by BRUCE A. DIXON
Clockwise from top: Muhammad Ali, Michael Eric Dyson, and Cornel West
Michael Eric Dyson’s political attack on his former mentor Cornel West is deeply dishonest, because it has to be. Dyson cannot defend drone warfare, the privatization of public education, austerity, preventive detention, or the president’s deportation of two milion people to whom he promised “a road to citizenship.” So he attacks West’s personal manners and love of the limelight, likening himself to Muhammad Ali. But it’s Dyson who never lays a glove on his intended target.
What do you do when a lunatic or someone deeply unprincipled tries to pick a public fight with you? It can be a vexing problem, first because such people tend not to be honest about what their real beef is, and secondly because onlookers may easily decide that both parties to such a dispute are equally bankrupt and worth ignoring.
Dr. Michael Eric Dyson has done something very much like this to the man he calls one of his former mentors, Cornel West. Dyson’s ten thousand word screed in the New Republic focuses at great length on West’s alleged academic and personal shortcomings. But the current context of time and place and alliances at this, the official start of the 2016 presidential campaign season, mark Dyson’s piece as an unmistakably political attack.
It’s a profoundly disappointing and dishonest critique as well, failing as it does to grapple with any of the dozens of specific policy matters upon which Cornel West has harshly criticized the entire lack political class of black mayors, black preachers, black legislators and officials and of course the first black president. Michael Eric Dyson on the other hand, is eagerly scrambling for his place in the pecking order of that black political class. Dyson knows that nobody’s career, nobody’s bottom line has ever negatively affected because they sucked up to a sitting president, or to the next sitting president.
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