Professor and activist Cornel West has confessed that he’s having second thoughts about President Obama.
In an interview with NPR, Dr. West states that he not only does he wish the president were more “Martin Luther King-like“, but also voiced his concern about the lack of love and respect he sees between races.
“More and more black folk tend to be well-adjusted to Obama’s presidency, but does that mean they’re well-adjusted to injustice?”Dr. West said in the interview.
“We don’t hear our president talking about the need for high-quality jobs for everybody, giving it priority, not just giving a speech in Detroit. When are you going to make jobs rather than Wall Street a priority? That’s what I’m concerned about.”
In the interview, Dr. West states that a lack of love and trust for the people of America as a whole is what’s driving the message of compassion for the poor to be pushed to the margin.
“Love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that’s being pushed to the margins and you can see it…You can see it in terms of the obsession on Wall Street with not just profits but greed, more profit, more profit. You see it in our television culture that’s obsessed with superficial spectacle. You see it even in our educational systems, where the market model becomes central.”
Although Dr. West feels that President Obama shouldn’t have a “black agenda”, he does feel that it is necessary for the President to address issues that the community is facing.
As previously reported, Dr. West had some harsh words for the President after accusing him of not handling critics, especially black critics, properly. West states that instead of addressing his concerns with answers, the President ‘treated him like a cub scout’.
“I hadn’t seen him for two and a half weeks, and he made a beeline to me, though, brother, and he was deeply upset. He talked to me like I was a Cub Scout, and he was a pack master, you know what I mean?” Dr. West said.
“I respect my dear brother, but I don’t like to be demeaned and humiliated in that way and I didn’t get a chance to respond to him. And I hope maybe at some time we can. But it was very, it was a very ugly kind of moment, it seems to me, and that disturbs me because then it raises the question for me: Does he have a double standard for black critics as opposed to white critics?”
Check out the radio interview below.
