Summary of Cornel West's Race Matters, 25th Anniversary

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 The liberal/conservative debate overlooks the most basic issue facing black America: the existential threat to its very existence. The debate fails to address the fact that people, especially degraded and oppressed people, are also hungry for identity, meaning, and self-worth.

#2 The first African encounter with the New World was an encounter with a distinctive form of the Absurd. The initial black struggle against degradation and devaluation in the enslaved circumstances of the New World was, in part, a struggle against nihilism.

#3 The genius of black Americans was to create cultural buffers to ward off the nihilistic threat. These consisted of religious and civic institutions that sustained familial and communal networks of support. But as black civil society was shattered by market forces, more and more black people became vulnerable to daily lives endured with little sense of self and fragile existential moorings.

#4 The market has contributed to the collapse of black civil society, as it has done with all other civil societies. The common denominator of these calculations and analyses is usually the provision, expansion, and intensification of pleasure.

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