So from Dr. West’s ideological frame the louder Coates speaks about injustice from the frame of one who has experienced the damage of white supremacy the more that makes Coates an accomplice of legitimizing the American Empire in the role of a victim. West's critique, as I read it, is that Coates would be a better servant of justice if he were to extricate his voice and perspective from that of a reporter of human experience and history and advocate of justice in order to take the role of ideological analyst outside of individual context and historical experience. In doing so Coates would be much more capable of overthrowing American Empire wholesale through the piercing light of complex analysis.
 
In my own experience, try as I might to position myself as outside my history and experience, I simply cannot discover the intellectual, spiritual or moral expertise that Dr. West has found that allows him to exist outside the lived experience of the master/slave dialectic and the American Empire. How West has managed to pull this off while working at Harvard and other established Universities firmly embedded within the neoliberal tradition (taking their salary, health insurance and so forth) is thoroughly beyond my vision.
 
In the meantime, I will continue to agree with Coates that a demand for justice, the articulation and memory of experienced oppression, is not some secret deal with the devil that is an acquiescence to injustice and oppression. I will continue to believe, as Coates has demonstrated so powerfully and my own experience suggests, that white supremacy is engrained in white experience and consciousness so deeply that even if America were able to find a non-violent means to overthrow the current means of production and/or oppression we would still live in a thoroughly racist and white supremacist structure just in new forms and institutions.
In short, I’m not so sure West’s Marxist/Christian frame is superior to Coates’ agnostic-humanist frame in analyzing our history or current situation. West's more academic and philosophical approach working from theory to experience is certainly broader. Coates' more humanist, historical, and experiential approach, however, has the benefit of interacting at profound depths with a narrative within a lived community and shared experience. While Coates may not yet possess a philosophical sheen born of and certified by the academy as does West, Coates’ use of probing historical and personal experience is as effective a case of applied existentialism and good old-fashioned agnostic humanism as exists today.
 
I love what Dr. West has added to my life in thinking broadly. But in this case, for me, Dr. West’s critique of Coates not only reveals some of the contours of thought that Coates may want to address in order to expand his voice, but even more so West's critique reveals the obvious shortcomings of his own analysis and the limitations of a too ideological frame in addressing the depths of lived human experience. West contends that Coates fails the test of addressing everything. This may be true, but Coates approach is such that what he does address is made plain, revealed, and the possibility of change made real. In short, Coates - the agnostic - has acquired the voice of one crying in the wilderness. West, in addressing everything in his ideological critique of Empire might wonder if in fact he actually touches anything at all. Perhaps West - the one who readily adopts the role of prophet - could learn from Coates what it means to deepen his prophetic voice.