This week I’ve got the one and only Cornel West on The Glenn Show, and I couldn’t be more delighted. Brother Cornel hardly needs an introduction—he’s been one of the most prominent, possibly the most prominent, black public intellectual in the US for the last 40 years. I’ve known him for about that long, since we started up a correspondence back in the early ‘80s. I wanted to have Cornel back on the show to work through something that’s been troubling me. Now that “race is over,” or now that race plays a much less determinative part in our politics, what is the role of the black intellectual?
Cornel begins by delivering his interpretation of my memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Consevative. As he notes, the book is about much more than conservatism. He zeros in on the book’s interrogation of authenticity and race, and, as one might expect, the ambivalent but powerful influence of religion in my life. Back in the ‘90s, Cornel wrote a well-regarded book called Race Matters, and I want to know: is that still the case? There are other concerns reshaping American politics, after all: the Middle East, Trumpian populism, and the imperialism that dare not speak its name. As always, Cornel consults the classics for inspiration: Plato, Socrates, Dostoevsky, Conrad, Ellison, and Morrison. For Cornel, the great enemy, at least in the black community, is nihilism, the absence of belief in foundational values, whatever they may be. Whatever the status of race, those values do matter. The Democratic Party isn’t providing them, and Trump seems to have other things on his mind. So where can we find grounding values in our politics?
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0:00 Glenn and Cornel’s early correspondence
2:20 Cornel: “Brother Glenn ain’t never been just a black conservative”
9:34 Ground News ad
11:10 One-eyed and two-eyed reason
19:33 The Loury family legacy
25:01 Does race still matter?
34:32 The black intellectual in a declining empire
45:56 Keeping nihilism at bay in the black community
51:42 Keep the funk, and die with a smile on your face
55:40 The Democratic Party plantation
Recorded July 18, 2025
Links and Readings
Glenn’s memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative
Toni Morrison’s book, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
Ralph Ellison’s book, Shadow and Act
Thomas Sowell’s book, The Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggle
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, The Message
Cornel’s book, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight against Imperialism
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
Coleman Hughes’s book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America
Mahalia Jackson’s rendition of Clara Ward’s, “How I Got Over”
John Coltrane’s album, A Love Supreme
Niall Ferguson’s book, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire
Glenn’s book, Race, Incarceration, and American Values
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brother’s Karamazov
Joseph Conrad’s novel, Victory: An Island Tale
Cornel’s 2024 Gifford Lectures
