The Fire Down Under

...Once the jury delivered split verdicts and the city remained peaceful, the subject began to drop from sight...

...Spike Lee and others have capitalized on the resurgence of Malcolm X's reputation...

...On the whole...

...If his reserve comes across in other chapters as evenhandedness and ultimately lends him credibility, here it borders on being coy...

...Let's go, nigger!'" West refrains from clearly locating his own politics as well, calling his view simply "progressive...

...Neither acknowledges that our society is the sum of its parts...

...His deconstruction of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings is a compelling example of his approach...

...Far from merely reflecting the headlines, though, the book aims to give depth and continuity to what should be an urgent debate...

...West writes of the riots, "The astounding disappearance of the event from public dialogue is testimony to just how painful and distressing a serious engagement with race is...

...The result, West proclaims, is despair, the abandonment of community and eventual lawlessness...

...Part of what distinguishes this slim volume is the author's recognition that the way we tackle a subject shapes our response to it...

...Thomas had painted his sister, Emma Mae, as a "welfare cheat"—revealing, says West, "his own lack of integrity and character...

...As he points out the shortcomings of the national racial debate, West, who heads the Afro-American Studies Department at Princeton University, is careful to maintain an academic distance...

...self-help Republicans stress a need to confront immoral behavior within the black urban community, especially among poor black men...

...In the process, he casts a fresh light on moribund controversies...

...In a speech to a conservative San Francisco audience...

...The publication of Cornel West's Race Matters also coincided with the first anniversary of the April 1992 upheaval...

...For him, the California outburst provides an occasion to put the country's long vexing racial concerns into a wider, more meaningful context...

...He is as likely to quote from a rock song by Sly and the Family Stone as from the writings of Plato...

...He is similarly reluctant to pigeonhole his academic colleagues, whereas he is quick to pin labels on black political figures...

...The raw reality of drugs and guns, despair and decrepitude, generates a raw rage that among past black spokespersons, only Malcolm X's speech approximates...

...Both sides, West observes, have formulated their positions from a white perspective: "For liberals, black people are to be 'included' and 'integrated' into 'our' society and culture, while for conservatives they are to be 'well-behaved' and 'worthy of acceptance' by 'our' way of life...

...Only in his Preface does he lower his guard to reveal how racism has affected him personally: "Years ago, while driving from New York to teach at Williams College, I was stopped on fake charges of trafficking cocaine...

...Thomas' performance as a Supreme Court nominee, the author goes on, not only played into George Bush's tokenism but also was supported by the worst features of black patriarchy...

...He faults both Thomas and Hill for supporting "unbridled capitalist market forces...

...Even his attacks on capitalism display a remarkable equanimity, and it is apparent he has paid attention to the culture industries spawned by the market...

...What we witnessed in Los Angeles," he says in his Introduction, "was the consequence of a lethal linkage of economic decline, cultural decay, and political lethargy in American life...

...Reviewed by Linda Kulman Freelance writer The national discourse on race relations deteriorated into intellectual ambulance-chasing this past April while Americans awaited the outcome of the "second Rodney King trial"—in which four police officers previously acquitted of beating the motorist now faced Federal charges of having violated his civil rights...

...Drawing on the socialist and Christian tenets that have informed his other works, West offers a hybrid antidote to the problems plaguing black society: government assistance programs paired with a re-emphasis of old-fashioned morality...

...Young blacks today, he reminds us, "are up against forces of death, destruction and disease unprecedented in the everyday life of black urban people...

...He finds the current political responses to these ills too confining, too limited in their possibilities...

...As long as the violence that had leveled parts of Los Angeles following the initial decision a year earlier threatened to recur, talk-show hosts and Op-Ed-page columnists flocked to address the race issue...

...Race Matters is designed to be provocative...

...All of us, he says, should feel rage at the failed American system...

...West instead pivots black anger on its axis to make the emotion understandable to whites too...

...The author of seven previous books and a prodigious lecturer, he is well-known for his rhetorical nimbleness...

...When I told the police officer I was a professor of religion, he replied, 'Yeh, and I'm the Flying Nun...

...Although most of them have been published separately, the chapters achieve a loose cohesion here in condemning our consumer-driven culture, where self-gratification is prized at the expense of group values...

...The book is a collection of eight essays on themes central to black America, including black rage, the taboo of black sexuality, homophobia, and anti-Semitism...

...Great Society Democrats advocate economic measures to compensate for the lack of opportunity at the root of black America's present predicament...

...A man of his stature, after all, is in a position to provide a far greater return to the community than most people...

...Given the post he holds and his degrees from Harvard and Princeton, it is difficult to accept West's lament that so many bright young blacks choose to attend prestigious colleges and universities to enhance their marketability, and forsake the chance to enrich their community by attending traditionally black schools...

...Race was the visible catalyst, not the underlying cause...

...In the final chapter, West tries to demystify Malcolm X, whom he calls a "prophet of black rage...

...Although at times West's prose gets lost in a thicket of suffixes, he succeeds in bringing down the divides that have kept matters of race essentially a black domain...

...West is no less forthright in taking up such charged issues as black nationalism and black-Jewish relations, yet in every case he deftly avoids ensnaring himself in polemics...

...Nonetheless, it delivers a powerful moral message in a tone made accessible to a broad audience...

...But he is particularly critical of Thomas, whose relentless self-promotion he shows was evident before Hill ever took the stand...

...Despite his mediocrity, most blacks rallied around him for the color of his skin, and then supported him over Hill in keeping with the age-old black gender hierarchy...

...In his chapter on the black intellectual leadership, where he speaks of "race-distancing elitists," "race-embracing rebels," and "race-transcending prophets," he has the opportunity to place himself within the spectrum—but lets it pass...