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EGACY Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow.
WEDNESDAYS • Sept. 9, 2015
INSIDE Nurses & wounded officer honored - 2 It’s open season for ‘Buzzkill’ - 3 Students explore race and justice - 5 How old is your heart? - 14
Richmond & Hampton Roads
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Cornel West at VCU: Speaks on Black Lives Matter, racial justice, and more
Cornel West, Ph.D., one of America’s most prominent public intellectuals and a champion of racial justice, visited Virginia Commonwealth University on Thursday, calling for a more just and fair society, one in which racism and poverty are eliminated, jobs pay a living wage, decent housing is available and quality education is accessible to all. “I come from a tradition of a people, of a great tradition of folk terrorized for 400 years,” West told the crowd of hundreds in the Siegel Center. “Ferguson’s nothing new. Staten Island’s nothing new. Baltimore’s nothing new. Been wrestling with it for 400 years of trauma and staring in the face of it, and still mustering the courage to raise some of the most crucial questions about what it means to be human.” “When we say Black Lives Matter, that doesn't exclude anybody,” he added. “That just means if you're going to talk about all lives, then make sure you’re not excluding the chocolate ones.” West, a Princeton University professor and the author of 19 books, including “Race Matters,” “Democracy Matters,” and his new memoir, “Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud,” urged the crowd to “learn how to die,” meaning that they must critically examine themselves and shed assumptions and preconceived notions in order to come to terms with the past and make a better future. “The unexamined life is not worth living for the human,” he said. “What kind of human being will you choose to be?” As an educator for 40 years, West said, he always opens every class by telling students that they have come to learn how to die. “I’m not talking about cheap schooling,” he said. “Save that for the marketers. Save that for those who think that somehow education is just a matter of gaining access to a skill so you can get some job and live in some vanilla suburb
Cornel West, Ph.D., poses for a photo with Idella Glenn, Ph.D., director for diversity education with VCU's Division of Inclusive Excellence. and no longer have to wrestle with what kind of human being you really are. Yes, you want a skill. Yes, you want schooling. But you come here for something more than schooling. You come here for deep education and deep education is about learning how to die so that you learn how to live because when you examine certain assumptions that you have, certain presuppositions that you’re holding on to, when you let them go, that’s a form of death. And there’s no growth, there’s no
development, there’s no maturation without learning how to die and giving up certain dogma, giving up certain doctrine.” “The dogma of white supremacy cuts so deep in America, past and present, that if America doesn’t learn how to die and critically examine that doctrine all the way down, America could lose its democratic possibilities. And that is real,” he said. “That is very real.”
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