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With West, this process of celebrity making is shifting into high gear. The message on West's answering machine at Princeton refers those interested in arranging a speaking engagement to a high-powered New York booking agency. Along with Michael Lerner, editor of the liberal Jewish magazine Tikkun, he received a $100,000 advance for a joint book on black-Jewish tensions, an almost unheard-of sum for a scholarly work.
Pressure is building on West to provide instant answers to every racial question, whether he has thought it through or not. For example, after a talk at a bookstore in Berkeley, California, he was confronted by Cherie Chichester-Glass, a veteran elementary school teacher. "I've read your book and listened to you talk," said the teacher. "Hell, how do we put this into practice in the classroom?" West replied with a rambling soliloquy about the need to set priorities and then call on the experts to fill in the details. His response left Chichester-Glass exasperated. "I think he's a man of prophetic strengths," she said, "but it's also obvious he's never set foot in an elementary school classroom."
Indeed, despite the freshness of his diagnosis of social problems, West's prescriptions for curing them can be vague and hopelessly Utopian. He advocates a "politics of conversion" in which blacks and other oppressed people would "affirm themselves as human beings, no longer viewing their bodies, minds and souls through white lenses and believing themselves capable of taking control of their own destinies." That would translate into a new surge of grass-roots activism, the building of coalitions between now competing groups, and "large-scale public intervention to ensure access to basic social goods." In other words, critics charge, reconstituting the 1960s.
Some friends fear the hoopla will prove impossible for West to resist. "You've got to understand one thing about Cornel," says a colleague. "There's a part of him that wants to be the next H.N.I.C. It's not just white folks holding him up." Says Cone: "One of the best ways to destroy someone is to expose and promote him. It's very hard to be critical of a system that makes a hero out of you."
West admits he shares his friends' misgivings. "The same folks who want you to be a public intellectual also want you to be an expert, a visionary, a technician and leader on the ground all at the same time. You can't do all those things and do them well," he says. "People will try to shape you into an image of yourself that in no way coincides with your image of yourself. It's a danger that might be realized, even though I'm fighting against it as hard as I can."
The time could come, West says, when he will withdraw from the public stage back into the ivory tower to think through the practical implications of his ideas, while sustaining himself with books, the black church and sweet soul music. Meanwhile, friends say, West has read biographies of the great public intellectuals of the past -- Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, Walt Whitman, Matthew Arnold -- to prepare for the highly visible role that is being thrust upon him, not entirely against his will. After all, if a philosopher like West can't be philosophical about success, who can be?