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Du Bois talked about “a hope not hopeless, but unhopeful.” That’s a blues-soaked hope. That’s a hope that says, there’s nothing about my condition right now that suggests that I could be other than a slave, but I’m gonna sing a song and imagine my world beyond this current moment. It seems as if there’s nothing imaginable beyond now, but because ofthe work we can do on the ground with each other, oh, you got to have faith in the possible.

– Eddie S. Glaude Jr

Signs we are failing.

The Solution

In such times, we need a multiracial alliance in a progressive middle class, libreal slices in the corporate elite, and subversive energy from below. There must be radical democratic accountability to redistribute resources and wealth and restructure the economy and government so that all benefit.

I’m carefully reading The Cornel West Reader. West’s profundity is almost annoying. It feels nearly superhuman. I struggle to understand how he has accumulated such detailed scholarship.

West is my hero, my star. If I aim to be like him, I’m bound to hit something orbital. Though my scholarship likely won’t be as in-depth in literary theory, for instance, I’ll at least have a unique appreciation for Tennyson, Auden, Goethe, and Kafka. In our disciplinary and technocratic age, theoretical-poetical-empiricist holism, to name some elements of my yearning interdisciplinarity, is rare.

I’ve perused the journal Social Text, which I found was vibrant in the 80s and 90s but has since declined in quality (as it relates to my own intellectual intrique).

What’s interesting to me is that the intellectuals in those early years seemed to have a pulse on something very special. Greatness was being born. This pulse reverberates throughout my current doctoral program, where we have the spirit of the early years but with a new irrelevant jargon. The early lucidity is part of its pull.

I mentioned Kafka. In my previous entry, I noted a dismissal of existentialism. After further reading and returning to key works, I’ve concluded that there may be something still worth valuing in that domain. For example, Schopenhauer’s notion of compassion seems useful for better understanding the nature of living a life with less sadism, as Rorty might say.

At the beginning of this year, I had little respect for fiction and poetry. I found it tedious. I’m now developing, respect, though. I was told this year that stories are the main medium for pedagogical social transformation. I think there’s something to that.

I don’t know where I’m going. I’m just following West right now. I’m trying to borrow from his perspective as much as possible so that my worldview might enlargen and better approach his.

I think good writers develop by emulating others. They steal from a variety of sources they respect. Good thinkers are probably similar. One learns to think more critically, with deeper questions, and a bigger picture of the world by steeping oneself in the views of someone with a grand vision.

Marxism has become a specter of American conservatism. The red scare and paranoia is pervasive among the right-winged social commentators—so much so that, as an academic, a part of me fears the title I’ve given this brief reflection. As a progressive intellectual, there are many that see me as boogeyman, prowling the halls of the university, searching for developing minds to corrupt.

I (and my fellow progressive, practice-inclined colleagues) am, of course, not malicious but benevelont, caring, and empathetic. If I’ve transgressed academically, I aver that my transgression is merely action to alleviate the plight of the wretched and marginalized.

Marxism is valuable. Its historical and economic analyses, the theory of reification, and conceptons of hegemony help foster explanatory power to spur social freedom.

When combined with insight into oppressed peoples’ structures of feeling and meaning, their oppositional ways of life and struggle, we can better understand complex subordinating phenomena related to nationalism, racism, gender oppression, homophobia, and ecological devestation.

Americans must confront a fragile experiment summed up in three ideas: democracy, individual self-creation, and equal opportunity. While looking to the creation of a new, better future, we must perennially ask: What does the public interest have to do with the most vulnerable and disadvantaged in our society? And we must answer that question with a bold vision of collaborative, collective liberation.

Modernity means using one’s intelligence to question and challenge authority and convention—despite the weight of fallibilism and the social risks. We may never find harmony or achieve wholeness.