Sanjay Varma’s Reviews > Prophesy Deliverance! > Status Update

the three similarities between black prophetic christian theology and Marxism are…weak. TBH they seem to amount to nothing.

I wonder how many followers West has? The way he categorizes black American history into 4 stages is so personal. It is the kind of heuristic that a loyal cadre of believers would adopt without question. Yet in the context of academic debate, stages 3 and 4 seem quite a reach.

I wish the West would cite historical evidence to support his argument that slave revolt leaders (Prosser, Vesey, Turner) fit into a “black prophetic christian” tradition. But I suppose that this is not history, it is critical theory. West is interpreting history as he needs to fit events into his theory.

this comparison or dialog between Marxism and christianity is extremely thin. My reaction is, Hmmm….

“Since we can neither reduce truth to the spheres of science, art, and religion nor view the world from the standpoint of eternity we must acknowledge our finitude and fallenness as human beings.”

What a load of religious BS that empowers any persuasive charismatic huckster!

My gloss of West’s exceptionalist and assimilationist traditions:

Exceptionalists are middle-class blacks who want to join the upper class and be proud of being black.

Assimilationists are lower-class blacks who want to join the middle-class and atop feeling shame at being black.

My gloss of West’s marginalist and humanist traditions:

Marginalists are artists who fit neither in black nor white society. Humanists are artists who fit in both.

Marginalists write stories with sad endings. Humanists write stories with happy endings.

West describes four black responses to racism, which he calles traditions. The first two make sense, black exceptionalism and black assimilationism. Both of these traditions have the same goal of joining white society. The third tradition ("Marginalist") is an odd fit. I suspect that West included it for the sole purpose of undermining Richard Wright, and repeating James Baldwin's critiques.

West ends chapter 2 by presenting a counter-example by Frank Snowden, who examined all sources from antiquity and found mostly admiration for African beauty and culture.

West follows this immediately with a very vulgar image, that Western thought has a "bowel" of white supremacy that has released "fumes" and "secretions" that pollute the air of our times.

This is a very cheap rhetorical trick by West.

West frames this chapter around the tendency to order things in Western discourse & thinking. But, in the sweep of intellectual history of the 17th and 18th centuries, West focuses on minor footnotes that deal with race. Then he jumps to an antebellum American abolitionist Benjamin Rush who believes dark skin is caused by leprosy and reject interracial marriage because healthy people should not marry diseased people.