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Cornel West latest outburst is directed at a now familiar target: his one-time brother Barack Obama. "Outburst" is almost the wrong word to describe West's recent and vehement opposition to the president on everything from how he's handled the financial crisis to how he handles his black identity. "Redux" might work better since the points on which the Princeton professor harps are the same he's been championing since the beginning of Obama's ascent to office. However, West's way of saying things has become increasingly, shall we say, aggressive.
Yesterday, Truth Dig published a somewhat condemning exposée by Chris Hedges on West's behavior towards Obama since the inauguration. Though the article is filled with blogworthy quotes--we'll get to them--the backstory provides some much needed context to the whole affair.
In the early days of the Obama campaign, West spoke critically and spoke often of the man who would become America's first black president. His speeches weren't necessarily negative, but they certainly viewed Obama through a critical lens, usually focused rather narrowly. For example, after Obama won the democratic nomination in 2008, West bellowed over the president's failure to cite Martin Luther King Jr. in his acceptance speech. By the celebratory occasion of Obama's election and inauguration, however, the tone mellowed a bit but foreshadowed a lot. West told Democracy Now after Obama's election in November 2008, "I hope he is a progressive Lincoln. I aspire to be the Frederick Douglass to put pressure on him." Promise: kept.