President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are inspiring to black people in one sense, but they aren't doing all they can to help people at the bottom, author and professor Cornel West said Monday on
"The Late Show with David Letterman."
"On the one hand, it's a magnificent achievement at the symbolic level in terms of both having access to the most powerful office in the world and, secondly, the impact it has on our precious young people of all colors so that you actually see a charismatic black man there wielding power," West said. "But there's a difference between substance and symbol."
He said that every 28 hours, a black or brown youth is shot by the police.
"We've had a black president, black attorney general, not one federal prosecution of the policemen of murdering those folks," West said. "So young people are raising the question: We have black faces in high places, but it doesn't deliver when it comes to justice — what's going on?
"Then it's a question of what kind of persons do you have, not just the black faces."
Black leaders are not "keeping track of those stuck in the basement, and it's more and more all the time," said West, a professor at Union Theological Seminary. "It's not just black. It's white, it's brown, it's the structure of the system that needs to change."
And real improvement is impossible until it does, because money rules everything, he said.
"Right now we live in an age of the sellouts," West said, the
Daily Caller reported. "We live in an age of cupidity and love of money, money, money — Wu-Tang Clan, C.R.E.A.M, 'cash rules everything around me,' but it doesn’t have to rule me.
"We have too many folk who are simply in love with money and access and power. And this is true when it comes to mainstream leadership; it is true when it comes to our president."
He added, "Political calculation. Not moral conviction. The same is true in terms of poor people. You’ve got 40 percent of children of color living in poverty in the richest nation in the history of the world. That’s a moral abomination."
West, honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, also said that Obama is too afraid of Fox News to stand by his convictions.
"Where are the voices? Well, the president says, 'No, Fox News is going to get me, right wing is going to get me, the neo-liberal opportunists ... Where’s your integrity? We don’t have enough folk of integrity and that’s true across the board, whatever color."
Watch the video here.
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