Cornel West’s History
On February 4, Cornel West ascended the pulpit and preached to a crowd that filled both floors of Battell Chapel. His lecture marked the commencement of Black History Month and 25th anniversary of the publication of his book, Race Matters. West spoke passionately, addressing such themes as elitism in racial discourse, the necessity of love in the fight against racism, and the beauty of blackness. He touched on both contemporary and historical issues, weaving together the past and the present. West awed the audience with his rhetorical prowess, moral suasion, and candor, situating himself within the larger black oratorical tradition.
In the days following West’s lecture, I found that his words continued to echo through my head. “In the quest for truth, stop looking for blind spots,” he had proclaimed to the audience, urging us instead to critically examine the frameworks of justice. Referencing the backlash he had faced for criticizing president Obama, West defended his position, turning the charge towards the audience and asking, “Do we have the honesty to be candid about the challenges we face?” Later in the lecture, he reified the importance of truth: “If you’re not interested in truth, goodness, justice, and beauty, then black history is NOT for you.” As West proclaimed the necessity of truth, the audience, including many Yale students, roared with applause.
Indeed, West’s lecture represented an ideological call to action. Using the impetus of Black History Month, he called upon the audience to interrogate the shortcomings of antiracist frameworks. This call to action is one that we must carry out in our own apparently antiracist spaces, including the classroom. The same Yale students who were clapping for West are among the very people at whom he aimed his indictment.
As a prospective History and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration double major, my academic interests lie in histories of oppression and resistance. As such, I have spent a lot of my academic career at Yale in courses that explore questions of race, agency, and memory. For me, the notion of memory is crucial — memory reconstructs the past into a tangible, coherent narrative to be mobilized for our purposes.
U.S. national memory tells us that Christopher Columbus discovered this land and saved the Indian savages with Christianity. Although some continue to believe in such a depiction, the rise of revisionist history has called this national myth — and others like it — into question. West would likely advise a believer in the Columbus myth to “get off the crack pipe,” a line that he repeated throughout his lecture. Modern historical discourse denounces the celebratory, limited, and racist nature of the Christopher Columbus narrative, and today, many see the problems with falsified and simplistic renditions of American history. But few are skeptical of the tendency to pare history when it is convenient for liberal rhetorical purposes.
Consider Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Structuring his narratives as “bottom up” histories of marginalized groups, Zinn sought to present an alternative imagination of American history. The text, published in 1980, has left a lasting mark on approaches to American historical thinking. Nevertheless, more recent scholarship has suggested that Zinn’s portrayal falls short for its simplistic, didactic approach to history. In his efforts to reframe history from the perspective of marginalized groups, Zinn frames American history singularly — his conception of American history transforms from an understanding of American history to the approach.
Yale history classrooms are riddled with such examples of well-intentioned but limited revisions. As students grapple with the oppressive realities of the past, they can often fall into presentism, applying judgments rooted in contemporary values that fail to understand the specific cultural context of a place or time. Examples of such judgments include the surface level critiques of “racism” that treat racism as a ubiquitous and static entity and fail to address the particularities of racial systems in different contexts. Such ‘critical’ approaches to history depend on present value systems in an attempt to denounce oppressive institutions, but, in doing so, operate insubstantially as mere performances of liberal values. Such comments fail at their primary undertaking: though revisionist history attempts to restore agency to oppressed groups, such a goal cannot be achieved if the framework under which oppressed peoples were operating is not understood. How can one point to instances of resistance if the very thing being resisted is undefined?
Other common presentist remarks perpetuate hierarchy within historical memory itself, notably via a ‘historical pedestal.’ A figure is placed on the pedestal when celebrated, fiercely removed from it when deemed flawed, and another figure is desperately sought to fill its place. Such a process can take on both figurative and literal forms, as figures are bolstered and renounced through historical literature and through the physical removal of statues from their pedestals. Despite differences in the cultural import of both theoretical and physical pedestals, they are similar in that they mandate celebration. Under the framework of the ‘historical pedestal,’ history becomes a process of exaltation and repudiation, saying less about the actors of the past and more about the values of the historians themselves.
West alluded to the pedestal in his discussion of Martin Luther King, Jr., who, despite his popular acclaim today, was a contentious figure within his own time: “When he died, 55% of black people disapproved of King; 72% of white people disapproved of King.” Nevertheless, few would contest the notion that King has become a — if not the — figurehead of the Civil Rights Movement. West acknowledged the inevitable disappointment of historical figures, but his rendition is not hopeless. Instead, he uses this inevitability as a stimulus for mobilization, demanding that we “try again, fail again, fail better,” in the fight for justice. The singularity of King’s attribution to the Civil Rights Movement is contested in courses such as Crystal Feimster’s The Long Civil Rights Movement, which broadens credit to those figures who, without pedestals, remain invisible in historical memory.
The point is not that failed attempts at revisionist history are bad. The point is that, in the words of West, “the standards are high.” Surface level approaches to revisionist history are not enough. Historians have developed a framework that offers the possibility to recover the agency of the oppressed in the historical process itself. It is up to us to fully engage in the personal and historical interrogation that such a framework necessitates.
