Cornel West
Scholar
(He is in a three-piece navy-blue suit with a pocket watch and he has on cuff links. Eyegla**es. Books everywhere, papers on the desk. It is as if the desk, which is two-sided, is a fortress. The answering machine clicks and there are two beeps.)
You sell
at the
most profitable price
and it's inescapable, it's ubiquitous,
you're selling things,
you're selling things at the most profitable price
and you're trying to gain
access
to power and property
and pleasure
by any means you cayan,
you see,
and thal [sic] are two different things.
On the one hand
there's like duh frontier myth in America,
right (barely audible on the word "right")
That we (hard to hear that "we") gain some moral and
plitical [sic]
regeneration
and expansion by means of conquest and dispossession of
duh
people's land.
So I mean a, uh
Richard Slotkin talks about dis in terms
of being a gunfighterr (grabbing the "r") nation.
If in fact our major myth is that of the fronteer,
the way in which you expand the fronteer
(He is leaning forward, with his head down close to the desk,
his
gla**es seeming to sit on top of his ears, and screwing up his
face, as
he literally puts his body into the idea)
is by being a gunfighter.
So many heroes,
these cowboys
wit dere gu-uns
Now, you can imagine
on one level
dat's done
because you wanna
expand
possibilities for the market,
extract resources from the land,
even as you subordinate the peoples who are on that land.
Well, on another level
it's a deep machismo
ethic,
which is
gangsterous,
eh? (almost as if he's saying "okay?" or "right?")
That to be a
mayan
who engages in this
means ta put othuhs down,
ta be tough, ta be cold
and meanspirited, and so forth.
To be like Rambo,
as this brother Stallone made big money in the last decade,
right?
Uh, and
this kinda gangsterous orientation,
which as we know,
ya know,
has a long history in black and white,
uh, and
in rap music these days--
you know, gangster rap,
which is deeply resistant of, uh, against racism and so forth
but so centered on machismo identity because
you tough
like a soldier,
you like a, uh, military mayan,
you, you can best,
you're better thayan, uh, these other
military men that you're fightin', against,
you can outpolice the police,
you can outbrutalize the police brutality,
the police who are being brutal and so forth
and so on.
So you're playing exactly the same game, as it were,
and racial reasoning, I think, oftentimes has been construed
as an
attempt of black people
all coming together
in order to
both protect
each other
but usually the men
who will serve as the policing agents,
therefore the interests of black women
are subordinated
and the black men
become the machismo heroes,
because they're the ones who defy
and women can't do that.
Why,
because,
you know, these folks who you're defying
themselves are machismo,
so you need a machismo person to respond to the
machismo.
So you get dis
encounter
between two machismo heroes,
you see,
and it takes courage.
I don't wanna downplay these machismo heroes
but it's still within a patriarchal mode,
it's still very much within a patriarchal mode,
and it reproduces and recycles the same kinda conception of
what it
is to engage
in
struggle
and what it is to
attempt to gain
some progress,
as it were,
and hence what I think we end up with is a certain kind
of turf policing.