Black Socrates-Cornell West

He speaks buttery effusions and flicks biscuits of artery clogging wisdom to constipate your bitter self with the cholesterol of self-respect. His gap-toothed whistle and long scraggly beard belie his evangelist disposition and the sincere empathetic feelings he has for his earthy brethren still toiling in the muck of poverty. Every time he speaks it's as though an epiphany explodes from his tongue by a god-driven lightning bolt. He's "blessed," as he says, with many well-wishers and perhaps even more neigh-sayers and yet his constant response is to thank them for their, at times horrifyingly offensive, inquiry or insult. In his effort to walk in the path of Jesus, he takes on one of jesus's most astonishing gifts given all of his other strengths--his humility.
"I am but a speck in a long standing tradition," he said while on the NPR radio program "On Point," and his words echoed back to the man who constantly reminded all of Greece that he knew nothing and yet the muses chose him as the smartest man in the world--Socrates. Socrates did not need language, philosophy or anything in his life that would serve to exclude people. He used his skills to include people and lead them to the truth. Cornell West has devoted himself to a similar practice. Just as Socrates never ran from an intellectual debate from any of the greatest minds of his time as he had the self-confidence to know that if he could be proven wrong then there is no greater result. If proven wrong, he would be closer to the truth than he was before. Cornell West plows his thoughts into some of the greatest academic institutions of this or any era with the unyielding passion of a spartan spear.
He claims to be a bluesman by vocation, canvassing the cob-webbed crevasses of his soul to claim a vision of modern truth that all can latch on to and recognize as somehow part of their own humanity, despite, and perhaps better for, the imperfections that may arise in his philosophy. If nothing else, the world a hundred years from now will look across the timeline of american civilization and see a post buried deep deep into the very foundation of american progress with "Cornell West RIP" written on it. As his work, more than near any single man of our time, reaches through to the most gangster of poor black youths and the most elite of waspy ivy league intellectuals and wrenches us by the neck to push us in front of the mirror and see: see just how far we have miraculously managed to progress in this country, and how dauntingly far we still have to go.