From the opening session of the American Public Health Association’s 138th Annual Meeting. Cornel Ronald West is an American philosopher, author, critic, actor, and civil rights activist and currently serves as the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University where he teaches in the Center for African American Studies and in the department of Religion. He is known for his combination of political and moral insight and criticism, and his contribution to the post-1960s civil rights movement. The bulk of his work focuses upon the role of race, gender, and class in American society and the means by which people act and react to their “radical conditionedness.” Born in Tulsa Oklahoma, West enrolled at Harvard University at age 17 and graduated magna cum laude in Near Eastern Languages and Civilization. He earned a Ph.D. in 1980 from Princeton. In his mid-twenties, he returned to Harvard as a Du Bois Fellow before becoming an assistant professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York. In 1985 he went to Yale Divinity School. While at Yale, he participated in campus protests for a clerical union and divestment from apartheid in South Africa which resulted in his being arrested and jailed. He then returned to Union and taught at Haverford College for one year before going to Princeton to become a professor of religion and director of the Program in African American Studies which he revitalized in cooperation with such scholars as novelist Toni Morrison. In 1994 …