Daily Inspiration Quote by Cornel West

“Black people have been working hard for decades” is a deliberately plain sentence that refuses two convenient American myths at once: that racial progress is a gift bestowed from above, and that inequality persists because the marginalized didn’t “try hard enough.” Cornel West isn’t reaching for poetry here; he’s reaching for a moral receipt. The simplicity is strategic. “Working hard” sounds like the language of bootstrap individualism, but West repurposes it as an indictment of a system that demands extraordinary labor for ordinary dignity.

The subtext is exhaustion and stolen credit. “For decades” telescopes generations of Black work - in factories, fields, schools, churches, movements - and implies a grim continuity: effort has been constant, but the terms of reward have been rigged. West’s choice to avoid qualifiers (“many,” “often,” “some”) reads like impatience with debates that treat structural racism as a matter of isolated incidents. He’s not litigating; he’s asserting a baseline truth before the conversation gets hijacked by respectability tests and culture-war distractions.

Context matters because West speaks as a public intellectual shaped by civil rights history, labor politics, and prophetic religious traditions. In that lineage, the point isn’t to praise Black perseverance as inspirational content. It’s to expose the cruelty of a society that celebrates Black labor while resisting Black power, safety, and full citizenship. The line functions as both rebuke and reminder: the problem was never a lack of effort; it was the persistence of extraction, exclusion, and amnesia.