Time & Perspective Quote by Cornel West

West is doing a neat rhetorical two-step: he romanticizes nothing, but he refuses the lazy story that social fragmentation is just “the way things are” now. By staging 1967 against 1997, he picks years that carry political weather. ’67 sits in the heat of civil rights organizing, urban uprisings, Vietnam-era dissent, and a thick ecosystem of unions, churches, local papers, and street-level movements. ’97 lands in the afterglow of the Cold War, the Clinton boom, welfare reform, the crime bill era, and a triumphant neoliberal culture that sold privatization as common sense. The comparison isn’t about better music or cheaper rent; it’s about the infrastructure of belonging.

The key phrase is “important to say.” West isn’t reminiscing; he’s intervening. He anticipates the rebuttal - You’re just nostalgic - and cuts it off. “Not as if ’67 was a time when things were so good” signals he knows the brutality of that period: racism with sharper edges, state violence, assassinations on the horizon. That admission gives him credibility, then lets him land the real charge: community can be stronger precisely under pressure, because shared threats force people into collective life.

Subtext: in the ’90s, prosperity and consumer choice don’t automatically produce solidarity; they can dissolve it. West is hinting that the loss isn’t moral fiber, it’s institutions and habits - fewer common spaces, thinner movements, more individualized survival. The line functions as a rebuke to complacency: if community existed amid catastrophe, its absence in “good times” is a political failure, not a cultural mystery.