As the first Black man to receive a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University and an author of 20 books, including Race Matters and Democracy Matters, West has spent more than four decades advocating for social justice and prophetic faith, with love at the center of all his work. During the talk, he was candid about injustices in the world and emphasized that integrity, compassion, and perseverance matter now more than ever.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Here are highlights from the conversation on May 22.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On each generation\u2019s calling, choosing integrity over power, and how Santa Clara can continue that legacy<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery generation has got to produce unleashed love warriors, freedom fighters, joy sharers, wound healers\u2014visionary servants of something bigger than their own egos [and] narcissistic predicaments.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s better to have some integrity and love in your heart and be relatively defeated than be evil triumphant\u2014a gangster on the way to hitting up against the wall of history. That\u2019s the great tradition and we\u2019re bouncing back. Santa Clara University is part of it. I\u2019m serious about it. There\u2019s something happening in this place. There really is.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEverywhere I go, I see clouds of witnesses, different people making choices to be forces of good in a variety of different forms. They don\u2019t have the institutional power, infrastructure, or collective resources\u2014but they\u2019re doing some wonderful things given what they do have access to. That\u2019s beautiful. In institutions of higher learning, you see these possibilities.\u201d<\/p>\n
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On the true meaning of personal success<\/p>\n
\u201cYour vocation is what you feel at the deepest level of your heart, mind, soul, and body\u2014not just the various market strategies you might come up with to make money, to gain access to some economic status. We all need money. Absolutely. But success must always be secondary to integrity, secondary to the love of family and others, [and] secondary to your fundamental sense of who you are as a human being.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the importance of integrity<\/p>\n
\u201cPart of the escalating decadence of the culture of professionalism among the professional managerial classes of our declining and decaying empire is that people are not honest and candid. They don\u2019t have integrity. They pose, they posture. They say things that other people want them to say. They don\u2019t want to go against the grain. They don\u2019t want to pay the cost of noble discontent\u2026 because the cultural professionalism that reinforces specialization\u2014with all the different jargons for the highly specialized discourses\u2014creates a conformity, and the aim is upward mobility rather than soul formation.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIntegrity becomes more and more important\u2014and that cuts across politics, religion, and educational institutions. That\u2019s why when you have persons of integrity in places, especially high places, it makes all the difference in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
On his 2024 presidential run and what he was really after<\/p>\n
\u201cI want people to think hard about an election and vote for who [they] want to vote for. No candidate owns the vote. They make their case and people choose. [I wasn\u2019t] running for office, [I was] running for Jesus\u2014and it spill[ed] over to running for justice. All I was doing was trying to convince the country to understand the best of itself. And the best of itself has been persons who, given their finitude and fallibility, have tried to stand up for the quest for truth, beauty, and justice, and in some cases the Holy, and have the younger generation see what it looks like.\u201d<\/p>\n
On finding joy in spite of current events<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not an optimist. I\u2019m a blues man. Blues ain\u2019t got nothing to do with optimism, but it produces prisoners of hope who wrestle with despair every day. I draw a distinction between retail despair and wholesale despair. People come up to me all the time, and say, \u2018Brother West, I don\u2019t see why you\u2019re not pessimistic.\u2019 Of course I\u2019m pessimistic\u2014I\u2019m a sensitive human being, I see what\u2019s going on. But I\u2019m a retail pessimist. Pessimism doesn\u2019t have the last word. We know how grim and dim [the world] is\u2014we\u2019re not denying anything at all. But we\u2019re going to keep loving our kids, our families, others\u2014not just in our own neighborhoods, tribes and clans, but loving others around the world. For me, always putting the priority on the most unloved: the widows, the orphans, the Godless, the fatherless, the motherless\u2026 and in that sense, it\u2019s a joy that can never ever be crushed.\u201d<\/p>\n
On keeping each other and ourselves accountable<\/p>\n
\u201cThe crucial thing for any of us willing to make that leap in the genuine quest for truth, beauty, goodness, or maybe even the Holy, is that we\u2019re all cracked vessels. We all are fallible. We all need to learn and listen. We need to keep each other lovingly accountable. In the end, we all want to be connected at that deep human level.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the latest installment of Santa Clara University\u2019s Compelling Conversation series, hosted by the Office of the Provost…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":336215,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[88,90,89],"class_list":["post-336214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-jose","tag-san-jose","tag-san-jose-headlines","tag-san-jose-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336214\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/336215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}