Cornel West: There is no doubt that human life and homo sapiens emerged in the great continent of Africa. In that sense, we are all Africans. But, of course, I am an African in the modern sense of being part and parcel of a system profoundly rooted in white supremacy, the vicious notion that black people, brown people, red people, yellow people are less, moreorless intelligent, less beautiful. This is very much a modern construct linked to the emergence of the capitalist mode of production in the 15th century tied to the European invasion of the world in which those nations between the Euro mount us in the Atlantic Ocean beginning in late 15th century, 1492 let’s say, with Columbus encountering the New World, begin to reshape the world and the image of powerful European elite. The white supremacy served as an ideological justification of the stealing of lands of indigenous peoples in New World. The enslavement of Africans in both Africa and the New World, and it made it very difficult for African peoples and African nations to assert their self respect and their self determination, ending up more economically underdeveloped than those European nations who themselves were developed dependent in part on a very ugly exploitation of African people’s labor and the degradation of African people’s cultures. And, yet we hope things will be changing in the future as Africa emerges like a phoenix from the ashes with its resources and we hope plays a role in the democratic globalization on this planet.