Aaron Harvey, a Pillars of the Community member, sat down with Dr. Cornel West at the San Diego College of Continuing Education - Educational Cultural Complex in 2023. Harvey and his brother Brandon were falsely accused of conspiracy in a high-profile criminal gang case almost a decade ago and successfully fought back. West, a professor, activist and public intellectual, is running for president as an independent candidate in the 2024 election.
The following backstage interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Harvey: In California, you can be documented as a gang member based on seven criteria — where you live, what you wear, who you hang out with — and if you meet a few of those criteria the local police department can document you as a gang member. And if you’ve been convicted of a crime or just charged with a crime, you can get gang enhancements, adding up to 15 years onto the principal sentence.
What does the criminalization of Black and Brown youth under gang documentation and gang enhancement laws say about our society’s view of public safety and the treatment of Black and Brown communities?
West: The criminalization of this gang culture that tries to bring in folk who are not even part of the gang — they’re just in the neighborhood — is a particular stage in the 400-year war against Black people. Six days before Malcolm was shot, he went up and gave a lecture in Rochester, and he talked about the war on Black people for 400 years. Two-hundred and forty-four years of slavery — what do you do? You contain, you repress and exploit. We got 12 brief years of reconstruction. Black folk and other progressive white brothers and sisters tried to create a more racial democracy. That got crushed. Another 100 years of neoslavery. War against Black folk called Jim Crow/Jane Crow lynching and so on.
Here comes the 1960s. Thank God for Martin and Malcolm. Thank God for Ella Baker and Fanny Lou. Thank God for the Black Panther Party and other folk who loved Black people enough to fight.
Here we are now 60 years later. Laws have been on the books to repress, contain, exploit and degrade Black people, and that’s why I don't in any way downplay you and brother Brandon standing up the way you have. You’re part of a long tradition against the criminalization of Black people, but it’s not just Black folk in general, because you got classes in the Black community. They’re not criminalizing Black elites in the way they’re criminalizing our precious Black poor brothers and sisters, or Black working-class brothers and sisters. And it’s also Brown. We gotta include our precious Latino brothers and sisters who are also caught within that criminalization.
So once we understand that, it doesn’t mean we start hating anybody. It means we start more intensely hating the injustice. And when you intensely hate the injustice, based on the love of the people, you’ve got to do something. Say something. Organize. Bring some public pressure to bear. Bring back the best of history so that the present is full of possibilities for a better future.
Harvey: Love seems to be a central topic in most of your talks. Can you talk about the consequences of the lack of love for Black and Brown youths in institutions such as school, foster care, law enforcement, incarceration, etc.?
West: One of the strategies of a white supremacist society is to convince precious Black folk to hate themselves. To disrespect themselves and each other. To think lowly of themselves. To think that we are less beautiful, less moral, less intelligent — all of the white supremacist lies. And then it is to keep Black people scared, afraid, intimidated, always doubting themselves, both their abilities as persons and their abilities as a community to make a difference in the world.
So love has revolutionary consequences. What breaks the back of fear? Love does. The love of your mama made you do something you wouldn’t have conceived of doing. Love has a way of overwhelming fear, and you become courageous based on empathy and so on. It’s no accident that the lack of love is one of the ways in which Black folk remain deferential or turn on others or not have a lens through which to view the world such that they can be better than they are. But the presence of love, man, we don’t even have a language for that. You might as well put on John Coltrane ‘Love Supreme’ and just let the music play.
Another way of putting it is the freest of Black people have been those who loved us the most.