Politics & Power Quote by Cornel West

West is doing something deliberately unfashionable: he refuses to let a "black agenda" be reduced to symbolism, grievance-as-branding, or the narrow professional class interests that can quietly pass for representation. The triple repetition of "jobs, jobs, jobs" is more than emphasis; it’s a diagnostic. If you start from chronic unemployment, underemployment, and precarious work, you’re forced to talk about power, not posture. That’s why the list keeps moving outward: education, infrastructure, regulation. He’s sketching a material program that treats racism not just as attitude but as architecture.

The subtext is a rebuke to two audiences at once. To centrist Democrats and corporate liberals: you don’t get to celebrate diversity while outsourcing livelihoods and deregulating predation. To racial nationalists and cultural essentialists: the measure of a black political tradition isn’t separatist purity, it’s whether it can democratize the country. West’s key move is framing black politics as a moral vantage point, "the least of these", borrowing the cadence of the Black church and Christian scripture to claim ethical authority, not just demographic bargaining power.

Context matters: West emerged as a public intellectual when neoliberal consensus politics was shrinking the meaning of justice into technocratic tweaks and respectability narratives. Here he insists that the most "particular" starting point can yield the most universal outcome: build a society that works for those with the least leverage, and you end up with a stronger democracy for everyone. That’s coalition politics with teeth, not sentiment.