Tag Archives: Anderson Cooper

Cornel West: We’ve got a love the world can’t take away

Anderson Cooper tears up over Cornel West's speech on Floyd family ...

Cornel West often inspires me. He is a man with prophetic imagination and he doesn’t mind speaking Jesus into the Jesus-resisting box of American media. The other day I tuned into a segment he made with Anderson Cooper on CNN. I was so encouraged by it, I decided to make a transcript for you.

I hope you will catch the Jesus West appreciates in the George Floyd funeral. I hope you will applaud the wonderful example of Floyd’s extended family and their church as they resolutely follow Jesus and choose love like the black church has done so well throughout its difficult history. I hope you will note the alternativity West highlights and suggests as the way to the future.

Circle of Hope has been agreeing with him since its inception. But West may say our thoughts spontaneously better than we say them after a lot of thought!

Here’s the interview:

Cooper: [At the funeral of George Floyd] what was going through your mind and heart?

West: It was a heavy day my brother, and yet I was buoyed up. Because I saw in the hearts and minds and souls, not just of the Floyd Family, but of the church, of the music, the preaching, a love. Not one reference to hatred or revenge, it was all about love and justice. It’s in the great tradition of the best of black people, a people who have been hated chronically, systemically, for 400 years but have taught the world so much about love and how to love. You saw John Coltrane’s Love Supreme in that church service. You saw the love of the children in Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On?, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. You saw Mama, Raisin in the Sun, a Lorraine Hansberry.

White people ought to give black people a standing ovation that after 400 years of being terrorized we refuse to create a black version of the Ku Klux Klan. After 400 years of being traumatized, we want to dish out healers. That’s Frederick Douglass, that’s Martin King, that’s Curtis Mayfield, that’s Fanny Lou Hamer. What is it about these black people, so thoroughly subjugated but want freedom for everybody? That’s a grand gift to the whole world, right at the bowels at the center of an American Empire that has enslaved, Jim Crowed, Jane Crowed, lynched them, still dishing out these love warriors.

That’s what I saw in the Floyd Family and I was buoyed up. It reminded me of the West family; it reminded me of Irene and Cliff and Cynthia and Sharol. That’s where we come from: Shiloh Baptist Church. You can put us down but you are not going to put us down in such a way that we are going to hate you because you become the point of reference. No, we are going to put a smile on Larcenia’s face. That’s his Mama. That’s where he is right now. He’s lying right next to Sister Larcenia, whose way of engaging the world was embracing it with all of the love.

Now I’m not saying we don’t have black thugs and gangsters. I’m talking about the best of our tradition. Because brother, brother, brother, if we had created a black version of the Ku Klux Klan there’d been a civil war every generation with terrorist cells in every hood. And that’s what Brother Trump needs to understand because it looks like he’s trying to push us to the race war. But the good news is if there was a race war, we’ve got a whole lot of white brothers and sisters on our side now. That makes a big difference. And we’ve got black folk and red folk and indigenous people and Asians and so forth. This is a matter of integrity and honesty, a matter of justice and love. They kept it on the high ground. That was a beautiful thing.

But I did break, though, brother, when I saw those brothers marching in, like the ushers in Shiloh Baptist Church and pick up that coffin and go and walk out. My daughter was there. Couldn’t take it man. I’ve been at this for over fifty years. And yet I got to bounce back. And I will bounce back. Because we’ve got a love the world can’t take away. The world, white supremacy may make being black a crime. But we refuse to get in the gutter. We’re going to go down swinging like Ella Fitzgerald, Muhammad Ali in the name of love and justice. We’re doing it for brother Wyatt, we’re doing it for my daughter, we’re doing it for the Asians, we’re doing it for the whole world because that’s the only hope of the world. And that kind of love is always tragic-comic and cruciform. You’ve got to get ready to get crucified with that kind of love, and yet you’ve got to keep dishing it out generation after generation after generation.

The Floyd Family lifted up that spiritual moral banner in the midst of a moment when we’ve got all these lies and crimes, be it Pentagon, or Wall Street, or White House, or even congress itself. We know they don’t represent the best of this country. It’s just that the best of this country right now seems to be so powerless. But in the streets of our nation we see this multiracial, multicultural, multigender, different sexual orientations, different religions – Jewish brothers and sisters holding up the Rabbi Abraham Heschel, Catholics holding up Dorothy Day, the Protestants holding up William Coffin and Lydia Maria Child and the agnostics and the others holding up the Norman Thomases and the Edward Saids and others. That was my mixed wrestling with what I saw today, my brother. And I think we’ve got hope in the form of motion but we’ve got to get ready for the backlash. Got to get ready for the neo-Fascist clampdown. Because it’s coming. It is coming.

Cooper: yeah. I’ve had the, um. I’ve got to say your…I’ve never had the honor of taking one of your classes. But, uh, I feel like I’m a student of yours. And I learn lessons every time you speak. And, um [sigh] I just think it’s [breaks down]

West: No. We’re in it together brother. And the beautiful thing about tears: Socrates never cries, but Jeremiah does and so does Jesus. We cries because we care; we’re concerned. It’s not about political correctness. It’s not about self-righteousness. We cry because we are not numb on the inside. We don’t have a chilliness of soul and a coldness of mind and heart. We cry because we connect. But then we must have a vision that includes all of us and we must have an analysis of power that’s honest. In terms of the greed especially at the top, in terms of the hatred running amok, in terms of the corruption – not just White House and congress, it’s in too many churches, too many mosques, too many synagogues, too many universities, too many civic associations and then the greed in us. You and I talk about this all the time, right? The gangster in us. Because we’re wrestling with this day, by saying that’s why we need each other brother.

Cooper: You know, you said something…I follow you when you aren’t on my program, I follow you wherever you go and I read what you have to say. And you said something a couple of days ago on somebody else’s program. You said, “Can we hold on to integrity, honesty and decency?” and it seems to me, as you’ve said, that there are a lot of people who have remained silent and have just been watching this. And as you said, there’s going to be a backlash and that’s something to be prepared for. Because I think there are a lot of people just waiting on the sidelines, waiting to kind of to start to chip away at this and cause doubt and divide people. But I think that is so important that at its core, this is about integrity. and honesty and decency and fortitude and courage which are two other things you’ve spoken a lot about.

West: Absolutely, especially the fortitude and courage. We must have the integrity, honesty and decency — not purity, no one of us is pure or pristine, we all have our spots and our wrinkles as it were. But it’s the courage and the fortitude. That’s what’s necessary, the backbone. We don’t need lukewarm folk, we don’t need summer soldiers. We need all seasoned love warriors. That’s the tradition that we saw represented in that church at the spiritual level. And my dear Brother Sharpton, I love Sharpton, we come out of the same black church tradition, and we fight all the time, but we come together and so forth. He was powerful.

But I always want to connect the police power and the police crimes with the Wall Street power and the Wall Street crimes. We live in a culture in which people feel as if they can do and say anything and get away with it with no accountability, no answerability, and no responsibility. We saw on Wall Street in terms of all that insider trading, market manipulation and fraudulent activity and predatory lending. How many people went to jail? Zero. Trump will say anything, do anything, thinks he will get away with it. Pentagon can drop drones on precious folk in Yemen, Pakistan and others and think they can get away with it. We have to have accountability. Our politician will seemingly tell us anything in front of our faces and we know what’s going on behind closed doors with their tie to big money. Just be honest. That’s what integrity is.

Malcolm X used to say, “Sincerity is my only credentials.”  That’s why we love Malcolm. We did not always agree with Malcolm. But he said what he meant and he meant what he said. You see what I mean? That’s what we need. We need that in our lives. We need that in our communities. We need that in our civilization. And we need that as a critique of the worst of the American empire, the worst of American white supremacy, the worst of American predatory capitalism, the worst of American patriarchy and the worst of American homophobic and transphobic, any ideology that loses sight of the humanity of folk. I don’t care if they’re Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, Jewish or whatever, it’s got to be all the way down. You know, the English word human comes from the Latin word humando which mean burial. And that’s what we saw today. We saw the humanity. Because they were ascribing significance to this precious person made in the image of God whose body was now undergoing extinction and his soul ascending.

I am buoyed up, as well, by the thought of all the good people I know personally who are waking up, changing their minds, and changing their behavior. I am buoyed up by our church, full of people eager to make a difference and foment transformation. I am buoyed up by the thought the evils of the American way of life might have a collective knee on their necks, even while I prepare for the backlash – like Trump trying to go to Tulsa on Juneteenth. Lord help us join the Floyds and their church and demonstrate an alternative, an example of which we have the best of the black church to thank.

Anderson Cooper and Truth flummoxed by Trump

Anderson Cooper was flummoxed as he sat in the middle of the fact food-fight he organized for the evening of the worldwide women’s march. The scheduled fight was happening. But he seemed upset that it was a fight between facts and assertions contrary to the facts (or as Kellyanne Conway later named them: “alternative facts“), otherwise known as lies.

For some reason, Donald Trump could not control the itch under his thin skin when he got to CIA headquarters to make amends. He patted his own back for his election victory; then he misrepresented the  size of his inauguration day crowd — he said 1.5 million people showed up, which is not true. What made it worse is that he was exposing his inner dialogue while standing on one of the holy sites of American civil religion, the CIA wall of sacrifice. People noticed his lack of genuflection and said so. So he went even further. Donald Trump told his newly-minted press secretary to get to the podium and keep talking about the size of the crowd. Sean Spicer said that Mr. Trump had drawn “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration,”  which is not true, as were several other assertions he made.

Any casual observer (like me) could tell that the crowd was smaller than past inaugurations. A NY Times reporter tweeted a comparison shot with one of Obama’s to prove it.

evidence of lies

What flummoxed Anderson and what interests me is the reply to all this hubbub by the Trump-supporter on his panel. She waved to the imaginary crowd of regular Americans behind the camera and said, “They believe Sean Spicer, not you.”

Anderson said, “But the facts are the facts.”

She said, contemptuously, “Nobody cares.”

Does nobody really care about the truth?

Nobody cares! I think she is mostly right — even when it comes to my circle. For instance, we had a procedural tempest in a teapot last week among our church’s leaders, and I have to admit, as far as the general population of our church, it is very likely that nobody would care if we followed our agreements or not. Does anybody care?

It is an era when truth is what you care about. If you want to call climate change a hoax, fine. You want to have alternate definitions of words, fine. If you want to say you had 1.5 million people at your inauguration, fine, as long as you are willing to fight to the death about it. And who is eager to fight with the latest narcissist about their latest lie?

My mind immediately went to John 8, one of the least-appreciated chapters in the gospels, in my opinion — but read it for yourself, of course. There Jesus calls his opponents fellow-travelers with the devil because they believe the devil’s lies. He told them, “You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out his desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, refusing to uphold the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, because he is a liar and the father of lies.”

The Lord’s whole argument with these opponents (who will, eventually, get him killed, as he implied) is based on the fact that they can’t hear him because they don’t know God. He is just revealing God to them. But they believe the lies instead. It is like He is speaking a foreign language when he tells them the truth.

Are we committed to a democracy of lies?

These days, such an argument is even harder to have with Jesus’ opponents, since their philosophy of truth basically says that their assertions are equal with anyone else’s, and it is the majority (or those in power) who legalize what truth is.  What the Bible says, is just another truth. What the woman on Anderson’s panel might say, if Anderson told her about Jesus, is, “Nobody cares.” And that would count as a televisable argument.

I admit that President Trump’s lying already bores me to tears. I am having trouble caring. I loved the pink-eared women getting out all over the world to say, “No” to his character and to the threat of his potential actions. But I have a feeling that in a few weeks they will also lose steam in the face of the chief liar and his cabal of billionaires and be tempted to watch fantasy people fight the power on Netflix. I hope I am wrong. Whether they fight the power or not, I hope our collective boredom has some of the same resignation as Jesus. He told the powers, If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? Whoever is from God hears the words of God. The reason you do not hear them is that you are not from God.Trump is just more of the same, only worse.

Elizabeth confronting the lies.

When Elizabeth Warren, the anti-Trump, got up to speak at the gigantic Boston protest, Saturday, she recited her latest version of the eleven commandments of progressivism. Most of them make sense to me, politically and even morally, but it was not like she was speaking from God. I was excited, but that will pass. My spirit was not moved by the Spirit, and that is what I long for. I was not moved to save democracy with her, yet another millionaire supposedly fighting for the downtrodden.

But I woke up today moved to listen to Jesus again and see what he really wants us to do in the middle of a world that is even more attuned to the devil’s lies than usual. I hope I am bored because I just don’t want to learn the native language of the elite.  Come to think of it, Elizabeth Warren reminds me of my ninth-grade French teacher. I didn’t learn French, either.