All About Dr. Cornel West: Intro to Cornel West’s Life and Work

Dr. Cornel West is impossible to categorize; he’s a philosopher, author, activist, actor, recording artist, public intellectual, man of faith, and music fanatic. The throughline connecting all of these callings is not a single ideology but an exquisite attunement to the world. Like the jazz musicians he reveres, Cornel has always valued flexibility, improvisation, and the rejection of rigid and reductive views.

• Early years: The son of a teacher and a civilian U.S. Air Force administrator, Cornel was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as the post–World War II baby boom neared its peak, but spent most of his childhood in Sacramento, California. By third grade, he was already practicing civil disobedience: He was kicked out of school for refusing to salute the American flag, having learned that a great-uncle had once been wrapped in one after he was lynched.
• Academia: Cornel studied civilization and Near Eastern languages at Harvard University, earning his bachelor’s degree with honors in just three years, and he did his postgraduate work at Princeton. After finishing his PhD, in 1980, he quickly established himself as a titan of academia and one of America’s leading intellectuals. He taught at both of his alma maters, as well as at similarly elite institutions like Yale University, the University of Paris, and Union Theological Seminary in New York.
• Written work: Cornel has written essays for The Washington Post and The New York Times, authored some twenty books, recorded three spoken-word albums, and appeared in The Matrix film trilogy (twice).
  
• Life as a public intellectual: Through it all, Cornel has proved to be equally at home in any number of ostensibly contradictory contexts: He’s as comfortable speaking publicly with late-night comedy talk-show hosts as he is with conservative news pundits; as passionate behind a lectern as he is on the front lines of a protest against police brutality; as articulate on the pages of a book as he is on a hip-hop track, trading lines with respected American rappers like Killer Mike and Talib Kweli.
• Philosophy behind bars: In the mid-1980s while he was teaching at Yale University, Cornel was arrested during an anti-apartheid rally. He was also arrested once in 2002, outside the U.S. State Department in the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., where he joined a group demonstrating for peaceful intervention in the Middle East; twice in as many weeks during 2011, in New York and Washington, D.C., where he was protesting racist policing and corporate greed, respectively; and again in 2014 and 2015, both for civil disobedience acts related to the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black boy who was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.
• Prisoner education: Cornel has been teaching in prisons for more than four decades. Through the NJ-STEP (New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons) program, Cornel has educated participating inmates on thinkers ranging from Plato to twentieth-century Irish writer Samuel Beckett; some of the program’s students, upon their release, have continued their education at respected institutions such as New Jersey’s Rutgers University. Like all of his students, incarcerated people who attend Cornel’s talks try to keep up as their instructor bounds from philosophy to politics to music. He’s been known to kick off his prison classes by playing R&B classics.

Cornel’s ferocious intellect never outshines his underlying passion for humanity; he’s fundamentally a man “trying to love his crooked neighbor with his crooked heart,” as he often says, paraphrasing the English poet W.H. Auden. In Cornel’s opinion, examining your life with honesty, courage, and compassion isn’t just a moral obligation; it is, he says, “one of the great joys of being alive.”

Over three eclectic albums, Cornel West has taken his musings to a place where most philosophers fear to tread

• Sketches of My Culture (Artemis Records, 2001): An efficient thirty-five–minute compilation of Cornel’s spoken-word soliloquies set to a sonic landscape spanning jazz, hip-hop, soul, and blues. Executive produced by Clifton West, Cornel’s brother, the album was recorded in Sacramento, California, where the West brothers spent most of their childhood. The standout track “Stolen King” showcases, over slinky grooves, Cornel’s intellectual rigor and sensitivity to the innate rhythms of language.
• Street Knowledge (RockDiamond Records, 2004): Cornel’s second album arrived as a two-disc bundle that paired Sketches of My Culture with ten new tracks. Through exaltations, dialogues, and guest verses, the album delivers insightful takes on the power of language. Cornel offers a dramatic discourse on some of the most loaded words in the American lexicon via three thematically linked tracks: “The ‘N’ Word,” taken from Sketches; “The ‘N’ Word (Part 2),” featuring two other powerhouses of Black American thought, the minister-scholar Michael Eric Dyson and talk-show host Tavis Smiley; and “The ‘B’ Word,” featuring American activist and businesswoman Marcia Dyson.
• Never Forget: A Journey of Revelations (Hidden Beach Recordings, 2007): Black Men Who Mean Business, or BMWMB, join Cornel on this hyper-polished (and star-studded) release. Over sixteen tracks, he collaborates with an assembly of America’s heavy-hitting Black musicians, including Prince, Jill Scott, Andre 3000, Talib Kweli, and Killer Mike. Never Forget is structured more like a pop record than Cornel’s previous albums, with fleshed-out structures loaded with hooks and big choruses playing off his inimitable voice.

Learn what it means to think like a philosopher with the MasterClass Annual Membership. Dr. Cornel West, one of the world’s most provocative intellects, will guide you through fundamental questions about what it means to be human and how to best love your community.