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Race Matters confirms Cornel West's stature as the pre-eminent African-American intellectual of our generation. -Henry Louis Gates Jr. We are living in one of the most frightening moments in the history of this country. -Cornel West, Epilogue to the Vintage Edition (1994) of Race Matters The fact that Henry Louis Gates Jr. could make that statement about a book which is premised on this ludicrous assertion by Cornel West must be profoundly depressing to anyone who cares about black America. No one can, or should, deny the long and horrible history of racial oppression in this country. Racism is still a reality and, though it can never be expunged entirely, we should vigilantly seek to limit its impact on the life of our nation. But, by any objective measure, you would have to say that the last fifty years have seen a tremendous amount of progress in the area of racial relations. It is simply ridiculous to compare the status of black Americans today to that of blacks fifty, a hundred or two hundred years ago. And to argue that this is a uniquely dangerous moment in the history of black America is to virtually beg to be dismissed, which Cornel West should be, as a kook and a crank. Cornel West has built his entirely unjustified reputation as a serious philosopher on a bizarre blend of Christian rhetoric and Marxist doctrine. He is defined, for the most part, by his robust criticism of liberal and conservative approaches to the problems of the black community, his dismissal of the current crop of black political leaders and writers, and his own steadfast refusal to offer any ideas or solutions of his own beyond the most general platitudes and completely discredited Marxist cant. But there's a method to his lack of a constructive message : his willingness to lash out at everyone else (except Tony Morrison, for whatever reason), enables him to portray himself as an independent thinker and his simultaneous willingness to identify problems but not to propose remedies, enables him to exploit those maladies, even exacerbate them, for his own purposes. You can get something of a feel for his modus operandi in his discussion of nihilism, which he identifies as a central threat to black America : The proper starting point for the crucial debate about the prospects for black America is an examination of the nihilism that increasingly pervades black communities. Nihilism is to be understood here not as a philosophic doctrine that there are no rational grounds for legitimate standards or authority; it is, far more, the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness. The frightening result is a numbing detachment from others and a self-destructive disposition toward the world. Life without meaning, hope, and love breeds a coldhearted, mean-spirited outlook that destroys both the individual and others. Nihilism is not new in black America. The first African encounter with the New World was an encounter with a distinctive form of the Absurd. The initial black struggle against degradation and devaluation in the enslaved circumstances of the New World was, in part, a struggle against nihilism. In fact, the major enemy of black survival in America has been and is neither oppression nor exploitation but rather the nihilistic threat--that is, loss of hope and absence of meaning. For as long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive. The self-fulfilling prophecy of the nihilistic threat is that without hope there can be no future, that without meaning there can be no struggle. The genius of our black foremothers and forefathers was to create powerful buffers to ward off the nihilistic threat, to equip black folk with cultural armor to beat back the demons of hopelessness, meaninglessness, and lovelessness. These buffers consisted of cultural structures of meaning and feeling that created and sustained communities; this armor constituted ways of life and struggle that embodied values of service and sacrifice, love and care, discipline and excellence. In other words, traditions for black surviving and thriving under usually adverse New World conditions were major barriers against the nihilistic threat. These traditions consisted primarily of black religious and communal networks of support. ... What has changed ? What went wrong ? ... None of us fully understands why the cultural structures that once sustained black life in America are no longer able to fend off the nihilistic threat. I believe that two significant reasons why the threat is more powerful now than ever before are the saturation of market forces and market moralities in black life and the present crisis in black leadership. Okay, I buy a certain amount of this analysis : yes, the biggest problems in urban black America are the decline of the church and the end of the nuclear family, the two institutions most responsible for providing community support to people. But what's this about no one understanding what happened to them ? The 60's happened. The Great Society, which West lauds elsewhere, happened. Government stepped in and tried to replace existing institutions, most disastrously by creating economic incentives for people not to work and to have children out of wedlock. At the same time, the cultural Left, of which West is now a part, sought to free morality from its religious tether, with the entirely predictable result that moral standards lost their validity. Yet where does West place the blame ? He points at black leaders (we'll give him that one) and at free markets. But is there anywhere in the United States where capitalism was more restricted by government regulation than in America's major urban areas ? Mind that this book was written before the GOP took over Congress and passed Welfare Reform, and before Republican mayors took over several of America's biggest cities : as the past few years have demonstrated, it actually turns out that when you restore law and order and bring market forces to bear on black inner cities you can increase employment, reduce crime, and reduce teen pregnancy. What West was doing was contributing to the problem, by suggesting that it was hopeless. He had no positive alternatives. Here he is describing the choice between liberal and conservative policies : The liberal notion that more government programs can solve racial problems is simplistic--precisely because it focuses on the economic dimension. And the conservative idea that what is needed is a change in the moral behavior of poor black urban dwellers (especially poor black men, who, they say, should stay married, support their children, and stop committing so much crime) highlights immoral actions while ignoring public responsibility for the immoral circumstances that haunt our fellow citizens. Yeah, okay, there is a moral dimension, not just an economic one, to the problem. Conservatives have identified some moral solutions. But at the point where West's analysis would lead a more open-minded person inexorably toward those solutions, he instead chooses to focus on blaming someone for the circumstances as they exist. It turns out he's quite right about the problem with black leadership, as his own failure shows. These leaders, like West, are so busy parceling out blame for the past, they have no time to work on solutions for the future. Would that this were the only example of such willful backwardness in the book, but most of the essays are filled with similarly retrograde notions. There's a profoundly silly one called, "Black Sexuality : The Taboo Subject," which assumes that whites still view blacks like they did Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird : like it's just one easy step from breaking up a chifforobe to having their way with our poor, innocent women : White fear of black sexuality is a basic ingredient of white racism. And for whites to admit this deep fear even as they try to instill and sustain fear in blacks is to acknowledge a weakness -- a weakness that goes down to the bone. Social scientists have long acknowledged that interracial sex and marriage is the most perceived source of white fear of black people -- just as the repeated castrations of lynched black men cries out for serious psychocultural explanation. Castrations of lynched black men ? We all recall the tragic murder of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, but we're not exactly in the midst of a castration epidemic. Equally inane, though considerably more harmful, is his take on affirmative action. While acknowledging that such programs are counterproductive, because they make even worthy beneficiaries feel like they are cheating to get ahead, he advocates maintaining them simply as pay back for past discrimination. What is it finally that West calls for as his solution to the problems of black A