Los Angeles, California - Independent presidential candidate Dr. Cornel West took to social media to share his take on Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump's first 2024 debate.

"What I saw here was a reflection, especially with gangster Trump, of a profoundly sick society. The fact that he could win as dogcatcher let alone as president is a sign of just how sick America is," West told supporters in a video taken at the KBLA radio station in Los Angeles and posted on X.

"If Trump was a Black man, he'd have been in jail a long time ago."

West said he had known Harris' father, Jamaican-American economist and Stanford University professor Donald Harris, whom Trump mentioned on the debate stage in an attempt to cast pro-capitalist Harris as a Marxist.

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"Of course, Sister Harris is more intelligent, more sophisticated, more brilliant than Trump," the Independent said. "Trump is beneath mediocrity, locked in the mendacity, high in criminality, yet he can be president."

But in his view, both candidates failed to address the core problems facing the American people in 2024.

"For me, the question is: what does any of this look like from the vantage point of everyday folk in the Black community?" West said, before lamenting the silence on child poverty, educational disparities, mass incarceration, and other systemic injustices plaguing Black America. Meanwhile, the genocide in Gaza got far too little attention on the debate stage.

"You can't talk about a love for Black people and not talk about those issues," he insisted.

West went on to cite the late Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., who warned America of the triple evils of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism – threats not addressed during Tuesday's debate.

"We happen to come from a great Black people who always talked about love and integrity and honesty and decency and service to others and sacrificing for something bigger than you. None of that was really manifest on that screen," he pointed out.

West vowed to continue his Independent bid for the White House alongside his running mate, Black Lives Matter organizer and Pan-African Studies Professor Melina Abdullah.

"We've got to all raise our voices, or there are going to be a whole lot of Black folk voting for Sister Harris. I understand that. I still love you. But I'm still running trying to tell my truth."