Cornel West, born in 1953, is a scholar, philosopher, pastor, and professor at Princeton University. The majority of his work focuses on race, gender, and class with a profound interest in the civil rights movement. He suggests that there is a new cultural politics of difference on the rise which seeks to due away with universal truths in order to bring about different creative responses, from the views of the marginalized, to deal with current situations at hand. The movement will not come from the proletariat or lumpenproletariat however, and will instead come from those of privileged socioeconomic backgrounds who seek to move away from mainstream thought to join and give voice to those of the “demoralized, demobilized, depoliticized and disorganized peoples.” Intellectuals, according to West, have been lost in a web of social theorizing, that the work towards actual change has been neglected. He is an advocate for social action and agency, and suggests that:

There can be no artistic breakthrough or social progress without some form of crisis in civilization—a crisis usually generated by organizations or collectivities that convince ordinary people to put their bodies and lives on the line. There is, of course, no guarantee that such pressures will yield the results one wants, but there is a guarantee that the status quo will remain or regress if no pressure is applied at all.

West argues that the new cultural politics of difference calls for deconstructing old Black strategies of identity formation, such as assimilation or homogenization, but to construct multi dimensional responses to "articulate the comlexity and diversity of Black practices in the modern and postmodern world," (513). He stresses the need for social theory to demystify the historically specific ways that relations have come to be as they are.  West, Minh-Ha, Collins, and Lorde all share similar ideas about not wanting to simplify things and say, "We're all the same" because we're not, and they want it to be aknowledged, and thought about, and challenged and out in the open so that more positive change in people's everyday life can happen.

West acknowledges Frantz Fanon's work on decolonization and his accurate articulation of “century-long heartfelt human responses to being degraded and despised, hated and hunted, oppressed and exploited, marginalized and dehumanized at the hands of powerful xenophobic European, American, Russian and Japanese imperial countries”. Hard core non-conformist like the late W.E.B Dubois, Frantz Fanon, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nina Simone, have paved the way for present intellectuals like West, Patricia Hill Collins, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. who tirelessly advocate and continuously strive to demystify power relations on the national and international level.

When West discusses a version of W. E. B. DU Bois's notion of the double conscious, he argues that Blacks in America have not yet been recognized in White America; he explains that the White people have never recognized the Blacks and their culture.  West describes the eagerness of the Blacks to be accepted as a hunder for meaning, identity, and self-worth.