I appreciate those thoughts. I don’t think I actually am making a point at cross purposes to Cornell West. My point is really that I think he misunderstands his own point, that he has insufficiently examined the degree to which our needs and struggles exist at a personal rather than at a political level.
Being seen is a very powerful and provacative conceot. If by it you are only mean something about political structure and the distribution of power, then it becomes fairly technical and loses much of the personal, almost existential, feeling that the phrase naturally arouses. But this clearly is clearly an issue that holds great existential and emotive power. And when the discussion is framed within this metaphor of a person being seen, being known, it takes on an almost religious connotation. To be seen and known and valued, as people used to say that God sees and knows and values each of us. That he knows and cares for each sparrow, and so we hold the existential terror of life and insignificance at bay.

West makes use of all these deep feelings and associations, the language of intimacy and family and meaning and faith. And when you hear people talk about this subject, including Cornell West, those personal existential needs and feelings are actually doing a lot of work. So I don’t think the issue at hand really is one of policy and politics, it’s about something deeply intrinsic to our most basic individual psychological needs.
Even the idea of the Navi’s Ewa is about taking your place and having significance within some larger universal structure. It’s a religious notion. And Cornell West’s God is the political state. And my contention would simply be that that’s an error. That’s a false God and a false home and false sense of being seen. It’s false power. The state can affect the distribution of power but fundamentally does not produce it. The deepest problem to be solved isn’t distribution of power or meaning, the deepest problem is production. And it is at the personal level that all really powerful things are actually produced.
At this point, African Americans are actually in danger of committing the worst sins they have (legitimately) complained about in the past, because they’ve actually bought into the whole idea of grasping for power and political force and a zero sum game of scrambling to be on top of others and judging and punishing some while rewarding others based purely on their racial heritage. They’re seeking false power as the solution to real problems.
The 1619 project is a good example, an attempt to rewrite all the history and meaning of America, the most complex heterogenous nation in history, as being defined by one specific story. The argument that the black story (specifically the slave story) is the American story, and invalidates all other narratives and meanings. #@$& the Italians and the Greeks and Lebanese and Jews and Irish and Polish and Croatians and Turks and Germans and the hundred other groups that made the journey to America to start a new life story there and what it meant to them. All of that is invalid, none of that matters, none of what those people went through or what America meant to them has any significance or is a valid part of the American story. The black story invalidates and overwrites all of those dozens of others.

The irony of it is that that sort of approach is the exact mistake that previous black leaders were legitimately complaining about. The truth about America is that it isn’t just the great stories, it’s also the difficult ones. And often both are quite mixed. America isn’t any one group’s story, no matter what happened to them, good or bad. It’s everyone’s. It doesn’t belong exclusively to any one single group. We all belong to it, and it belongs to all of us. The good and the bad, the difficult and the triumphant.

No one has the right to say that America is just this or just that. There is no “American race”; the American people simply are all these different peoples crashing into one another and sharing space in a way that had never occurred before in history. People who had been divided and fighting for their entire history, back to the dawn of time, suddenly living next door to each other and trying to figure out how to make that work. Some coming from slavery, some fleeing religious oppression, some fleeing from war or famine or devastating poverty, some coming from centuries of racial or political hatred.

From such a mix of down-and-outs, slaves, and exiles you wouldn’t expect much. But what do we actually see? Where do the wealthiest people of African descent in the world live? Where do the wealthiest and most successful people of Jewish descent live? Where are there five times more Irish then in the country from which they originated? For group after group, there is a place where you can find more of them here, and more successful and thriving, than in their own original homelands. Where can you find people mixed with and married to their historical and religious and racial enemies of untold generations? Only here.

We all get to be part of that great narrative and bring our own unique story to that meeting. America welcomes the black story. But being part of that story means you don’t get to take what it meant or means away from anyone else. And compared to most places, and for so many different people, America has been uniquely good. Not easy. Not simple. Not a utopia. Because there is no such place, that humans have built and occupied.