Dr. Cornel West: Is America Living Up to Its Promise?

29:44You have to keep track of the non-American voices outside that have been critical of American crimes. And those American voices come in all colors. One of the great contributions of the United States is the stress on the dignity, sanctity, voice, and presence of everyday people and the shaping of their destinies mediated by their participation in the institutions that shape those destinies. now you can call it democratic small d or whatever it is that has inspired people around the world and that's the best of emerson that's the best of whitman that's the best of the blues and louie armstrong that's the best we go on and on and on that's the best of of ellison that's the best of richard right that's the best of saw early saul bellow that's the best we got so many american writers who accent that in a very, very powerful way.

30:50Thomas Prenton is still alive, he's almost 85 years old, Tony Morrison, all of these folks. Now, it's not just by virtue of them being Americans, because you've got Americans who are highly critical of the voices of ordinary people. And those are very important voices too, right? When John Adams argued, The demos can be as tyrannical as kings. I'm not a Democrat. John Adams got a strong point. But it's a challenge for Democrats like ourselves. It's a challenge. For him, it was a conclusion. Democracy? No. Plato's right about democracy. It's always one of the unruly passion. It's always one of the ubiquitous ignorance of the demos who refuses to be cultivated, refuses to undergo maturation and will always result in tyranny.

31:43That's Plato in the Republic. That's a powerful argument. That's the skeleton in our closet as small d Democrats. John Adams had the same thing. Henry Adams, one of the greatest men of letters in the education of Henry Adams, same argument, anti-democratic arguments. I don't believe in the capacity of the demos to undergo education, cultivation, and maturation to really govern themselves. They will be just as tyrannical as the kings and suzerains and monarchs of the past. You know, you look at Hitler in the 30s, you look at the majority of white Americans supported slavery, majority of white Americans supported Jim Crow.

32:30that's the tyranny of the majority that the great de Tocqueville talked about. Democracy can't be just about majorities, or you just end up with a tyranny of the majority. Yes, John Adams has a crucial point, but we come back as small d Democrats and say, but we want those voices to be heard, especially as those voices are able to undergo forms of education and cultivation and maturation so they don't become just as autocratic as the autocracies that have crushed them. But it's always an open question, always an open question. So that when I hear my right-wing brothers and sisters say, well, Brother West, Trump was elected over and over.

33:16So you've got to somehow not just acknowledge that, but as a Democrat, go along with the majority, never in a million years. In the name of Socrates and Jesus and Martin King and Fannie Lou Hamer and Dorothy Day, we're talking about moral and spiritual excellence. This is not about just majority, but we respect the right of the majority to be wrong because we're not autocrats. They said the majority votes in a way we disagree with, That doesn't mean we cut their necks off. That doesn't mean we silenced them. We lost. Now, keep in mind, there is a sense in which my beloved daughter always reminds me.

34:02She said, Daddy, look like you have been tied to lost causes all your life. You call it for the abolition of poverty, the abolition of white supremacy, some trying to tame hyper predatory capitalism in such a way that it can satisfy needs rather than put short-term profits at the center, dealing with all the various challenges. Are those lost causes? In a certain sense, in any historical moment so far, yes, they have been, but there's been movement, there's been amelioration, there's been betterment, there's been some relative progress. No doubt about that. But it's a lost cause in terms of it being fully realized.

34:51Oh, there's no doubt about that. But I do think that, you know, we reflect on July 4th, 250 years ago, that if we can't do justice to the fallibility of the quest for a constitutional republic, given the backdrop of thousands of years of vicious forms of monarchy and ruled by unaccountable elite, then shame on us. But that doesn't mean then that we end up just crowning and exalting uncritically what took place 250 years ago. Because why? We are pursuers of truth, beauty goodness those three are always bigger than any historical moment bigger than any individual bigger than any movement yeah so one of the um

35:51Coleman Hughes:one of um i forget the way your daughter put it but one of the one of the fights she said that you've been waging uh maybe without winning is against predatory capitalism i don't know exactly how you put it. This is a subject I think, perhaps I think about differently than you do, but I'm curious to see if there is a difference. From my perspective, clearly one of the reasons why America has been such a successful country, and in particular such a country that the poor, the multiracial, multicultural poor of the world are by and large dying to get into is because we've had an economy that grows, you know, two to 3 % every year for a very long time.

36:43Coleman Hughes:We inherited strong institutions from Britain, the rule of law, enforcement of contracts, open and competitive markets. And all of that has made us a wealthy country and an innovative country. And the sum total of that has been such an enormous benefit to the people who live here that the poor of the world are, as I said, dying to get in still to this day. um i count i count america's success at capitalism as one of the prime reasons for that and so when i hear the word capitalism i have largely positive connotations with it and when i hear critiques of it that don't acknowledge that that that's that's really at the core of why this is such a desirable place to be a striving poor person.

37:47Coleman Hughes:It's like either all the immigrants of the world are like wrong and stupid to come here or they know something. I think they know something, which is that this is where you want to be. So what accounts for that if America is a predatory capitalist hellscape as so many people, I think, on parts of the left would contend? Yeah, yeah. No, that's a fascinating question, a very important one. I would never deny, my dear brother, the unprecedented levels of opportunity and upward mobility that the American capitalist machine has been able to present to itself and the world. I think that's what you're acknowledging, that people want access to the United States from the very beginning because they just see this economic opportunity.

38:43You got a Homestead Act of 1862 and you got 160 free acres and you're a peasant in an oppressed southern Italy and you got two or three acres of land. You're going to get on a boat and try to make your way. I said, my God, look at these opportunities. This is up with mobility. This is unbelievable. But this is where I have a deep disagreement with. And you tell me what you think, that it's the conditions under which those opportunities and that upward mobility is possible. And take that 1862 example, right? That on the one hand, you got free land for presence around the world. Unprecedented, man.

39:25It's just amazing. It's like Thomas More's utopia. Elements of it have come into realization. Wow. But what are the conditions under which that's true? Oh, my God. You got this slavery. Well, what? One slave man is worth more than some of the biggest commodities outside of the South. That's one of the preconditions for that economic opportunity, you see. Same is true in terms of the upward mobility. Right, the other one, mobility is unprecedented, including our precious southern eastern European peasants coming from Jew-hating Russia, Jew-hating eastern Russia, the Irish, 800 years of British imperialism they're dealing with, the Wales.

40:20We haven't even got to Italy yet. But what? Is that those opportunities? Are those unprecedented forms of upward mobility available for those enslaved folk? Hardly not at all. You know, a sliver. You know, you got some free black folk, you know what I mean, at the top here or there. Same is true on the Jim and Jane Crow. Okay, we got more opportunities, especially after 12 years of multiracial democracy. But Union Army wins the war. White supremacy, 1877, wins the peace. So you got slavery by another name. just like Cicero called Rome what? Republic? By another, only a name? So that on the one hand, you've got the conditions under which these opportunities and upward mobility, and that is never to be denied.

41:09That is very, very real. And that's, I think, one of the major sources of why people want to come. But I think there is something else of why people do come to the United States, which is not solely economic. I think there is a cultural dimension to it. There's a level of energy and vitality and vibrancy in American culture. And that has to do with a number of different factors, but people like to get in on it. And of course, the music is at the highest level, because, you know, I believe the Black music tradition is the greatest tradition of the modern world in terms of artistic genius, spiritual fortitude, and moral courage.

41:48So you're talking about blues and gospel, but you're also talking about the Hank Williams on the vanilla sides who are blues men, but on the vanilla sides, but they're interacting with these different folks. So it's the music. It's in the language of Huck Finn and Mark Twain's genius captured. It's in the ways in which people have a sense of freedom, the way they have swing and swag. And that's not just a black thing. That is a deeply new world thing and very much a U.S. thing. People are attracted to that. People hear Tupac in Turkey. Yeah. Oh, my God. Lord, they may hear your album. Oh, we got Coleman out of New Jersey sounding good.

42:31My God. What's going on in the United States? These brothers and sisters come up with this linguistic, creativity, and oral expression. Something is going on. The beat, the funk, the polyrhythm, the syncopation. Something is happening in that country. Now, that doesn't mean there aren't forms of barbarism still operating. You got lynching still happening during 1877 all the way up to the 1950s. You see what I mean? So that I would want to acknowledge that you're on to certain truths in terms of the opportunity. I don't think that it's—my critique of predatory capitalism, I think, is more thorough and chronic than yours is because I go back to the conditions for the very possibility of the opportunities and the upward mobility that you're talking about.

43:25And you and I would agree, when you go back to those conditions for the possibility, oh my God, it's ugly. That's part of my critique of Brother Mandami. You know, he sounded like Oscar Hanlon in Harvard in the 1950s in his classic The Uprooted. When he used to begin to, the great Hanlon, who was my dear brother, but we had deep, deep, deep. America is a nation of immigrants. No, no, that's not true. That's not true. It's a nation of indigenous peoples and enslaved peoples and immigrants. immigrants. Immigrants have been crucial, indispensable in terms of the creativity and massive contributions.

44:04But if you only talk about the immigrants, you're going to erase and eliminate preconditions. When I hear Mom Donnie talking about New York City as a city of immigrants, I say, no, there wouldn't have been a New York City without the slave economy. There wouldn't have been a New York City without an indigenous people's land. And they are as much American as of folk who came from 1840s and the 1880s all the way up to as a result of the Black Freedom Movement in 1965, so Mandani and his family could come, because you know how white supremacist immigration policy was in 1924, between 1924 and 1965.

44:42So this notion of somehow downplaying the preconditions and exalting the opportunity and upward mobility, I think you have to be able to keep both in mind and telling the full truth of why people so often are attracted to the United States.

45:03Coleman Hughes:Yeah, I understand that. I mean, my response to that would be, I would want to be careful with the word precondition, because the word precondition implies that the reason for all the good opportunity is the bad stuff, the slavery, the indigenous dispossession. And I think sometimes that's true and sometimes it's not. So like in the case of there is no America without taking the lands from the Native Americans. That's true. Cause like, that's just, that's just two plus two. Like there were, there were either they're going to have the land or other people are going to have the land. Right. So, um, whether it was through land purchases with cultures that didn't really recognize the concept of a purchase very much, like, you know, purchasing the island of Manhattan for two cents or whatever it was, or whether it was through actual war, or whether it was through death from smallpox and all the rest.

46:06Coleman Hughes:Everything in America did depend on that happening in some very literal sense. But for me, what is good about America didn't depend on slavery in the same sense. In other words, if, you know, if you play the thought experiment out and somehow Georgia and South Carolina agree to ban slavery at the inception of the country and they figure it out, they figure emancipation out, whether it's, you know, immediate or maybe gradual. To me, most of actually everything that is good about America survives that in a very straightforward way. In fact, it's enhanced because you get to unleash the creative and productive capacity of all the freed slaves.

46:55Coleman Hughes:um probably you hopefully avoid the civil war which was a massive wealth destroying event and destabilizing event and national trauma um in particular for all the places in the south that were burned to the ground you all of those people that were killed in the civil war survive and thrive and have families and all the rest and to me it looks like the trajectory of america is just a better place with even more opportunity so i i would want to be careful to say that it's a precondition in the same way that the dispossession of indigenous land was a precondition. I mean, there, I see you make a distinction between a tight causal account versus a looser causal account.

47:37When you talk about indigenous people, it is a tight causal account. There's just no way we can conceive of X without something being in place prior. And therefore, there is a cause for the fact that the presence of Europeans, when in fact indigenous people's presence was there and is there no longer. Now, I agree with you. I think it is a looser causal attack account than with indigenous peoples when you talk about slavery and Jim Crow, but I still think it's a causal account though. And one of the ways I would make that claim is is that the degree to which all of the energy put into the enslavement of Black folk, the degradation of Black folk, generating the hatred and the terror against Black folk, all of that energy had something to do with people's perception that what they really were after would be obtained more easily if these Black folk were under control, subjugated.

48:45dominated, you see. And so I don't think we have a major disagreement there, but I would not want to use precondition as such an ambiguous notion that somehow when you talk about indigenous peoples, you got a causal account that's acceptable. But when you talk about black people's enslavement and being Jim Crow and Jane Crow and hated and so forth, discriminated against and degraded and what have you, that you don't have a causal account. But I don't think the two are identical. No, no, not at all. Not at all. But also, you have to keep in mind, my dear brother, the aftermath. You see, the after effects, the aftermath, the afterglow, the consequences that flow after slavery and after Jim Crow and after the lynching, especially in the minds of Black people.

49:40it cuts very deep the white supremacy inside of black people cuts deep and if it's deep that deep inside of black people you can imagine how deep it is in most white brothers and sisters so that the aftermath of slavery and jim crow is something that we still have to come to terms with i mean you wrestle with this in your own book when you say of course you're going to notice race you just don't want to use race as a basis of treating others in a certain kind of way. But the very fact you have to argue that means what? Race still has a gravity toss. And you've got to come up with some counter voice to somehow make sure that something deeper than race is operating in our human relations.

50:26But I agree with you at that level, of course, very much so.

50:30Coleman Hughes:Yeah, I mean, I think one of the dangers of, well, not just the American experiment, but every country, but the American experiment, especially because we have so much immigration, the contours of the American racial demographic makeup are always going to be changing. the negotiations between various groups for status and for for recognition of each group's unique and sacred and different taboos right every group every group of p every every subculture has its own we have a shared value system but we also have subcultural values what what i grew up caring about is not quite the same as what you grew up caring about.

51:24Coleman Hughes:What is offensive to me is not quite the same as what is offensive to you. And we have to learn that about each other and come to some sort of gentleman's agreement about how to respect other cultures and not needlessly trample on things that are sacred to them. And then in return, sort of ask for the same kind of thing. And on all of that without anyone's culture negating the overall American creed, right, of freedom of speech and freedom of expression and democracy and all the rest, right? So if your culture is incompatible with those things, then I guess we, you know, we don't have much to talk about.

52:04Coleman Hughes:But in that context, what's important is that each generation of children is raised on what i think of as the the shining rhetorical moments of martin luther kingism which is to to of course notice race but not treat anyone differently as a result of their race that has to be part of the american creed part of the American civic religion with the understanding that because of our tribal natures, we're never going to instantiate that perfectly. There's always, like you talked about at the very beginning of this episode, as a result of our fallen nature, there's always going to be a tendency to be groupish, to hate the out group, to make fun of others, to prefer your own and all that stuff.

53:02Coleman Hughes:All of that notwithstanding, that way the end of the republic lies. In a hundred different possible futures that we can't predict right now, ethnic conflict is one of the great dangers. Absolutely. And so how do we avoid that? How do we avoid those possible futures? Is it a matter of childhood education? Is it a matter of political institutions? Like, what is the answer there? No, I think that you're invoking Brother Mark, and it's very important here, because when you invoke him, as you know, he's not an isolated individual. He comes out of a long tradition of a peoples and a community that was trying to convince people to be not necessarily colorblind, but love-strucked.

53:53that when love your enemy, that's what we learned on the chocolate side in our churches. What do you mean love your enemy? That means everybody made in the image of God as your brother and sister, period. How can that be when we're living in a white supremacist society? It means you cut against the grain. It means that you don't accept the white supremacist formulation as some kind of framework. And when you are lovestruck, you generate what the founding fathers knew was a precondition of any constitutional republic, which is what? Civic virtue. You've got to learn how to respect others. You've got to learn how to acknowledge that they are who they are.

54:36Everybody's who they are, not somebody else. And therefore, they have their own voice. The gray anthem of black folk is what? Lift every voice. It's not lift every echo, because echo is just an extension of a silo that people want to control. When you find your voice, that means they're free. They're free to do what? To be wrong. They're free to disagree with you. They're free to go a different way than you go. And you have to be able to respect that, but still go your way and tell them, I disagree with you. I want to hear your argument. I want hear your story. I want to hear your narrative. Let me tell you why I believe what I believe.

55:11You tell me what you believe, what you believe. And in the end, we know we may not agree, but at least we're able to engage almost like a jazz orchestra, all these different voices bouncing off against each other. But if it's just an echo that's being dictated by some kind of head of a silo, you don't have an argument. That's just indoctrination. That's just manipulation. That's just transaction. And so in that sense, civic institutions like churches and sports, it's in synagogues and temples, it's in mosques, it's in schools, those crucial things. That's where the maturation, civically, spiritually, morally, should be taking place to help sustain a very fragile constitutional republic, which some people would call even more extensively a democracy.

56:02But I'm using the language of the founding fathers because they hated democracy, right? They said if every citizen was a Socrates, the assembly would still be a mob. that's heavy language man it's like oh lord that's in the federalist papers that's deeply anti-democratic Sheldon Wooler and others understood that but they had a deep deep distrust of the demos and that's just the truth for most of the founding fathers Thomas Paine was very different but he stands in a league of his own in that sense but your deeper point that you're making though about the deep human connection, however you get it.

56:45You can go on a secular route. A number of our secular brothers and sisters have been quite exemplary in terms of being a strong humanist. You can be Christian like King. You can be a Muslim like a leader. Malcolm X, not too early. You know, Malcolm, he had some growing to do. He had a love of black folk. Can I ask you about that? I took a while to start loving white folk.

57:10Coleman Hughes:what do you think about the secularization of america and certainly most of europe a lot of other places do you view this as a neutral trend just like an interesting way history has developed fewer and fewer people are christian or do you think that this is actually a good thing or a bad thing like what do you make of that well one i want to make a distinction between the secularization of a people than the Socraticization of a people. You see, if you follow Socrates, you're talking about self-criticism, which means, of course, you're self-critical of certain forms of secularization itself. But secularization can be captured so quickly by commodification.

57:57And what has happened, and I think one of the reasons why you get religious revival these days, especially among younger brothers and sisters of all colors, is that more and more when they say you hear secular, they hear fashions and fads of the market that take over and generate forms of conformity that push other voices out. Well, that's very real. There has been a commodification that has subsumed secularization so that, for example, Well, you know, if you're a student on campus, and I get this all the time, and you have to make a choice between what's going on Thursday and Friday night with all the hedonistic activity and evangelical circles meeting at the same time.

58:41And you say, those are the only choices to make. And you tried the first one for a year and a half, and you ran into dead ends with an empty soul because you got all that joyless quest for insatiable pleasure. You say, let me try these evangelical folks. They got community. They slow down in their life. And you say, those shouldn't be the only two options, but if those are the only two, then secularization has become overtaken by hedonism and narcissism and careerism and opportunism. Is that what secularization is? Well, we know that Diderot didn't think that. Kant didn't think that. But in 21st century, secularization often means that.

59:23But when you go with Socrates, Socratesation means, no, I'm always tied to a self-criticism predicated on something in place, or what the great Alfred North Whitehead called that noble discontent, but with an appreciation of the best of what has been put in place. All right.

59:47Coleman Hughes:I just got two more questions for you, Dr. West. One, I want to know what, if anything, you learned by running for president? Because your core way of being as someone in what I would consider to be the prophetic speaking tradition is something that— that's a situation where you can be inspirational. You can hold to principle without compromise. You can think single-mindedly about reaching the listener in his or her soul without many other considerations. And you obviously have a talent for that combined with an erudition that allows you to bring substance to the talent. running for political office is from what i perceive a totally different skill set totally different set of challenges um a set of inevitable compromises frustrations administrative headaches and and all the rest i'm curious in embarking on that what what did you learn what did you take away from it brother you're so kind in your your compliments.

1:01:06I can appreciate that. I aspire to what you talk about. But I did learn this, though, that I was just completely overwhelmed with great inspiration and meeting so many fellow citizens in so many different contexts. And I got the sense that they were thoroughly desperate, feeling helpless and hopeless and impotent in terms of trying to translate their moral sensitivities and their civic orientations into the electoral political system. And so when I would talk about the corruption of the two-party system and the role of the big money and the big donors and big benefactors and so forth, it resonated very deeply with them, but they always felt as if we can't do anything.

1:02:06Brother West, do we have any translation power? And so forth and so on. And I said, well, we've got to do all that we can do. So what I discovered was on the one hand, there was this hunger. And there's a wonderful line in T.S. Eliot's essay on F.H. Bradley, where he talks about when you reach a moment of spiritual nadir, sometimes it's a matter of struggling to preserve the very memory of what truth-telling, justice-seeking, integrity, honesty, decency, and infallible forms even looks like for populists. And I believe we're at that point. So one of the reasons I was running, I would tell folk, look, I'm running for Jesus, I'm running for justice, I'm running for president, I'm just trying to keep alive this great legacy that shaped me so that the young folk can actually see and get a glimpse maybe of what it looks like.

1:02:59so it's not the ordinary politician it's not the ordinary elected official and in the electoral political arena they can see something that is so very different not because i'm so pure pristine but because i come out of a legacy that is more and more alien the king's legacy defenny lou hamillet rabbi heschel and edward zayed and others what you were saying trying to just tell the truth period not tied to any money we would broker the ten commandments every day He's doing the campaign, as you know. Democratic Party paid$20 million to keep us off the ballot. We're still fighting. We won the case already in North Carolina.

1:03:34We're still fighting in Pittsburgh. We went to the Supreme Court in Pittsburgh to keep us off the ballot. I mean, so much for defending different voices and hearing different voices, right? Right. So that that to me was something that was worth it because it was part of my own sense of calling and my own sense of vocation. But you're absolutely right in terms of a different set of skills for organizing, dealing with the huge bureaucracies that are in place in order to sustain campaigns. We insisted Kiana and Anahita, my beloved wife, and the campaign manager, Kiana, you know, they did magnificent jobs.

1:04:15But for me, it was a matter of just prophetic witness. That's really what it was about. And I got such wonderful responses. Now, of course, I was trashed by the Democratic Party and Obama's people and Clinton's people and Biden's people. You're the worst thing. I'm just trying to tell the truth. You don't want to come to terms with the foreign policy and these drones. You don't want to come terms with genocide in Gaza or however you characterize genocide. That's the Democrats. That's not just the Republicans. I'm looking at both of these parties. Oh, you must be working for Trump. Oh, please. I've been calling that brother gangster for the last 15 years, the neofascist sensibilities.

1:05:00That's not the question at all. But I keep track of his humanity. See, I'm not into just demonizing anybody from the Klan to Trump. I confronted that in Charlottesville when I was down there with those sick white brothers coming at me tooth and nail and they talking about aren't you that brother on television call everybody brother I said yes brother he said I can't stand that don't call me brother I said I don't ask for anybody's permission as to who I love I'm a Jesus loving free black man I try to love everybody period I don't care who gets unhappy I don't care what the consequences I'm not in this for popularity.

1:05:41That's not my tradition. J.J. Jocelyn wasn't blowing for money. He needed it, but he wasn't just blowing for money. He's trying to play his horn the same way Charlie Parker played it. You don't play the trombone that way. I'm trying to be true to my artistic art integrity. I'm a free man. That's a great tradition. And that's very important for a young brother like yourself. I'm Coleman. Period. I'm true to my mama. God bless her. I know she passed. I'm true to my father. I'm true to my sisters. I'm true to myself. I'm trying to be better. I'm listening. I'm learning. I'm not static. But don't dictate to me who I love, how I laugh, how I orient myself in the world.

1:06:31Period. Drop the mic.

1:06:35Coleman Hughes:i love that all right um well i don't want to get into the genocide in gaza because i i think we disagree on that but i don't want to open the whole can of worms and i've done too many podcasts about that subject recently um so i'll i just want to flag that oh no no sure move on to the question and we'd have we could have a whole separate debate on that though but i want to get to the question final question i actually actually want to hear from dr cornell west on and the reason i'm thinking about this is because drake just released an album where he um you know predictably and and expectedly had a lot to say about the beef with with kendrick and i i really want to know what you think of the drake kendrick beef a you know it's it's almost two years old now, but now it's back.

1:07:28Coleman Hughes:Did you pay attention to it? Did it mean anything to you more profound than two individuals that are at the top of their game and don't like each other? Is there anything about it that struck the culture at a deeper level because of what Drake and Kendrick represent? What do you make of it? Yeah, no, I appreciate that question too, because I think it's very important for us to always view music, and particular art in general, not as marginal and peripheral phenomena. And at least for me, music has been integral and constitutive as to who I am in the same way, you know, philosophical texts and the same way my own biblically centered religious tradition is and so on.

1:08:24One is that I have a great love and respect for both of those brothers. I think that they are artistic giants in their own distinctive ways. I think Kendrick has a certain kind of genius that Drake doesn't have, but I think Drake's unbelievable versatility and his talent is just so immense. And of course, I recall when he embraced Kendrick, when Kendrick was a young artist, took him on tour and so forth. See, those kinds of things mean much to me in terms of the debts that we have with each other. It doesn't mean you can't be critical, but you just had to acknowledge a certain kind of character on Drake's part.

1:09:09Now, as you know, Drake's father is out of Oakland, who is the brother of Larry Graham. So he's got deep connection to Sly Stone. He's got deep connection to genius on the chocolate side of the Bay Area. Then he's got his vanilla Canadian mother, who did a magnificent job on that brother. because from a distance, Drake strikes me as a very, very kind human being. I never met him. I don't know him. I've never had conversations with him. I never met Kendrick either. So that when the beef hit, I wasn't crazy about it. Of course, my first thing I say is neither one of you black folk are Tupac or Biggie.

1:09:49Let's just keep this in mind. You've got tremendous genius, but you know others precede you. They would then acknowledge that. Ain't no doubt about that. Well, let's just keep this in mind because artistic excellence is artistic excellence. You all exemplify it, but there's levels of it higher than you. The second thing to keep in mind is what optics are at play. because he is starting to degenerate into this ugly and vicious name calling ad hominem attack on their persons and so forth. I hated that. I hate to see that kind of thing going on. And yet, you know, that was part and parcel of what made the beef so attractive and appealing to a lot of people.

1:10:44I haven't heard the new album by Drake. I have no idea what kind of state of mind he's in. I don't know what kind of response it is, whether it's a spiritually mature one or a spiritually immature one. I just don't know. I expect, I hope, a spiritually mature response to it. But you do have to defend yourself. I mean, there's no doubt about that. You can't just get beat up and not have some kind of response. Not at all. I just hope that people can see the artistic excellence in and beyond the beef so that the beef itself doesn't become just another moment for commodification of hip hop as opposed to a serious engagement of the subject matter of hip hop, which is basically, you know, what it means to be human under certain kinds of conditions of young folk who are trying to do the best of their ability.

1:11:43to proceed from mama's womb to tomb with some kind of integrity.

1:11:47Coleman Hughes:All right. Thank you so much, Dr. West, for coming on my show. Happy birthday to this great country. And you're the perfect guest to deal with this moment with. And, you know, people know where to find you so they can find you. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Brother, you stay strong, though, man. Stay strong indeed. And thanks for having me, though, man. Definitely.