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West is a study in the dialectics of personality: an author of acclaimed books on American pragmatism, prophetic Christianity and the ethical dimensions of Marxism who also possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of the latest releases from Arrested Development and Janet Jackson. He turned down a coveted post at Harvard in part because Boston radio stations don't play enough black music, which he calls "an important restorative of my soul." He was kicked out of elementary school in Sacramento, California, for slugging a teacher who asked him to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which West refused to do as a protest against segregation. But he went on to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard in only three years, while simultaneously working two jobs and earning a reputation as one of the most bodacious dancers ever to do the funky chicken on an Ivy League campus. Says his brother Clifton: "Cornel has always liked to go to two or three parties every weekend, but only after reading two or three books. He's been like that since he was a kid."
As director of Afro-American studies at Princeton since 1988, West has nurtured what even its rivals concede is the best program of its kind in the nation. Significantly, the university, where West got his doctorate, is within broadcast range of New York City's WBLS-FM, West's favorite soul-music station. The department includes Pulitzer-prizewinning novelist Toni Morrison and biographer Arnold Rampersad.
Now this academic star with a firsthand knowledge of the tribulations of being black in America is on the brink of wider fame. He has become a high- profile guest on TV talk shows and a controversial contributor to op-ed pages and magazines, with bristling articles on black anti-Semitism, gay rights and the social virtues of rap. His new book, Race Matters, has shown up on some best-seller lists on the strength of an 18-city promotion tour.
Timed to appear on the first anniversary of the Los Angeles riots, Race Matters is the first of West's eight books (including Breaking Bread, Insurgent Black Intellectual Life, co-authored by the black feminist writer bell hooks) intended for a general audience. Though far from his most profound writing, the slender collection of essays is laden with provocative observations on a broad range of racially loaded topics that have delighted and irritated people on both sides of the color line. West flays liberals and conservatives for trying to force blacks "to do all the 'cultural' and 'moral' work necessary for healthy race relations" while ignoring the psychic pain that racism has inflicted on the urban poor. He accuses the black middle class that has sprung up since the civil rights movement of the '60s of being "decadent" and "deficient." One consequence of its grasping materialism, he charges, is that "there has not been a time in the history of black people in this country when the quantity of politicians and intellectuals was so great, yet the quality of both groups has been so low." West also ventures into psychosexual waters, writing that "it is virtually impossible to talk candidly about race without talking about sex." He contends that "Americans are obsessed with sex and fearful of black sexuality," adding that "black sexuality is a taboo subject in America principally because it is a form of black power over which whites have no control."