Dr. Cornel West on free speech, utopian futures and music: August 15, 2018

This interview is a highly anticipated one. Lillian Hanly got to speak with Dr Cornel West and asked him to introduce himself with a one liner - he called himself a black intellectual freedom fighter. This encompasses his many roles as an American philosopher, political activist, author, social critic and commentator. He has been a professor at Harvard, Princeton and Yale Universities. He calls himself a jazz man in the world of ideas, and often speaks through his love of jazz and blues music. He’s even made a number of spoken word and hip hop albums. Other important things you might want to know about him is that he was in both the Matrix sequels. His work focuses on race, gender and class in American society. He is here in Auckland this week for an event called Polarised, a discussion between himself and Douglas Murray, a well known conservative and critic of Islam whose book The Strange Death of Europe gives firsthand accounts and criticisms of mass Islamic immigration and problems of multiculturalism in the EU. Lillian started by asking Dr. West about this event.

Photo credit: Black Enterprise