Press Contact : Kimberly Allen. Email: allenkc mit. Phone: Fax: Credits : Photo: Jake Belcher. Caption : Audience members lined up to ask West questions after his talk. Caption : West spoke with audience members after his talk. Caption : West spoke with audience members after his talk at MIT. Caption :. Credits :. The view from the panel The event also featured a panel of MIT students and faculty who spoke about how they work to help bring alternate ideas to the Institute.
Related Articles. Work continues toward a more diverse, inclusive MIT. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives. James West is a U. Kanye West is an outspoken Grammy Award-winning rapper, record producer and fashion designer. Serial killer Rosemary West murdered at least 10 young women. Most of them were dismembered and buried in the cellar of her home on Cromwell Street.
Mae West started in Vaudeville and on the stage in New York, and later moved to Hollywood to star in films known for their blunt sexuality and steamy settings. Fred West was convicted of several gruesome murders and brutal sexual assaults that occurred in England during the s and '70s. Du Bois was an influential African American rights activist during the early 20th century. Eldridge Cleaver wrote 'Soul on Ice,' a best-selling collection of essays about his time in prison, and was the minister of information for the Black Panthers.
Angela Davis is an activist, scholar and writer who advocates for the oppressed. What is that? Hold on to the relation between the present and the best of the past as you try to authorize an alternative future, a radically different, qualitatively different future than the catastrophic one in which we find ourselves.
Edward Gibbon, in his masterpiece Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , he raised a fundamental query. He said: Is history but a record of crimes and follies and misfortune of human beings?
We know most of human history is a history of domination and oppression and exploitation and degradation. Most of human history is a history of hatred and contempt. Where are the courageous ones? James Baldwin said what? Oh, we are all disasters but also wonderful miracles. Can we keep track of both simultaneously? Second brief message to you, beloved Class of Hold on to your existential humility. And that is so rare and scarce these days because we have such a toxic, masculinist conception of what it is to be strong and hard and phallocentric.
Thank God for the Me Too movement. Not just to humble we brothers, not just to keep us accountable, but to get us in contact with the best of our humanity, given the patriarchal socialization that has been so hegemonic. That is Socratic interrogation and prophetic summoning, and it still accents our capacity to be better human beings, the kind of linguistically sophisticated primates that we are, made in the image and likeness of God for some of us.
Indeed, indeed. But that existential humility has everything to do with intellectual fallibility. As we look around in our empire these days, and what do you see? Ooh, we see a lot of right-wing brothers and sisters of different colors and classes, so often so callous, so often so indifferent to the suffering of the least of these—of poor people, of poor children, folks locked into hoods and boroughs and ghettos.
The working-class people overlooked, looking at the world through the lens of the stock market. Oh, our economy is doing so wonderful because the stock market is breakdancing and the statistics look good. West earned an early reputation as a scholar of infectious enthusiasm, sharp insight, and wide-ranging interests. In addition, he lectured at more than a hundred colleges and universities in the United States. He taught philosophy to inmates of a federal prison, an unusual distinction for an academic philosopher.
Within the same decade he produced dozens of essays and reviews, published in books and in journals, both scholarly and popular. In an age of scholarly specialization, West cultivated widely diverse interests. His nimble mind danced from one subject to another with dazzling virtuosity. On one side of his thought he was a social philosopher, drawing much from the Marxist tradition but uninhibited by allegiance to any Marxist orthodoxies. His scholarship was closely related to active involvement in movements for social and racial justice.
He was simultaneously an interpreter of African American experience to white Americans, of American philosophy to Europeans, of democratic beliefs to South Africans, of religious insights to secularists, and of secular themes to the religious. As a philosopher, he showed special interest in pragmatism, Post-Modern thought, and philosophy of religion.
His artistic interests included literature he had published one short story and friends predicted that he would write a novel , opera he was seen occasionally at Salzburg , cinema he was a fellow at the British Film Institute , and architecture he lectured at the School of Architecture at Milan, Italy.
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