American philosopher, theologian, and public intellectual — one of the most visible Black thinkers of the past forty years and, with the possible exception of Martha Nussbaum, the living American academic who has most persistently refused the separation of philosophy from public argument. Born in Tulsa in 1953, educated at Harvard and Princeton, West has taught at Union Theological Seminary, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and most recently Union again, with intervals of departure, public controversy, and return that have become part of the story.
His intellectual project is the attempt to fuse three inheritances: William James's and Dewey's American pragmatism, the Black prophetic Christianity of the Black Baptist tradition in which he was raised, and the analytic apparatus of Western Marxism. The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (1989), still his most important academic book, argues that pragmatism — from Emerson through James and Dewey to Sidney Hook and beyond — is the distinctively American attempt to think philosophy as a form of cultural criticism rather than a metaphysical enterprise, and that what has been evaded is the color line. Race Matters (1993), published the year after the Los Angeles uprising, is the widely read public-facing statement — short essays on nihilism in Black America, the Black middle class, Malcolm X, affirmative action — that made him a household name. Democracy Matters (2004) extended the argument to the post-9/11 republic.
West's later career has been as much performative as scholarly. His public fights with Larry Summers and Harvard, with the Obama administration, with Ta-Nehisi Coates, and with his recent colleagues at Harvard have generated more attention than his writing; his critics say the showmanship has overtaken the scholarship, his defenders that the prophetic tradition he works in is showmanship in the best sense — that it has always been willing to sacrifice academic respectability for a more public witness. His influence on a generation of Black scholars and seminarians — Eddie Glaude, Tricia Rose, Melissa Harris-Perry among them — is substantial.