Herman Cain, ex-CEO of Godfather’s Pizza is getting a great deal of press and airtime with his recent achievements and statements on the campaign trail.

That being said, a vocal number of African American thought leaders are speaking out against some of the statements Cain has made, particularly as they relate to racism in America.

On Monday’s CNN Newsroom with Suzanne Malveaux, Tavis Smiley and Dr. Cornel West slammed Herman Cain‘s comments that racism didn’t matter that much with West saying that Cain should “Get off the symbolic crack pipe and acknowledge the evidence is overwhelming.”

“Black people have been working hard for decades,” West, a professor at Princeton University, said. “I think he also knows that if brother Anthony Davis, a brother who was just put to death, were a white Wall Street banker brother, that the response in the nation would have been very different as opposed to being a poor black brother. That’s just one small example, one very small example of racism still at work holding people back.”

Here’s video from that CNN segment.

Thoughts?

[summarized from Mediaite | image via nydailynews]