West

There has never been a race problem, there has been catastrophe visited upon black people and indigenous people and Asian people; there has never been a woman's problem except from the vantage point of the establishment gaze - to reduce the catastrophic to the problematic is to give the professional managerial class problems that they can manage. But it's not like that; there are different levels to catastrophe - ecological, nuclear, economic, social, psychic and cultural. And so the question becomes: is there really way out? What am I to do? What are we to do? What kind of courage are we going to exert given the structures of conformity and complacency and cowardliness that are shot through most of the professional managerial class in all of its various forms?

Cornel West