My interview with Dr. Cornel West of Harvard, Princeton and Columbia University, on the stage of the Miller Theater at Columbia University, was actually a return to a series of dialogues we held on a variety of subjects at the Schomburg Library in Harlem. Given my collaboration with Cornel in the making of Restoring Hope: Conversations on the Future of Black America (Beacon Press, 1997), Cornel and I simply returned to our conversational format examining the prospects for cultural equity and racial justice for people of African descent in 21st century America. We paid particular attention to Cornel’s engagement with popular culture, his appearances in movies of the Matrix series, his rapping, and his many speaking engagements in this country and abroad.