West Shifts Hip Hop Talk’s Focus to Attacks

After a year on sabbatical, Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74 spoke to a packed crowd of upwards of 800 at the Kennedy School’s ARCO Forum yesterday.

West’s speech, organized by the W.E.B. DuBois Institute of Afro-American Research and the Institute of Politics, was originally suppossed to focus on hip hop culture. However, in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, West said he thought it more appropriate to focus on America’s reaction to the attacks.

West drew parallels between last month’s events and the African-American experience.

“America has been ‘niggerized’” by the terrorist attacks,” West said, comparing current national anxieties to African-Americans’ long history of coping with terror and death.

Although West apologized for spending less time than anticipated on hip hop culture, he was able to incorporate music throughout his speech by splicing in tracks from a compact disc he recorded last spring.

The disc, produced by Danny Goldberg for Artemis Records, contains recordings of West speaking in his trademark style, deemed “preacher-like” by some, over a background of blues, jazz, and rap tracks.

Describing hip-hop as “rooted in struggle,” West talked about black music’s unique ability to “caress our bruises” in this “moment of deep sadness and sorrow.”

West drew some of his strongest crowd reaction when he expressed a slight indignation over politicians’ sudden infatuation with spending in the wake of the attacks.

“Sounds an awful lot like reparations to me,” West said to shouts of “Amen!” from the crowd. “I didn’t think America was into reparations.”

While pledging his wholehearted support for aid to the victims of terrorism, West told the audience that victims of “institutional forms of terrorism” such as slavery have been suffering long before Sept. 11. He warned that “the first casualty of war is always veritas,” and that America should safeguard against “anti-Arab racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Muslim” sentiments.

A few students said they were disappointed about West’s shift in focus away from the original topic of hip-hop culture.

“Overall, though, I was amazed by [the speech’s] breadth and the issues it covered,” said Toussaint Losier ’03.

West also paid tribute last night to his older brother, Clifton, who was present in the audience. Citing his willingness to “take a bullet in the heart and the brain” for his brother, West introduced Clifton as an expert with an inside take on the hip hop industry, as he runs his own production and recording company.