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Dr. Cornel West, is someone I’ve admired and respected for decades. He combines a formidable intellect with an enormous heart and an unceasing drive for social justice that transcends his multiple identities as an academic, author, philosopher, theologian, political activist, social critic, and public intellectual. Many of you even know him as an actor for his brief but memorable appearances in The Matrix films. Of course, Dr. West is also an independent candidate in this year’s U.S. presidential election.

I spoke with Dr. West a couple of weeks ago about compassionate leadership, nonviolence, social and economic justice, and the balance between inner and outer transformation that he believes is required to truly steer the world toward the thriving of all human beings and all life on earth.

Scott Snibbe: Dr. West, it’s a huge honor to have you on the podcast, I’m an admirer of your writings and work, and especially how you’ve emphasized the importance of personal transformation throughout your career, so welcome to How to Train a Happy Mind.

[00:02:47] Dr. Cornel West: Yeah, my brother, I’m just blessed to be here and I salute you, your works, witness, text, and wonderful temperament and personality.

Anybody who loves, weeps

[00:02:59] Scott Snibbe: Thank you, that’s so kind. Before we get started talking about the future, I know a lot’s happening in the world at the moment, and I’m curious what’s going through your mind, what’s in your heart right now?

[00:03:15] Dr. Cornel West: We’re in such a spiritual low point in the empire right now in the USA, and we’re such a wretched species in general in terms of our commendations to greed, fear, and hatred, but we’re also a wonderful species because we have the capacity for change, transformation, and getting beyond greed, hatred, and lives.

More and more, it looks as if in a highly commodified culture, everything’s for sale, everybody’s for sale, it’s all about brand, it’s all about money, status, position. So that selling out becomes normal and natural, rather than cutting against the grain, which becomes more naive and frowned upon. I do believe there’s an intimate connection between the quest for truth and integrity. That’s why Socrates means so much to me, not reducing things down to just the quid pro quo and the transactional.

More and more, it looks as if in a highly commodified culture, everything’s for sale and everybody’s for sale.

Now, on the other hand, you and I know Socrates never cries and never sheds a tear. It’s clear that he doesn’t put a premium on loving persons. He’s loving wisdom: “philosophia.” Anybody who loves persons weeps; Jeremiah weeps, Jesus weeps, and so forth, Buddha showed deep compassion; weeps on the inside and the outside. Anton Chekhov never weeps externally, he weeps every day on the page, internally, in his plays, in his short stories.

Anybody who loves persons weeps.

Somehow we’ve got to fuse the spirituality of Socratic questioning with the spirituality of prophetic witnessing, which is tied to weeping, a sign that you’re not numb to other people’s suffering, you’re sensitive to other people’s misery, and you want to do something about it.

How does love fit into politics?

[00:05:19] Scott Snibbe: It’s very unique what you say of linking truth to compassion, because we tend to think of truth as intellectual, but I like how you directly link it to the truth of our feelings, emotions, and caring for one another. This is your first pillar, your platform, the title of your platform is really phenomenal, it’s a movement rooted in “truth, justice, and love.” You don’t see love in anyone else’s platform.

Can you tell us what love means to you and how it fits in with politics?

[00:05:48] Dr. Cornel West: Niebuhr used to say, Any justice that’s only justice soon degenerates into something less than justice. What rescues justice? Well, mercy. For me, the reason why the love is important is because you have to have something more than just justice or law. What sustains any struggle for justice is not just justice itself, but it’s the love and care you have for the persons who are being violated, whose dignity is being called into question.

But even in addition to, and this probably connects to my own Black tradition, that tenderness is what love feels like in private. Black folk are often associated with soulfulness in our music, in our walking, and in our talking. Soul is the sharing of a soothing sweetness against the backdrop of a grim catastrophe; you’re not denying catastrophe, you’re not evading it, you’re trying to work through it. But sweetness allows you to be equipped along with the compassion, along with the other virtues.

Soul is the sharing of a soothing sweetness against the backdrop of a grim catastrophe; you’re not denying catastrophe, you’re not evading it, you’re trying to work through it.

[00:07:17] Scott Snibbe: That’s beautiful. It sounds like social justice needs to also include social love.

[00:07:24] Dr. Cornel West: Absolutely right.

How to embrace nonviolence?

[00:07:27] Scott Snibbe: One of the principles that I most admire about Buddhism is it’s grounding in nonviolence. I’m really struck by your own platform’s foreign policy that’s based in nonviolence. To many, this will feel radical, if not impossible.

Can you tell me about how you came to embrace nonviolence?

[00:07:47] Dr. Cornel West: Part of it is a matter of just acknowledging that so much of the history of the species is the history of war, psychic, spiritual, and economic violence toward others. One of the fundamental challenges of being human is how do we break that cycle? Well, you got to talk about it. You have got to acknowledge it. You have got to try to analyze it.

Then you try to go another way. You try to provide a new vision for the species, for human beings, and for all sentient creatures for the planet that could break the cycle of violence that is so often tied to greed and hatred and so on. Now, Martin and my dear brother, I should mention Desmond Tutu, who I knew it was blessed to spend high quality time with him. He and Martin were real, what you could call nearly absolute pacifists that they could never conceive of conditions under which some form of violence would be justified.

Now, I don’t go that far that I think that nonviolence ought to be at the center, at the core of our moral compass, but I can conceive of conditions under which some form of just war would be permissible. I’m a little bit closer to Augustine on that, but because the conditions are just, for me, so rare, for the most part, I’m with my pacifist brothers and sisters in terms of trying to pursue not just nonviolent options and alternatives.

[00:09:37] Scott Snibbe: Even in Buddhism, violence is allowed forwith two caveats. It’s self defense and if you can win.

[00:09:51] Dr. Cornel West: That’s based on a real utilitarian calculus though, isn’t it?

[00:09:55] Scott Snibbe: Yeah, but you cause so much additional suffering if you can’t win.

Scott Snibbe’s journey with Buddhism

[00:10:00] Dr. Cornel West: That’s true. Tell me about your journey though, brother, how did you land or end up where you landed now?

[00:10:10] Scott Snibbe: I like to joke that I used to be a part-time Buddhist and now I’m a full-time Buddhist. I was always interested in those principles of nonviolence, just born that way, really not liking violence and not liking being it. I got into a fight almost every week in elementary school with a lot of violent boys.

I was raised a Christian scientist, which is quite odd. It’s a rare religion that believes in the mind, that everything is the mind. Then I came to Buddhism through my brother who worked at Harvard and was introduced to His Holiness the Dalai Lama in the year 2000 and saw him speak. When I saw him, I wanted to be like him, because I knew particularly because of the political situation—they suffered a genocide, a Holocaust—and yet His Holiness maintained nonviolence as his core principle.

He said, If we kill one Chinese person, we make a hundred enemies. That just blew my mind. Yet he was still so happy and joyful, and had very strong political convictions and moral convictions. I just wanted to follow his path. For 25 years, I’ve been following the Buddhist path as it used to be between things and now it’s my kind of full-time work with this podcast and book and classes and Buddhist centers and so on.

Thank you for asking. I appreciate it.

[00:11:36] Dr. Cornel West: Beautiful, because I can see the tenderness and gentleness and sweetness and kindness that I was talking about so thoroughly baked into the very rich Buddhist ways of being in the world.

Finding hope in times of uncertainty

[00:11:57] Scott Snibbe: It sounds like both you and I were lucky to have so much spiritual grounding that helped us cultivate those things. A lot of people don’t have that. So many people are feeling hopeless today about even the possibility of peace, even in one conflict, like in Ukraine, Israel, or Palestine.

Was there a moment that felt possible for you? Because many people obviously don’t feel like that’s possible.

[00:12:23] Dr. Cornel West: I recall reading Clausewitz, the philosopher of war, years ago and being struck by why it was that philosophers and social thinkers didn’t want to say too much about war and yet war was one of the primary constants of the species. You really want to be intellectually honest and talk about just how wretched we are. That does not in any way mean that you can’t dream, you can dream of what is impossible, and attempt to make it possible.

In that very process, in the way you connect with other people every day, in a nonviolent way with kindness and gentleness and trying to cheer up and uplift people and then create organizations that bear witness to peace. This is why Dorothy Day and Bill Berrigan and so many others mean so much to me because they’re willing to go to jail. They part of organizations committed to peace and I’m part of that network myself.

It is a kind of utopian projection in the sense that it’s very rare to find a moment in the history of the species where some war was not going on, some violence was not being committed. But that doesn’t mean you give up on the dream. It doesn’t mean you give up on the possibility of peace, the possibility of justice, the possibility of treating people in the way they ought to be treated, be it the golden rule or a whole host of ways in which human beings have come up with various moral compasses and moral codes for dignified treatment of others.

What is the best way to end war?

[00:14:15] Scott Snibbe: The first time I saw the Dalai Lama, I heard him say, The best way to end war is to first resolve all the conflicts in your own personal life. Do you agree with this? Have you found that to be true in your own life?

[00:14:35] Dr. Cornel West: He’s absolutely right. William Butler Yeats used to say, It takes more courage to dig deep in the dark corners of your own soul that than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield. Now there’s always structures and institutions that are in place and they are shaping us even as we struggle inside of ourselves.

Because we’re shaped by the kinds of families, the kinds of civic institutions, the kinds of cultural practices, be it in media, film, or the books we read, the poetry that we take in all of these things are shaping who we are. But in the end, if we can’t have some kind of relative breakthrough, or relative victory, of the battles inside of us, then it’s going to be very difficult to sustain the victories outside of us.

If we can’t have some kind of relative breakthrough, or relative victory, of the battles inside of us, then it’s going to be very difficult to sustain the victories outside of us.

Economic and social justice

[00:15:37] Scott Snibbe: Yeah, personal transformation leads to societal transformation. It’s connected. I want to talk to you about economic justice, there’s a beautiful list, of course you support eradicating poverty, abolishing homelessness, universal parent leave, universal health care, universal basic income, or at least moving toward that, right to meaningful employment. In theory, these should be things everybody wants, right? Who could disagree with those things?

Yet millions of people have huge fears when you mention even one of these things. That they’re going to cost too much, that small businesses are going to have to close when we raise the minimum wage, people are going to get lazy, or they’re going to spend their free money on drugs.

Did you ever have fears like these and how do you process them?

[00:16:33] Dr. Cornel West: All of those are very real possibilities because human beings, we’re just so many different kinds of persons. There’s no doubt about that. But part of the problem is when you look at the status quo, if you’re living in the richest nation in the history of the world, and 1% of the population own 90% of the wealth, that’s a level of grotesque wealth inequality that hides and conceals unbelievable social misery. 62% of our fellow citizens live paycheck to paycheck.

If you’re living in the richest nation in the history of the world, and 1% of the population own 90% of the wealth, that’s a level of grotesque wealth inequality that hides and conceals unbelievable social misery.

People will say, Well, if you talk about making these changes, there’s all of these possibilities of chaos. There’s a lot of forms of chaos taking place right now in the unjust status quo. I understand what people are saying, nothing wrong with having a certain kind of fear of change, but I want people to have the same sensitivity in terms of a concern of the levels of social injustice in the present if we don’t change.

[00:17:52] Scott Snibbe: Yeah, it’s more scary with the status quo how things are than the potential damages of trying to have a more compassionate society.

[00:18:03] Dr. Cornel West: You do take a risk. There’s no doubt about that. But you do have to take a risk to change yourself. Once you take those risks, of course, there’s going to be some anxiety. Of course, there’s going to be insecurity, but the breakthrough in that self-transformation could in fact be so much more, not just positive, but allow you to flourish in ways you hadn’t imagined.

[00:18:34] Scott Snibbe: There’s so many dimensions to racial justice, which is another one of your platforms. I wonder if you can talk about some of your solutions, like ending mass incarceration, enacting reparations, ending racial abuses by police forces. How do we get there?

[00:18:54] Dr. Cornel West: So much of what we’re talking about, my dear brother, has to do with learning how to see things and people more clearly that then allows you to act more courageously. Racism is a form of blindness. If you see someone and don’t see their humanity because of the color of their skin or anything that gets in the way of their humanity, that blocks your perception of their humanity. You’ve got to learn how to see more deeply. Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, at their deepest, they’re getting us to see human beings in all of their humanity.

Racism is a form of blindness.

Therefore, it is an indictment of racism, explicit, and implicit. Yet, that seeing has to be cultivated because there’s long histories in which people were taught to see people’s color as a form of degradation, as a form of their lack of humanity, rather than see their humanity along with their color, whatever color it was.

White supremacy, of course, has been much more pervasive than Black supremacy. Both of them are immoral. Both of them are wrong. But white supremacy has shaped so much of the world from 1492 to 1945, more so than Black supremacy. It’s just a fact. Therefore, the question becomes, how do we address that in the name of truth, justice, and love?

That’s always bigger than any of those. That’s what is beckoning us, luring us, and it’s like a North Star. My dear sister Harriet Tubman here, looking at North Star when she went into the belly of barbaric U. S. slavery to bring those enslaved Black folk on the Underground Railroad to Canada or to Northern New York or whatever.

True Justice and Love are the North Stars, should be our North Stars, as it were. That’s why, on our platform, we have a profoundly humanistic program. How do you stay in contact with other people’s humanity and then deal with some of the damage that has been done with structures and institutions like slavery and Jim Crow and lynching practices that have had tremendous, ugly impacts on people of color and Black people.

[00:22:12] Scott Snibbe: Just how do we do that specifically with prisons and police forces, for example? The Dalai Lama always emphasizes that in a way there’s no such thing as an institution. It’s all made up of individuals. But how do we transform those individuals and institutions to be more just?

[00:22:34] Dr. Cornel West: One thing, of course, you want to learn from others. I’ve always said that the United States would learn so much if they went to Sweden or Norway and others where mass incarceration does not take the form that we see in the United States. It’s one of rehabilitation. It’s one of education. It’s one of trying to convince those who have done certain things that they shouldn’t have done to undergo maturation. To believe in themselves enough, have enough confidence in themselves that they can be better human beings. You have sites of rehabilitation and education and opportunity for them.

Whereas United States, it’s torture, solidary confinement, and mass incarceration. You just pack them in. I’ve been blessed to teach in prisons now since 1973, that’s now 51 years. I’ve seen some beautiful sights in terms of human beings wanting to bounce back. I’ve seen some very ugly sights in terms of the treatment of them in there. The crushing of their sense of possibility and potentiality when locked in a certain kind of prison like situation.

There’s a disproportionate amount of not just poverty and social misery, but not enough recognition of the humanity of people, sometimes among Black people themselves. When you talk about racism and white supremacy, you’re talking about institutions and structures. But you’re also talking about hearts and minds, including Black hearts and Black minds. Just like women can be taught to think less of themselves, male supremacy inside of women. It’s true for Black people, the white supremacy inside of Black.

Just like women can be taught to think less of themselves, male supremacy inside of women. It’s true for Black people, the white supremacy inside of Black.

When we’re talking about racial justice, this has to do with how Black people treat each other, being disrespectfully too violent, how white elites are perceiving Black working classes and Black poor people, too often stereotypical forms rather than humanistic forms. You can see how it’s all intertwined, you can’t really talk about the racial justice without talking about poverty and access to health care, jobs, housing, quality education, and soul formation. You should never downplay soul craft, the soul formation, the cultivation of attention, the maturation of a loving soul.

You can see how it’s all intertwined, you can’t really talk about the racial justice without talking about poverty and access to health care, jobs, housing, quality education, and soul formation.

[00:25:36] Scott Snibbe: I read this book recently, Humankind: A Hopeful History, by Rutger Bregman. It’s a great one, but it sounds like your solution, it’s beautiful how you tie rationalism with deep compassion, because what I hear you saying in terms of our institutions is just look at the best practices.

Go look at Swedish prisons. It costs less. They treat people with absolute dignity and respect. They have minimum security prisons, even for very violent offenders, and it works. People get out, they don’t come back, they don’t commit more crimes. They become productive members of society again. There’s practical ways we can acknowledge every single person’s dignity, no matter their race, no matter what crimes they’ve committed.

It’s already out there, right? That’s why I hear you saying it’s actually, we don’t have to invent something new.

[00:26:28] Dr. Cornel West: People have been raising these same questions for a long time. You’re absolutely right.

[00:26:34] Scott Snibbe: Policing too, it’s the same thing. If you look at police forces in other countries, in many countries, they don’t have any of the same problems we have with the needless racist violence, right?

[00:26:44] Dr. Cornel West: That’s very true, my brother.

Healing psychological wounds & working through despair

[00:26:47] Scott Snibbe: What about healing the wounds? Even if we managed to repair all the organizations, which would be quite difficult. What about the wounds, centuries of wounds, psychological wounds from racist policies? Do we need to go beyond even the rational reformation of institutions in terms of making a country that feels whole and just?

[00:27:11] Dr. Cornel West: Indeed, you always need more than transformation of institutions and structures, because the spiritual and the psychic are not reducible to the institutional and the social. They’re intertwined, but they’re not irreducible. In the face of trauma that produces deep wounds, the wounds themselves can never be eliminated. They can be alleviated, but not eliminated. The fundamental moral and spiritual choice is that between a wounded healer and a wounded hurter. How do you try to spiritually equip yourself to respond to your own wounds in the form of wanting to heal other people’s wounds?

The question becomes, What is it about we human beings such that we not only can go a better way, but stay on that way and be wounded healers for the rest of our lives as poets, as artists, as parents, as friends, as citizens, and as human beings? That’s part of the great tradition, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, at their best. I’m always talking about at their best, because each one of those traditions have versions of reproducing hatred, violence, fear, hurting, more pain, rather than the healing of the wounds and the pain. We go back to best practices again. Buddha’s got some great examples. Jesus has some great examples.

[00:29:22] Scott Snibbe: Absolutely, there’s not much documented about what Jesus said, but the few things he did say were real ringers.

[00:29:30] Dr. Cornel West: It’s true, there you go. All of that free healing and common eating.

[00:29:39] Scott Snibbe: There’s another area of so many areas of hopelessness. There’s a lot of hopelessness and denial when people start looking at how we’re harming our environment. I have a beautiful quote from your platform. You say, “We can forge a new covenant with the earth in respect, reciprocity, and radical love.”

We can forge a new covenant with the earth in respect, reciprocity, and radical love.

Did you ever feel this kind of hopelessness that so many people feel right now about the environment and can you tell a story of how you came to believe this is even possible? It’s another huge area of hopelessness with people right now.

[00:30:17] Dr. Cornel West: Goethe himself said, He or she who has never despaired has never lived. Now there’s different reasons why people feel hopeless. It could be an ecological catastrophe or it could be social injustice. It could be a personal betrayal. There’s all these different motivations that can lead toward a certain kind of nihilism, a sense of meaninglessness and lovelessness and hopelessness and touchlessness. But then the challenge becomes, How do we try to manifest these countervailing forces against the nihilism, against the despair?

You don’t deny the despair. That’s the crucial thing. You have to confront it, and it’s very human to deny it, because that’s the easy way out. The blowback will be intense. But once you acknowledge it, there might be moments when you say, “I’m overwhelmed. This is too much.” It’s like the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, that great prose poem of such profundity that Dostoyevsky wrote right before he died.

The Grand Inquisitor looks around and says, I was a believer, but I don’t think these human beings have the capacity to even begin to do what Jesus wants them to do. All they want to do is just get fed and led and drilled because the freedom is too heavy. They don’t want to be free. They just want pleasure and happiness, give it to them, but make them submit and defer so they can’t think for themselves and they can’t undergo transformation and they never really have genuine experiences of what deep love is all about.

Whoa, what a view of the world, Dostoevsky made that out for Baudelaire’s prose poem. Of course, he’s a Christian himself, Russian Orthodox tradition, but it’s such an indictment of so much of Christianity and institutional Christianity and institutional religion as a whole. Why? Because that despair is just something that can never be eliminated. It’s got to be wrestled with. You wrestle with it daily, monthly, yearly, but you don’t allow it to have the last word.

Break the back of fear with love, love casts it out, fear. Do not be afraid. That’s 365 references. In the Christian biblical text, 365 times, do not be afraid, afraid of what? Things inside of yourself, things in the world, wickedness in high places. wickedness in the corners of your own soul. Be not afraid. You can work it through and wrestle with it in such a way that your courage will be tied to compassion. Your bravery will be tied to service to others.

Your bravery will be tied to service to others.

[00:33:41] Scott Snibbe: That’s really the Buddhist view too, that the sadness, despair, anger, and fear, they all can be fuel for compassion if you use them to connect with others feeling the same way, and then give you some energy to work for the better in whatever way you can.

[00:33:56] Dr. Cornel West: Absolutely, I think it’s no accident that the greatest European philosopher of pessimism, the inimitable Arthur Schopenhauer, who ought to be a skeleton hanging in everybody’s closet, because the challenge that he poses is so profound. We don’t have to accept his conclusions. Nietzsche’s the same way. But in the end, he’s got a chapter called the Road to Salvation and he ends up saying, I’m just saying what Buddhism has been saying all these years.

Then he says, and some Christian mystics, if you listen to the sermon on the prodigal son by Meister Eckhart, I think it’s number 15, he’s saying the same thing too, which went over Schopenhauer, you associate with all this dimness darkness and pessimism. He says, Yes, but I’m also acknowledging that that can be fuel for compassion. That can be a fuel for a certain kind of connection and empathetic relation to other people’s flight and predicament.

Cultivating joyful effort

[00:35:13] Scott Snibbe: Yes, my daughter, she’s 13, and I have been reading about the life of Gandhi in the evenings, and she’s really struck by how long and hard it is to make fundamental changes toward justice in the world. In Buddhism, we have this principle of joyful effort, to stay joyful, even through the most difficult tasks.

I’m wondering what you do for yourself to cultivate joyful effort and if the work you’re doing ever feels too hard for you?

[00:35:49] Dr. Cornel West: It does feel hard, you tell your precious daughter that she is on to something very deep, she’s absolutely right. It does often seem that it takes a long time because it does take a long time in some cases. Sometimes it happens quickly because history is unpredictable. Sometimes within two weeks you can get it. Sometimes within two years or two days. You want to be open. You want to be jazz-like and improvisational, you know how flexible and unpredictable history can be. Most importantly, I think the joy that you talk about for me, and this is where my Christian sensibility does seek.

My beloved mother had a favorite a moment in the biblical text that’s Thessalonian, the fifth chapter, where Paul talks about being thankful in all circumstances. You say, how could that be? That makes absolutely no sense. Thankful, gratitude, piety, and acknowledgement of the blessings owing to the sources for good in your life in terms of the kind of father and mother that you had, over which you had no control, or the kind of grandparents you had, or the kind of friends you encounter, or the kind of text that you read, the kind of music that you listen to.

We’re grateful for Beethoven. Grateful for Aretha Franklin. Why? Because they’re sources of good in our lives. We’re thankful for Schiller, we’re thankful for Paul Salaam and his torturous poetic wrestling with catastrophe. We’re thankful to Mark Twain and Herman Melville and Tony Morrison and Chekhov. Of course, Chekhov is my favorite, so I won’t go anywhere beyond that. That’s about as deep as you can get.

But you’re thankful that they laid bare in their lives and in their works and with their words the source of joy. That’s a love and a joy that go hand in hand. Yes, with the sense of joy and gratitude and thankfulness.

[00:38:13] Scott Snibbe: I love how you connected it to art, because the way that the greatest art uplifts us. Even my Buddhist teachers tell me about it. They get overwhelmed, depressed sometimes, and my teacher says he puts on the Rites of Spring or something like that.

[00:38:36] Dr. Cornel West: That would cheer you up.

[00:38:41] Scott Snibbe: My daughter really wanted to be part of this interview in-person, but she’s out of the house today. But she recorded a question for you. I wonder for our last question, if you’d consider answering hers.

[00:38:54] Dr. Cornel West: Ah, God bless her.

What do young people have to look forward to?

[00:38:56] Samaya Snibbe: What do young people like me have to look forward to in our country’s future?

[00:39:04] Dr. Cornel West: What do young people like me have to look forward to in our country’s future? Yes, indeed. Well, I would say to your blessed daughter that we must always connect the three dimensions of time, the past, the present, and the future. So anytime we’re looking to the future, we’re looking also to the best of the past being preserved and manifest.

What is the best of the past? The memories of love of those who are no longer with us must always be part of the future. No doubt about that. We must be open to change and innovation, but change and innovation that is filtered with a commitment to truth, justice, and love.

Because we know all change is not good, all innovation is not good. But a change in innovation that allows for the flourishing of justice and love and a sense of genuine human connection that kind of “I thou” flourishing that the great Martin Buber talked about rather than just the I, it, the transformative as opposed to the transactional.

Young folk always have something to look forward to because they themselves carry with them when they’re conscious, the best of their past and the best of their present. Then to want to be able to make sure that in their future, love, courage, justice can be found and promoted. I know your precious daughter is one of those I’m talking about, a force for good at the deepest level.

[00:41:14] Scott Snibbe: Dr. West, I can’t not tell you what an extraordinary gift it is to spend an hour of your life with you. Thank you so much.

[00:41:24] Dr. Cornel West: A joy for me. I can tell you that. This is not the last one, brother Scott. This has been just a pure delight. You’ve got a very special anointed spirit, I’m telling you, brother. It’s a beautiful thing to be in conversation with you.

[00:41:44] Scott Snibbe: Well, thank you so much. Keep up all of your wonderful work. I really appreciate it, the world needs it. Thank you.

[00:41:50] Dr. Cornel West: Stay strong now. Thanks, and say hello to your beloved daughter, brother Scott.

Thanks for joining me for my interview with Dr. Cornel West. You can find out more about Dr. West at cornelwest.com and cornelwest2024.com. If you enjoyed this episode, you might enjoy the book based on our podcast, modern approach to Buddhist wisdom, How to Train a Happy Mind.

Cornel West

Dr. Cornel West, a prominent public intellectual, has been a vital voice in discussions around race, democracy, and social justice. As a professor at institutions like Harvard University (where he graduated Magna Cum Laude in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph. D.), Yale, Princeton University, Union Theological Seminary, and the University of Paris, West has shaped the fields of African American Studies and Christian thought. His groundbreaking books Race Matters and Democracy Matters brought critical attention to issues of racial inequality, white supremacy, and the struggles of Black people in America. With a blend of pragmatism and activism rooted in the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr., West critiques not only Donald Trump, but also Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party for failing to tell the truth to the people. His candidacy as an independent, linked to the Green Party and the People’s Party, challenges both the Republican and Democratic establishments.

West’s legacy extends beyond academia into activism and commentary. Known for his outspoken critique of figures like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, he argues that the mainstream Democratic Party has abandoned the working class and marginalized communities. His association with progressive movements, such as the Democratic Socialists of America and collaborations with Tavis Smiley, underscore his commitment to challenging systems of imperialism, patriarchy, and capitalist exploitation. Independent candidate Brother West remains a relentless advocate for truth, love, and justice, grounded in a Christian ethic and a deep concern for the oppressed.

Credits