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RESTORING HOPE CL, by Cornel West
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'Cornel West is one of the most authentic, brilliant, prophetic, and healing voices in America today' --Marian Wright Edelman
Nine of America's most influential artists, scholars, and public figures-Maya Angelou, Bill Bradley, Harry Belafonte, Patricia Williams, Wynton Marsalis, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, James Washington, James Forbes, and Haki Madhubuti-talk with Cornel West about their political awareness, art and politics, and the possibility of hope among African-Americans today.
- Sales Rank: #2605308 in Books
- Published on: 1997-09-25
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .0" h x .0" w x .0" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 256 pages
Amazon.com Review
Harvard professor Cornel West issues "a kind of wake-up call to each of us,"asserting that "Black America sits on the brink of collective disaster." In this collection of eight question-and-answer interviews, West seeks ideas for inspiring and reinvigorating black America. Actor-singer Harry Belafonte talks about his influences; politician Bill Bradley urges each of us to confront race in our daily lives; poet Maya Angelou makes the point that "one other word for hope is love"; and trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis discusses both music and the need to rebuild black communities. The book is a project of the Obsidian Society, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to improving conditions for black Americans. Profits from the book will benefit the organization.
From Library Journal
How is hope created and maintained? In his Race Matters (LJ 3/15/93), West said that there was an "eclipse of hope and the collapse of meaning in much of black America." With this book he returns to the topic of hope and meaning in the African American community by conducting a series of interviews with leading politicians, writers, musicians, journalists, and scholars, including Bill Bradley, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Wynton Marsalis, and Maya Angelou. Each talks of how hope can be created and nurtured through the strength of the traditional black church, the love of close families, and the experience of shared cultural history and traditions. The interviews?thoughtful, intimate, and intriguing?make the reader believe that hope in black America can indeed be restored. Recommended for all libraries.?Nora Harris, Marin Cty. Free Lib., San Rafael, Cal.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
West was justly praised for his provocative study Race Matters (1993), an exploration of the nature of racial discourse in contemporary America. Those looking for the same kind of probing and original explorations of race in these transcripts of West's conversations about race with, among others, Maya Angelou, Harry Belafonte, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault, will probably be disappointed. West notes in his introduction that ``a specter of despair haunts late twentieth-century America . . . Wealth, inequality and class polarization are escalating.'' To counter this, he argues, the times require those willing to ``speak our fallible truths, expose the vicious lies, and bear our imperfect witness.'' The problem here is that, as is usually the case with conversations, the quality of testimony and thought varies greatly. Those familiar with, for instance, Maya Angelou's ideas will find little new here. There are moving moments, such as Belafonte's call for viewing struggle not as ``some harmful, negative thing'' but as an action of great dignity, power, and beauty, but too often the things said are unsurprising and without much impact. A mixed bag, best for West's typically salty and precise comments throughout. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Like a good conversation....
By A Customer
This work was like a good conversation. A bit pithy and cliched at times, it raises many important issues within the black American diaspora yet does not present any specific solutions. The reader definitely gains the sense that he or she is actually engaged in conversation with Dr. West and the other individual; however, just when the reader is about to put his two cents in, the chapter ends. The conversations with Pat Williams was the most enlightening. I guess, one could perceive the levity of the this work as optimism, a quality that earns the four stars. Definitely, a nightstand piece that preps you for a solution-oriented mind.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting Look Into The Future of Black America
By Alex Thanos
In this book sociologist, Cornel West, decided to interview prominent figures in America in order to get their feelings on the future of black America. In this book West interviews Maya Angleou, Harry Belafonte, and Bill Bradley just to name a few. West deals with all aspects of black culture. He deals with the church, music, and literature all key in understanding black thought and history. Each person included the book has a unique perspective on what direction blacks are heading for in the future. This book's main thought is that even though black poverty is an American problem, blacks have risen up from hard times in the past and will continue to be a major part of this country.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
The two Buzzards high out on a limb think that Hope is not a Program?
By Herbert L Calhoun
If our history has taught us anything, it is that democracy itself is nothing if not a rich program for action, not just for hope - whether that hope is full, empty, or audacious. Democracy also is not for the faint-hearted or the perpetual wishful thinker. In short, democracy is not for those scared to act. And the forces of racial evil, inequality and injustice, our constant adversary, as the contributors to this volume make so clear, are not in the business of "harvesting hope" as their only program to roll back any gains that we make towards equal justice. To go along with hope, our adversaries, also always have as their companion an "action program" to defeat equality and justice.
Is hope forever going to be our only action program?
The asymmetry, between their "hope plus action," and our "hope without any action," is so glaring that it screams at us from beneath this veil of empty mourning, singing, marching, praying and wishful thinking, to do something, anything! And as quiet as it is kept, one of the most important allies of our racist adversaries' action program is us, who are constantly encouraged by our adversaries to do nothing but mourn, sing, pray, march and hope? And then when we finish mourning, singing, praying, marching and hoping, they want us to do it again. And we do.
This cultural leitmotif for non-action has been repeated so often that now every time I see a fat black woman singing a gospel like Mahalia Jackson, I get mad; I want to puke, because I know that that is the calling card for non-action, the ultimate black symbol of retreat, a cue to "tuck your tail and run back into the Church for another dose of hope." Maybe that is why "we" are constantly retreating and "they" are constantly on the attack -- and in the process it is why they are still racking up victory after victory?
Mr. Belafonte, who leads off these interviews, is one of my heroes, and whenever he speaks, the world must learn to listen. His wisdom and experience about this country runs so deep and are so profound that they never miss the mark. For instance, it is true as he says that we have more blacks and minorities with titles, but that don't give a damn about the black condition than we ever had before. I can list a few of them: Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Bill Cosby, John Yoo, Linda Chavez, Clarence Thomas, Ed Perkins, Herman Cain, and Barack Obama -- as the ones that immediately come to mind.
These people did not fight in the trenches of the Civil Rights movement, or for justice and equality, they just waited around like buzzards out on a limb, to help pick up the pieces, and pick up the pieces they did. They are the living legacy, that provide the current weak and brittle foundation that we now call our "multicultural nation?" But I agree with Dr. King" with their moral cowardliness, we have done little more than "integrate into a burning house." Amid all the destruction and confusion, and moral cowardliness, black culture has been neutered; it has lost its cultural base; young people are lost, and as a result have become the "entertainment culture;" and the churches have become "cash-and-carry" megadollar enterprises. Mr. Belafonte is right again: we have not just lost our culture and our vision, but we have also lost our moral authority and even our humanity!
Dr. West is another of my heroes. He is that rare mixture of Existentialism and Christianity, a so-called self-described, Chekhovian Christian. Sometimes I think he should become more in touch with the existentialist side of his being and less with his Christian side (as he has done here). For he knows as well as any one, that hope is not a program. But rather than say that to us straight up, he keeps mimicking Obama and pushing this empty framework of hope off on us? Yet, his own life is not one fashioned out of hope; it is filled with "committed action!" Why then is he still selling us these "hope Wolf tickets," when what we really need is committed action?
Is committed action not what Democracy was made for, and demands of us? Indeed, if hope were a program, then black people would be "riding high" already, because despite all the despair in our communities described in this book there are no more hopeful people on earth than American black people. We do not need to incessantly be encouraged to be hopeful, it is a natural part of our DNA, how else could we have survived on this racist continent for 400 years without it? What we lack is "follow through" with a committed action program.
Why then are so many people still singing "Obama's hope song" and advocating more and more hope instead of what we really need which is more action? Plus, we now have in the White House today, the self-declared world champion of all hope: our first mulatto President, Mr. Barack Obama. We have seen where his audacious brand of hope has led us: directly back to the future, back to yet another cycle of mourning, singing, praying, marching and hoping. He only shows up in Irish bars. I am still "hoping" to see him arrive in one of the many black bars in the inner city? Hope on ... huh?
No wonder our racist adversaries have been able to use him like a heavy punching bag. He has been on the ropes in his "rope-a-dope for hope" posture for almost four years. Now that it is election time again, he is back out in the center of the ring bouncing on his toes like Rush Limbaugh. But by now we know the real deal: Obama's hope is like Sarah Palin's "bridge to nowhere:" It does not include an action plan, but a plan to pre-emptively rollover and genuflect in the face of the power of our Republican adversaries. And then Obama's hope is to patiently wait for the next election cycle, where empty-handed he again can come center stage and puff up his chest and crow progressive themes like a Banny rooster. He does this all the while sending robo-calls seeking more campaign donations with false messages about how liberal and progressive he is, and about how the Republican boogey man will get us unless we support him again? In this regard, he and Mitt Romney are soul mates: moral chameleons and pygmy politicians of opposite colors.
Remember the old joke about the two buzzards sitting high out on a limb waiting for something to die. Impatient, one buzzard says to the other: "To hell with waiting, I am going to go down there and kill something." That my friend, is the difference between a black Christian and a black existentialist, between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright, between Harry Belafonte and Condoleezza Rice. One will sit out on a limb forever waiting for his rewards in the next dimension. This life to him is only a rehearsal for the next world, the "real life." Obama's hope program" is enough for this life.
The others, like Mr. Belafonte and Dr. West, will take their lives into their own hands and try to make something of them. Again, Mr. Belafonte is right: groups must take responsibility for themselves. Politicians, no matter their skin color, will sell us all down the drain.
There is a little Barack Obama and a little Jeremiah Wright in each of us. We have waited, sung, mourned, marched and prayed "too long" and our cause is "too just" to wait any longer. It is time to stop turning the other cheek, and start turning all this hope into an action program. That is what Mr. Belafonte did his entire life. He flew down to Selma, Alabama with a hundred thousand dollars of his own money in a briefcase to help Dr. King survive during one of King's most trying times. He was not high out on an isolated limb waiting for something to happen. He was more an existentialist than a Christian, actually on his way to save a Christian. Unlike Mr. Obama, Mr. Belafonte audaciously put his hope into an action plan and executed it to perfection.
As a survivor of the Civil Rights era, there are some ugly truths that must be told but were not told in this very uplifting book. We blacks must eventually come to grips with them all. One is that during the heady era of the Civil Rights Movement, when John Lewis was getting his head split open in Selma, 98% of blacks did less than nothing. I say less than nothing only to emphasize that many of those who were active, were in fact actively helping the other side. For instance, we now know that on that balcony in Memphis at the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. King died, at least one of his own entourage (the one without a tie on -- that was the FBI's signal used to identify him) was a paid black FBI informer, who helped set up Dr. King's murder? I remember well how Ms. Early, a black Registrar at AM&N college, turned all the names of those of us who sat-in at the lunch counters in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, to the local white police?
Are we to continue to ignore these aspects of our existence? As well, unless we forget, at least in my hometown, the vanguard of the Civil Rights movement was initially made up of young white college students on vacation from the North, many of them Jewish. Black middle-class parents, almost to a man and woman, were encouraging us not to get involved, as it might put their jobs in jeopardy? The sad truth is that there was nearly as much angst in the black community about how the Civil Rights movement might affect the racist status quo as there was in the racist white communities? What these parents were "hoping for" was that we either succeeded quickly, or else got out of the movement in time to save their jobs? That is the kind of strategic but morally bankrupt hope that many black people still engage in. I did not make this up, this actually happened. And it is sad to say that this is as much a part of the Civil Rights legacy as are the big scars on John Lewis' scalp.
We cannot assert, insinuate or hope our way into the hearts of the racists who oppose our every move. While we diddle with hope, they are in the active rollback mode, and are succeeding -- using every lever of power and action to their advantage that there is. Right before our eyes, the whole Republican Party has morphed into a "legitimized racist anti-black Party" literally a "white Citizens Council, writ large," all out in the open and all under the convenient rubric of "being conservative." What they have, my friend is an "action program:" not hope.
Our only response to this national challenge has been to either join them, or put our faith in another political Messiah peddling hope? Barack Obama has made it clear in everyway he knows how, that he does not want to be our Messiah, yet we cling to him anyway? Gratuitously and mockingly he has called us "professional liberals," and shakes his fingers in the faces of all black men telling us we are all irresponsible, and telling us to get off the couches and out of our house shoes, and too stop whining? These gratuitous insults incidentally came from the same politician that Rev Wright had already warned us about: as being just another "Chicago politician." And so far, Rev Wright has been right. (no pun intended). This is the man that we supported with 95% of our votes in the last election? Now, boy that support was some kind of hope?
I understand that Dr. West's Obsidian Society has an action component to it, and that some blacks do "get it," but I am too old a buzzard to keep on sitting out here on this limb alone waiting for the racist to die. It is clear now to me that if I don't act, it is I who will die before they will. Five stars.
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