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West's interests range far beyond the epistemological conundrums that preoccupy many professional philosophers. Nor is he easy to typecast as a liberal or conservative, black nationalist or integrationist, since he endorses bits and pieces of all those ideas. Instead, this self-styled "intellectual freedom fighter" wields his learning as a polemical sword, slashing at barriers that prevent "ordinary people from living lives of dignity." Says West: "We need intellectual weaponry to find out why people, black and white, are catching the hell they're catching in America and around the world. If we don't have it, and historical windows open up to make social change, we'll find ourselves unprepared." His goal is to become an "organic intellectual" on the order of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the father of transcendentalism, "someone who tries to fuse the life of the mind with the public affairs of the nation, who tries to shape public opinion."
West's vision, which he calls prophetic pragmatism, is most fully spelled out in The American Evasion of Philosophy. The book traces how Emerson's emphasis on innovation, refined by John Dewey and other American thinkers, then leavened with a dose of Marxist class analysis and the black church's commitment to racial justice, can be the basis for a rebirth of democratic radicalism. Says West: "I'm trying to revive a grand yet flawed tradition, to take the best from liberalism, populism and the Gospel while keeping track of what happens to everyday people, the ones the Bible calls the least of these."
In practice, that makes West a Marxist who believes in God, an admirer of black nationalism who thinks such Afrocentrics as Leonard Jeffries are too narrowly parochial. He pulls the disparate threads together like jazz: "Emerson said it's all about experimentalism, and Louis Armstrong's music is all about improvisation. I think we need these kinds of links, to be eclectic, to open us up to what we actually share rather than what divides us."
Like many black activists and socialists, West rails against white racism, powerful corporations and rampant consumerism. But because of his passion for moral consistency, he also insists the fight against sexism and homophobia must be on an equal footing with the battle against racial oppression. "A lot of black brothers and sisters think talking about homophobia and sexism will dilute the attack on racism," says West. "But black culture is unimaginable without James Baldwin, the poet Audre Lorde or ((civil rights activist)) Bayard Rustin, and I won't even begin to talk about black gay brothers and sisters and the role they play in the music of the black church." As for sexism, says West, "for too long, black brothers have been beating up black sisters just like white policemen beat up Rodney King. We've got to clean up the moral content of the black freedom struggle."
% West's budding fame presents him with new challenges. The biggest is to avoid being swept up in a destructive swirl of publicity as many earlier black intellectuals and leaders have been. Starting with Booker T. Washington, America has seemed to have room for only one top black spokesman at a time, consigning each former favorite to the ash heap of inauthenticity as soon as a new H.N.I.C. (Head Negro in Charge) appeared.