Race Matters: Preface - Ch. 6

5. The author, Cornel West, writes about the dilemmas of Black Americans who are categorized at the bottom of the social ladder, and he defines their problems as nihilism, living a life full of meaninglessness and etc. He explains that Blacks usually don’t oppose each other when it comes to politics. Along the same lines, West also brings up the point of Black leadership and the lack thereof. The emergence of Black conservatives is another important point that West writes about. Overall, the author hits on all major issues that are consistently in the forefront of Black culture, politics and ethics.

4. Pg. 23 – “Life without meaning, hope, and love breeds a coldhearted, mean-spirited outlook that destroys both the individual and others.”
Pg. 47 – “A prophetic framework of moral reasoning would have liberated black leaders from the racial guilt of opposing a black man for the highest court in the land and of the feeling that one had to choose between a black woman and a black man.”
Pg. 55 – “One reason quality leadership is on the wane in black America is the gross deterioration of personal, familial, and communal relations among African-Americans. These relations—though always fragile and difficult to sustain—constitute a crucial basis for the development of a collective and critical consciousness and a moral commitment to and courageous engagement with causes beyond that of one’s self and family.”
Pg. 82 – “The crisis of black liberalism is the result of its failure to put forward a realistic response to the changes in the economy.”

3. Nihilism (pg. 22) – the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness
Prophetic framework (pg. 43) – a framework that consists of moral reasoning with its fundamental ideas of a mature black identity, coalition strategy, and black cultural democracy
Black conservatives (pg. 82) – have been able to convince black Americans that conservative ideology and the policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations are morally acceptable and politically advantageous

2. As a person of a minority in America, I still feel as if this is my country. All of my loyalty is to America. However, I do think that the school systems could better educate their students of other cultures just to open their eyes to how other people live their lives. I know from personal experience that my friends love listening to what I have to say about my Indian culture and all of the things we do different than the “typical” American culture. Even though it may not be much, each culture has their uniqueness that students should be aware of.
In high school, usually when we learned about black history, it was always about the same thing; civil rights. Along the lines of what West is proposing, it’s true that our schooling did not emphasize the importance of learning about other cultures, especially the black culture. The only time we learned about certain other cultures was probably when we briefly talked about the world religions and the cultures that practice those religions. History class, even if it is world history, is repetitive and does not change from year to year. We seemed to always learn in the end about white Americans and their origins.

1. Can curriculum change so that more cultural history is applied and required in schooling?