by Malaika Jabali


On Sunday, April 19, renowned professor and author Michael Eric Dyson penned a 9,220-word screed lambasting his former mentor Cornel West on The New Republic. The essay is meant to detail West's decline from the leading Black public intellectual and cultural critic he once was. Instead, the piece tells us more about Dyson and West's long-running feud, with Dyson performing the literary equivalent of taking off his earrings and greasing himself up with Vaseline, readying himself for a fight. Amid unnecessary, personal details that could have remained in the recesses of West’s books and the distant memories of the two men involved, the bulk of Dyson’s argument hinged on West’s diminishing scholarship, prophetic illegitimacy, and, most of all, West’s relationship—or lack thereof—with President Obama.