In the Book of Genesis, Jacob wrestles with an angel who persistently overpowers him. But as dawn arrives, Jacob’s resilience finds a new name bestowed on him: “Israel.” This name has taken on various etymological interpretations, including “One who wrestles or struggles with God” and “One who strives or prevails with God.”
As Cornel West recites the story of Jacob wrestling the angel as an allegory for hope, the irony is not lost on us that the philosopher, intellectual and 2024 presidential candidate is saying this immediately after an appearance at a “Millions March for Palestine” event in Oak Lawn. After all, Dr. West did just speak at an event where Israel was described as an apartheid and genocidal state.
West’s solidarity with Palestinians and criticisms of Israel's foreign policy are well-documented. At that same rally on Saturday, West called members of President Joe Biden's administration “enablers of genocide.”
“Israel’s been getting away with it for so long,” West says while sitting in the back of an SUV en route to his hotel in Northeast Dallas. He'll be in his hotel room only briefly before another event in Plano that evening. “Israel has been getting away with it probably because the United States has been protecting it for so long, and now the whole world takes notice.”
He continues, “I’m against killing innocent people no matter who they are. ... [A] Jewish life and a Palestinian life have equal preciousness.”
West departs from traditional pacifism in the sense that he believes combat and self-defense are justified in exigent circumstances. Examples of such circumstances, West explains, include fighting against South African apartheid and the Holocaust.
This raises the question: What about the Jewish people who don’t have anything to gain from loss of Palestinian life but still feel emotionally invested in the Israel we see today? Even if one regards Israel as a genocidal and oppressive regime, Jewish people have their own history of being on the receiving end of genocide and oppression, so how does one reckon with this unique nexus?
“It’s a complicated story,” West says. “The very thing you want to achieve, I want too. I believe in ‘Never Again.’ No Holocaust for anybody. But if you think that the only way you can be safe is to have an apartheid state, then that’s what the Afrikaners thought. That’s what the white supremacists thought in America.”
“Israel has been getting away with it probably because the United States has been protecting it for so long ..." – Cornel West
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A Love Supreme
West has never underestimated the unique power and responsibility that come with being an artist.“Any time a civilization or an empire is reaching its nadir, the artists play a very important role for truth-telling,” he said in a June 9, 2022, episode of Real Time with Bill Maher.
This viewpoint is so deeply embedded into West’s being that discourse surrounding political issues will usually lead to mentions of Curtis Mayfield, Billie Holiday or Richard Pryor.
“I come from a blues people,” West explains as we are leaving Oak Lawn. “The blues is not optimistic or pessimistic at all. Blues is about hope.” He cites as examples Holiday’s “Good Morning Heartache” and “Strange Fruit,” and John Coltrane’s “Alabama.”
His affinity for Coltrane is such that the jazz artist’s masterpiece A Love Supreme will often be mentioned in tandem with West’s political, moral and spiritual discussions. So, naturally, we ask a question that has been a source of great mystery for nearly 60 years: How can Coltrane give such a profound expression of gratitude and spiritual edification despite only saying three words throughout the entire record?
Quietly, West sings those three words using the exact same inflections Coltrane used: “A love supreme… A love supreme… A love supreme…” After this impromptu Carpool Karaoke session, he says:
“Part of it is that first, he had composed the greatest lament in American culture.
“You’ve got ‘Acknowledgement,’ he says, referring to the title of one of the album's four tracks. "Acknowledgement means an unflinching encounter with evil. A lot of limitations … come with that. When you confront evil, brother, you got a lot of tears. And there’s no such thing as a love supreme without deep tears. So lamentation is there, intertwined with ‘Resolve,’ ‘Pursuit’ and the gratefulness – the ‘Psalms.’ So you’ve got all four dimensions of what love is about. And love is a very dangerous thing. It’s a difficult thing – it’s the most sublime thing, but it’s the most difficult thing. So he doesn’t really need lyrics in terms of the words. Because he’s speaking through the sounds; he’s speaking through the notes … he’s speaking through all of the cadences and the polyrhythms and Elvin [Jones] on the drums and McCoy [Tyner] on the piano and Jimmy Garrison on the bass.”
As the musical discussions continue, West cites J. Cole, Dead Prez and Immortal Technique as more contemporary artists he admires. Asked about the current generation of music makers and how well they have risen to the challenge of truth-telling, he offers, “This generation has certain impediments that are more intense than my day, because this generation is living in the most commodified culture in the history of the world. It’s all about money and spectacle, you see. It’s about titillation and stimulation, whereas my generation had commodification but it wasn’t as intense, so they could talk more about caring and nurturing.” (The caring and nurturing, West adds, is still present in current generations, but the excesses of unfettered capitalism have silenced it.)
To mark the occasion of being in Dallas, West mentions Erykah Badu, whom he calls an “artistic giant.” Strangely enough, they have never met.
Hitching a Ride on the Third-Party Campaign Trail
On July 4, 1856, Frederick Douglass wrote an opinion piece in his newspaper Frederick Douglass’ Paper, endorsing third-party presidential candidate Gerrit Smith. Smith was running under the Liberty Party; the three establishment candidates – James Buchanan, John C. Fremont and Millard Fillmore – were running on the Democratic, Republican and Know Nothing tickets, respectively. This led to lively debate in Republican circles: Fremont was antislavery, and his two opponents were either supportive of slavery or committed to begrudgingly enforcing the laws legitimizing it. So why was this a difficult choice?
Turns out, Fremont was not an abolitionist insofar as he didn’t want to abolish slavery in the slave states but merely wanted to keep it from expanding. So Douglass endorsed a candidate who was. (Weeks later, he did ultimately endorse Fremont and would later align himself with the Republican Party, even when he expressed disappointment in Abraham Lincoln.)
This historical account of Douglass’ third party endorsement became the focus when the topic of West’s 2024 presidential run (and the concerns people have expressed over third-party candidates diluting votes in favor of the opposition) came up. As West describes it, Douglass faced a Hobson’s choice: no matter the outcome, slavery would continue. The Hobson’s choice West describes is one between a neofascist complicit in genocide and a corporatist neoliberal complicit in genocide.
When asked for his response to people who would say Donald Trump is worse than Biden on the issue of Israel (after all, it was Trump who moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem), West offers:
“If you’re choosing between a gangster like Trump and Genocidal Joe, how do you make a choice?” West says. “It’s like asking a woman, ‘Will you vote for this rapist, or this serial violator of women?’”
After letting the Frederick Douglass metaphor sink in, West explains that a concerted effort to get him ballot access in Texas is gaining traction.
“If we get Texas, I’m going to sing a duet with Erykah Badu.”
