Cornel West.

Cornel Ronald West is an American philosopher, author, critic, actor, civil rights activist and prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America.In 1980, he earned a Ph.D. from Princeton, where he was influenced by Richard Rorty's pragmatism. The title of his dissertation was Ethics, historicism and the Marxist tradition which was later revised and published under the title The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought.
In his mid-20s, he returned to Harvard as a W. E. B. Du Bois Fellow before becoming an Assistant Professor at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. In 1985, he went to Yale Divinity School in what eventually became a joint appointment in American Studies. While at Yale, he participated in campus protests for a clerical labor union and divestment from apartheid South Africa. One of the protests resulted in him being arrested and jailed. As punishment, the University administration canceled his leave for Spring 1987, leading him to commute from Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, where he was teaching two classes, across the Atlantic Ocean to the University of Paris.Cornel West publicly supported 2008 Democratic Presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama. He spoke to over 1,000 of his supporters at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, N.Y.C. on November 29, 2007.


West criticized President Obama when Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, saying that it would be difficult for Obama to be "a war president with a peace prize. West further retracted his support for Obama in an April 2011 interview, stating that Obama is “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.