Word: cornel
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...nomination in Congress never read her stuff. There is an assumption, perhaps, that black excellence is exceptional or somehow out of place or outside the norm. There is that notion that black excellence is not supposed to be too widespread. I think that when we position people like Cornel West and Skip Gates as the sort of paradigmatic examples of black excellence things like this unleash the possibility for people to question black excellence and to talk shit about black excellence in a way that is really deeply racist...
Douthat: But Tim, don’t you think that that is something that Cornel West brings on himself by being basically outside of his scholarship. He’s not among Harvard intellectuals, but he’s a bomb threat to public intellectuals. He’s someone who likes going out and spreading controversial things, like his comment on September 11th. Inevitably, he does this much more than anyone else in the Af-Am department. I think if this had been an issue between Skip Gates and Larry Summers you would have had fewer people...
Douthat: But I’m just saying that the people you’re running into in the bathroom, knowing that Cornel West is a bomb-thrower of a sort, their reaction is simply going to be that if a bomb is thrown, well, who throws the bombs most of the time...
Breece: I’ve never heard Cornel West be unreasonable and throw a bomb, as you call it. He’s a little bit too polite for that in the speeches that I’ve heard and what I’ve read...
Douthat: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. No one is suggesting that Cornel West is saying things that should get him fired from Harvard, or anything like that. All we are saying is that Cornel West has become in the past five or 10 years a polemicist. I mean, if you open up the Cornel West Reader or Race Matters or read any of his op-eds, he’s saying things that—while they aren’t utterly loony—they are of a certain extremely left wing stripe that is?...