Cornel West in Review: Leading Scholars Reconsider his Theories on Race

In this collection from Barbara Will, prominent academics reexamine Cornel West's philosophical contributions on racial, existential, and related sociopolitical afflictions, and his proposed remedies.

Posted on March 28, 2025 in Featured Review

Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope: New Essays on the Work of Cornel West, ed. by Barbara Will. Pennsylvania, 2023. 224p, 9781512824070, $39.95, 9781512824087

Barack Obama’s election to the White House in 2008 gave rise to a faint glimmer of hope in some quarters that the United States, at last, had begun to evolve into a post-racial society. The backdrop to this sentiment was the nation’s long history of white supremacy and racism against people of color (POC), which need not be rehashed here as countless scholars have explored this topic already. Cornel West is among those contemporary scholars who have engaged these issues by critiquing society, beginning with its very racial and social architecture. West’s bestseller Race Matters (1993) is a series of critical discussions on racial, existential, and related sociopolitical afflictions affecting society with a prophetic-sounding call for corrective measures to address them.

Against this background, Barbara Will’s edited volume Prophet Leadership and Visionary Hope is an interdisciplinary volume assembled from a three-day conference at Dartmouth College in 2018 to reevaluate Race Matters in honor of the book’s twenty-fifth anniversary and in view of contemporary events. As Will (Dartmouth College) writes in her introduction, invited participants, who hail from a variety of academic disciplines, gathered “to reflect on the significance of Race Matters … [and] to speak both to the text … and to the larger issues it raises in the present day” (p. 5).

In the years since the book’s publication, American society has witnessed a resurgence of white supremacy and racism, and the economic disparities between white people and POC have continued to grow. Obama’s election inaugurated the Tea Party movement, heralded by their call to “take back [their] country.” Donald Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016 ignited the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacist protestors blazed tiki torches while chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” During this period, there has been an increase in the extrajudicial killings of Black men and women, including Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbrey, and George Floyd, among many others. Republican politicians and conservative stalwarts are now determined to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives across the nation (most notably in Florida and Tennessee). Today, there are even attempts to rewrite American history with local school boards mandating that canonical literary works about slavery, race(ism), and social injustice be removed from public school libraries, such as Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970)—some conservatives even deny the history of chattel slavery. These challenges warrant a fresh look at Race Matters, and Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope is that fresh look.

Given the disappointment and dread African Americans have experienced in the United States since slavery—what West himself describes as a “collapse of meaning”—Afropessimism takes the view that there is nothing to be hoped for in this nation, notwithstanding what African Americans do.

p. 8

The book is divided into three sections, consisting of eight chapters and an afterword by West. Part 1 elaborates on West’s intellectual influences, including Deweyan pragmatism, Du Boisian race consciousness, the Black prophetic Christian tradition, and Kierkegaardian existentialism. These culminate in West’s self-definition as a prophetic pragmatist. Part 2 focuses on West’s examination of nihilism and his critique of Afropessimism. Given the disappointment and dread African Americans have experienced in the United States since slavery—what West himself describes as a “collapse of meaning” (p. 8)—Afropessimism takes the view that there is nothing to be hoped for in this nation, notwithstanding what African Americans do. In response to this deterministically bleak outlook, West proffers an optimistic approach grounded in hope, a love ethic, and a politics of conversion. The four essays in this section, particularly Brandon Terry’s, defend West’s contra-Afropessimist outlook. Finally, part 3 concerns West’s engagement with social justice that derives from racial hierarchization and its attendant economic and social inequities.

The remainder of this review will comment on two of the essays this reviewer found particularly fascinating and representative of the book’s very high quality: chapter 2, “Race Matters and US American Democracy,” by Lucius Outlaw, Jr., and chapter 3, “Nihilism, Pessimism, and Tragic Hope,” by Brandon Terry. While all of the essays are of equally high quality, these two essays’ respective foci on West’s treatment of Du Bois and his treatment of nihilism and response to Afropessimism are particularly engaging.

The underlying theme here is to salvage democracy within a racially hierarchized society.

Outlaw advances a very poignant critique of West, starting with West’s declaration that Plato and Du Bois posed “the most fundamental challenges to [West’s] basic aim in life,” namely, to strip white supremacy of its authority and legitimacy (qtd. in Will, p. 36). For West, Plato’s critique of Athenian democracy as corruptible by ignorance was a failure, and Du Bois’s critique of white supremacy in the democratic polity of the United States also fell short. West’s self-avowed mission, then, is to remedy the shortcomings of these two intellectual giants in their respective quests. The underlying theme here is to salvage democracy within a racially hierarchized society. Yet, as Outlaw rightly notes, it is not democracy that West engages in Race Matters but racial issues. Specifically, West focuses on how racial issues have been central to America’s past and still matter in the present. In this regard, West’s aim is no different from Du Bois’s. The comparison is apropos given their differences—West critiques Du Bois as abstract, elitist, and undemocratic and considers Du Bois’s quest out of touch with most Black people’s daily realities. By contrast, West considers himself populist, democratic, and attuned to the aspirations of the proverbial “wretched of the earth” (p. 10).

Taking profound exception to West’s critique of Du Bois, Outlaw offers a forceful, blistering, and devastating counterattack. To begin, Outlaw points out that West makes exaggerated and exorbitant claims about how his own pronouncements as a public intellectual will lead to political action without specifying how. As Outlaw sarcastically puts it, West’s declared aim to strip white supremacy of its authority and legitimacy “is inflated by ambition that carries [West] 250 miles on the wrong side of humility and is not informed by tempered self-understanding, which leaves [West] deep in the badlands of hubris” (p. 39). Has West succeeded where Du Bois failed? One need only consider West’s recent failed presidential bid to assess the practical efficacy of his political pronouncements.

To reiterate, West’s pronouncements have not stripped white supremacy of its intransigence and legitimacy, nor resurrected democracy in the US.

It may be tempting to read Outlaw’s critique as part of an ad hominem against West within the realm of the nihilism and failure of the Black political and social leadership that West discusses in the context of America’s racial dynamics. But this objection misses that West set himself up as a unique figure with the grandiose, even messianic, aim to succeed as an academic practitioner by mere dint of speech where other towering giants, in his estimation, have woefully failed. It is thus fair that he be called out and his proposed ambition challenged, as Outlaw rightly does. To reiterate, West’s pronouncements have not stripped white supremacy of its intransigence and legitimacy, nor resurrected democracy in the US. Indeed, as noted at the beginning, Americans are witnessing a resurgence of white supremacy notwithstanding, or perhaps because of, Obama’s 2008 ascent to the Oval Office. What does that say about West’s proposed aim?

Turning now to Brandon Terry, his chapter begins by historicizing the problem of nihilism in African American life as treated by previous scholars and activists, such as James Weldon Johnson, Mary Church Terrell, James Forman, the psychologist Kenneth Clark, and Malcolm X. Terry provides this historical sketch in response to critics who alleged that West’s treatment of nihilism in Race Matters devolved into, and was an endorsement of, the conservative characterization of urban Black life as pathological. Among such critics are Stephen Steinberg, Michael Eric Dyson, and Adolph Reed.

Defending West, Terry points out that African American existence in the United States has always been a confrontation with nihilism; Race Matters simply presents a new variant of that threat in inner-city life, particularly its horrifying and devastating impact on the civic institutions of Black life. As Terry contends, West’s critics are misguided.

From an ontological perspective, Afropessimists see the reality of Black life in the United States as characterized by abjection and negation, without any possibility for hope.

That said, there is no denying, however, that the nihilistic threat to Black life, especially in the 1990s, motivated the cynical Afropessimist outlook mentioned earlier. After all, even West’s own forceful characterization of this threat as “the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness” brings out the magnitude of the issue (qtd. in Will, p. 18). From an ontological perspective, Afropessimists see the reality of Black life in the United States as characterized by abjection and negation, without any possibility for hope. Are the Afropessimists wrong?

Terry, like West, thinks so. Characterizing the Afropessimist endeavor to foreclose future possibilities as “epistemic arrogance,” Terry appeals to the notions of contingency and revisability to address Black historical moments and to provide a framework to guide Black future endeavors (p. 86). This supposes an open-ended future, and so, in the spirit of William James, alternative possibilities cannot be foreclosed a priori as the Afropessimists’ metaphysical outlook purports. Further, this outlook paints human agency as an illusion, but the fact that humans constantly endeavor to alter their lived reality, even in the face of failure, proves the reality of their agency. Therefore, “the transfiguration of [B]lack suffering is possible,” contra the Afropessimists (p. 77).

Hope enables POC to forge ahead despite all odds. It enables them to entertain possibilities to reconfigure and transform their mode of existence from its bleakness to a possible better and brighter future. Hope does not guarantee such a future, but it does inspire POC to forge ahead and actualize a possible future. Black existential strivings have always been this quest, even in the face of (or despite) white supremacy.

The two essays examined above exemplify the rich tapestry of essays that comprise this book. Regrettably, space limitations hinder further discussion of the other remarkable essays, but readers will find the entire volume timely and edifying. Overall, this is a very serious study of Cornel West’s Race Matters, even thirty years after its publication.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.
Interdisciplinary Subjects: African and African American Studies, Racial Justice
Subject: Humanities – Philosophy

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Clarence Shole Johnson is a professor of philosophy at Middle Tennessee State University and the author of Cornel West & Philosophy (2003).

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