It’s been a great week for gay activists, but Dr. Cornel West is not happy. As the postmodern professor par excellence explained to radio host Tavis Smiley last Sunday, the advances made by gays and lesbians mean that “we black folk are just being pushed to the back of the bus”:

Again this has something to do of course with what history books will say. The irony of the age of Obama in which black folks found themselves pushed to the back, [and] our gay brothers and lesbian sisters more and more pushed to the center.


Perhaps West is right, and identity politics really is a zero-sum game. Then again, the good doctor may simply be suffering from a touch of radical conditionedness.