cornel west
You usually associate street smarts with some one who knows how to negotiate in business. Donald Trump apparently considers this ability to be a top of the line requirement for statesmanship and something which qualifies him to be president of the United States.
Few Hollywood actors, if any, have made a bigger impact on progressive politics--both cinematically and in real life--than Warren Beatty.
The only candidates in the 2016 race who might embrace these ideas are Bernie Sanders for the Democrats, and Jill Stein with the Greens. To help incubate a new politics of peace, though, a think tank co-founded by intellectuals Michael Lerner and Cornel West called the "Network for Spiritual Progressives" (NSP) has some good ideas.
In 1993, responding to what he saw as misleading treatments of the Watts riots following the acquittal of four police officers a year earlier in Los Angeles after the violent beating of an unarmed black man, Cornel West wrote Race Matters.
WHAT'S HAPPENING
In hindsight, Michael Eric Dyson might have been the person least well-positioned to attack Cornel West about a preference for celebrity over scholarship.
As a historian, I can attest to the fact that dissent among the black intellectual elite is nothing new. Indeed, writers, politicians, community activists, entertainers, professors, ministers and others have publicly sparred with one another for centuries.
I wish Obama had gone to Ferguson and issued a stinging critique of the Grand Jury. I wish he'd raised hell after the killing of Trayvon Martin. I wish he'd make endemic racial inequality the centerpiece of his final years in office. But that Obama has never been.