The Next Level

[enlightenment06]

Brother King, Malcolm X, and countless others fought and died for us so that we could have the freedoms we have today, but how should we carry on the legacy? Most, if not all, of the blantantly discriminatory laws have been changed, yet socially and economically Black and Brown people the world over aren't significantly better off than they were thirty or forty years ago.

My question is this: what is the next level? the next episode, so to speak? what should be our goal for the next twenty-five to thirty years? One stipulation: no asking the federal government for anything. Period. Let's keep it focused on ourselves.

[Steeltrap]

We have to figure out how to create an economic infrastructure so that we don't get into a state of panic if there's change in certain social policies. That's one thing that the original civil rights movement didn't really address.

But to do that, we also need to learn to trust each other and work together.

It's a hard thing. But remember that 50 or fewer years of civil rights can't undo 400 years of slavery-related BS, IMO.

[enlightenment06]

Originally posted by Steeltrap

It's a hard thing. But remember that 50 or fewer years of civil rights can't undo 400 years of slavery-related BS, IMO.

True dat. I feel you. I also feel that we've gone as far as we can with legislation and appealing to the federal government to resolve these issues. Whatever happened to the bank that supposedly a group of wealthy Blacks were going to set up? The one with Janet Jackson, Will Smith, etc.? Maybe it was just a rumor...

[Steeltrap]

Originally posted by enlightenment06
True dat. I feel you. I also feel that we've gone as far as we can with legislation and appealing to the federal government to resolve these issues. Whatever happened to the bank that supposedly a group of wealthy Blacks were going to set up? The one with Janet Jackson, Will Smith, etc.? Maybe it was just a rumor...

Man, I never heard about that. But it would be cool if Janet Jackson, Will Smith, Oprah, Bill Cosby, Shaq, Ken Chenault, Stanley O'Neal, etc., or people of that stature, could start something like that. Ah, we can always dream.

[CrimsonTide4]

Originally posted by enlightenment06
Whatever happened to the bank that supposedly a group of wealthy Blacks were going to set up? The one with Janet Jackson, Will Smith, etc.? Maybe it was just a rumor...

Do you mean this bank?

[enlightenment06]

ah yes! thank you! what ever happened to that bank?

I need to become a billionaire real quick so I can start handlin' business around here...

[SummerChild]

Originally posted by enlightenment06
Brother King, Malcolm X, and countless others fought and died for us so that we could have the freedoms we have today, but how should we carry on the legacy? Most, if not all, of the blantantly discriminatory laws have been changed, yet socially and economically Black and Brown people the world over aren't significantly better off than they were thirty or forty years ago.

My question is this: what is the next level? the next episode, so to speak? what should be our goal for the next twenty-five to thirty years? One stipulation: no asking the federal government for anything. Period. Let's keep it focused on ourselves.

Encouraging middle class Black people to go back into our communities and spend some time volunteering and working with those who have not "made it." According to Henry Louis Gates, who just published a new book on this subject by the way, we now have *two* nations in Black America - the middle class and the lower-class. We have got to begin to think of our race collectively once again. Instead of each person who has "arrived" turning his back and pretending that the ills that are in our community do not exist.

SC

[SummerChild]

Originally posted by Steeltrap
Man, I never heard about that. But it would be cool if Janet Jackson, Will Smith, Oprah, Bill Cosby, Shaq, Ken Chenault, Stanley O'Neal, etc., or people of that stature, could start something like that. Ah, we can always dream.

Good point Soror Steeltrap. Even more, I'd like to see a group of wealthy, non-sports or entertainment-related AA start something of this stature. I am tired of our children thinking that to achieve you must be in sports or entertainment. Part of the problem is that they are not seeing the true black middle-class really come back. They are not seeing the engineers, lawyers, doctors in our community. They need to know that it is possible to succeed in life and make $$ w/out being a BB player or Janet J.

Further, if one more football player opens a football camp, I am going to scream. Athletes, our children need BOOKS and INSTRUCTION in academic subjects - not instruction on how to throw a football. What are these athletes thinking? They need to raise their thinking to a new level of consciousness in my opinion.

SC

[Steeltrap]

Originally posted by SummerChild
Encouraging middle class Black people to go back into our communities and spend some time volunteering and working with those who have not "made it." According to Henry Louis Gates, who just published a new book on this subject by the way, we now have *two* nations in Black America - the middle class and the lower-class. We have got to begin to think of our race collectively once again. Instead of each person who has "arrived" turning his back and pretending that the ills that are in our community do not exist.

SC

Encouraging is a good idea, but again, the individual has to want to give back. I know that many are wary of it, unfortunately.
I'm not sure if we can start thinking collectively once again, particularly now that many of us are fairly comfortable.

[Steeltrap]

From a British newspaper.

The biggest brother

Black America's foremost intellectual is coming to our TV screens. With his cane and smart clothes, Henry Louis Gates looks like one of the elite - but you can call him Skip

Sean O'Hagan
Sunday July 20, 2003
The Observer

There is a small model figure of American Secretary of State Colin Powell, standing to attention, on Henry Louis Gates's inordinately tidy desk in his Harvard University office. 'You like him?' Gates asks, between poses for the Observer photographer, but before I can discern whether he is referring to the model or the actual man, he offers his own view of the eminent Republican. 'I like him a lot. I mean, he's central-right on most stuff, but left on black issues. He's a Republican, but first and foremost, he's a good brother.' This says a lot about Gates, author, scholar, activist, journalist, and chair of the department of Afro-American Studies at Harvard. He is a man who views the success of any black American as a cause for celebration, even one whose ideology - right-wing, globally expansionist, anti-welfare - is utterly at odds with his own liberal world view. Then again, he might identify with Powell because they have both excelled at the highest level in establishments where, not that long ago, black people, however gifted, were not given the chance to rise through the ranks: the academy and the military respectively.

If Powell often seems uncomfortable among the hawks and ultra-conservatives of the Republican vanguard, though, Gates is utterly at home among the Harvard elite. He has every reason to be. The department he has built almost from scratch in his own image is the foremost centre for African-American studies in America. 'There was one professor and 19 students the day I was hired in 1991,' he tells me proudly. 'Now there are 20 professors and thousands of students who have taken our courses.' Gates's own star has risen accordingly. It is difficult to imagine a British academic, never mind a British black academic, ever approaching the earning power or the public profile of Gates or his friend, Cornell West, the Princeton professor whose cult status is such that he recently had a cameo in Matrix Reloaded. They are close as it gets to the notion of the academic as celebrity.

In Harvard, though, as I find out, Gates's popularity springs from something more intimate and old-fashioned: his effortless Southern charm and unquenchable cheeriness. Everywhere we go, from the Faculty Club dining room, hung with portraits of past grandees, to the tree-lined gardens, where students lounge between lectures, he greets people and they hail him as he passes. I feel like I've wandered into a real-life The Truman Show, where everyone knows everyone else by their first name. As it turns out, everyone, but everyone, knows Henry Louis Gates by his childhood nickname. 'Hey Skip, what's happenin'?', they shout, and 'Hey Skip, how ya doin?' The guy has charisma by the bucketful.

The British public will have a chance to experience that charisma next week when Gates presents the first programme in a four-part BBC2 series, entitled America: Beyond the Colour Line. In it, he journeys from the housing projects of inner-city Chicago to the mansions of Hollywood's new black elite, from Wall Street to the deep South where affluent suburbs are being recolonised as wealthy exclusively black neighbourhoods by aspirational families escaping the cities. It is an often fascinating and always accessible series, authored by Gates, who is a natural on camera, relaxed and chatty, whether he's quizzing Samuel Jackson on why Hollywood is overwhelmingly white, or an inmate in Cook County Jail on why the prison population is predominantly black. What emerges from the four programmes is not just a gloomily familiar picture of an America still brutally divided on race lines, but the recent emergence of a new black America divided on class lines.

'Since the day Martin Luther King was killed,' Gates says, 'the black middle classes have almost quadrupled, but the percentage of black children living on or below the poverty line is almost the same. Two nations, but they're both black and they're both defined by economics, and never the twain shall meet. In fact, the class divide in the black community is now seen by some as a permanent aspect of our existence.'

The sense that the ghetto is now a place of no escape is most palpable when Gates wanders around the Ida B Wells housing project in Chicago, visibly shocked by its desolation. He interviews a young black man who works in a Popeye's fast food outlet for $600 a month, while his friends earn $6,000 a day selling crack cocaine. He meets a young single parent whose energy and optimism in the face of insurmountable odds are genuinely inspiring: on her doorstep, gangs carry on a fitful, often fatal, battle for control of the drug trade, while she strives to educate her children and look after her mother on a pittance. She is a model citizen, but she has no hope of ever breaking out of her environment.

'Entering that building brought home to me the sheer sense of hopelessness that people live under in those places,' Gates says. 'The Right insists that anyone can escape poverty by working hard but that is simply not the case. For generations to come, you feel, this family will be trapped. That's what poverty does.'

How, I ask, given the anger and optimism that fuelled the black power movement of the Sixties, has it come to this? He shakes his head. 'The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass. When I was growing up, we thought integration meant class escalation for everybody who worked hard, and affirmative action meant getting kids from the ghetto into higher education. Now, the black kids who come to, say, Harvard or Yale, are middle-class already. Nobody else gets through. If Martin Luther King came back, he'd say we need another civil rights movement built on class not race.'

The irony, of course, is that Gates himself represents the highest echelon of that new black upper-middle class. From his silver-handled cane and preppie clothes to his summer vacations in Martha's Vineyard, he epitomises the buppie, or black yuppie. Unlike, say, James Baldwin before him, he has none of the simmering anger nor what the West Indian poet Derek Walcott once memorably called 'the problems of belonging' that bedevilled previous generations of black intellectuals operating in an overwhelmingly white world.

'Am I guilty about being part of the black middle class?' he says, when I put this to him. 'No. I was raised for this. Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am. This,' he continues, extending his arms as if to embrace the corridors and classrooms, courtyards and cloisters beyond the Faculty Club, 'is who I am, it's who I was raised to be.' How then, given that most of his students are white and well-off, does he propose to counter the elitism of the Ivy League? How can Harvard reach out to the people he encountered in the Chicago projects, trapped, impoverished and disempowered?

'My TV series is really about that very dilemma. What I call the black cultural nationalist imaginary - the belief that we are all united because we are black and descended from slaves and have a common enemy called 'whitey' - no longer applies. It's not white versus black any more, it's haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underclass, tension between them is inevitable. What we, the black middle class have to do, is think of a strategy to avert that.' He does not, though, enlighten me as to what that strategy might be.

Henry Louis Gates Jr was born in Piedmont, West Virginia in 1950, a remarkably integrated part of the South, which he hymns in his rose-tinted memoir, Coloured Folks. His father worked in the local paper mill, while his mother was a house cleaner and, revealingly, the first black woman to serve on the local PTA. He was, he admits a mummy's boy. 'My mother bred a tremendous amount of self-confidence in my brother and me,' he once said, 'and we always knew that we would be loved no matter what.' When, aged 46, she was hospitalised with clinical depression, the 12-year-old Gates embraced fundamentalist Christianity for a while, though more out of desperation than a sense of spiritual epiphany. At 14, he collapsed at school with a serious hip injury - a slipped epithesis - which, initially misdiagnosed as psychosomatic, left him permanently damaged. He now wears an elevated shoe and walks with a cane which has become as much a signature as his smart clothes and bright demeanour.

The social upheavals of the Sixties, which he saw on television, and his concurrent reading of Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, galvanised him politically. He organised a successful boycott of his school on the day of Martin Luther King's funeral. His application to Yale included a Personal Statement, that began, 'My grandfather was coloured, my father was Negro, and I am Black', and ended, 'As always, whitey now sits in judgment, preparing to cast my fate. It is your decision to either let me blow with the wind as a non-entity or to encourage the development of self.. Allow me to prove my self.'

Along with 95 other black students, Gates was accepted by Yale in 1973. There he met Sharon Adams, a white campaign worker for Jay Rockefeller, and he married her seven years later. Having graduated with a history degree, Gates won a fellowship to England, and attended Cambridge, where he befriended Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, who would become a Nobel laureate, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, who would later join Gates at Harvard and become his friend and co-editor on many academic projects. In London, in the mid-Seventies, he worked as a correspondent for Time magazine, before returning to America to lecture at Yale.

There, Gates seems to have found both his inspiration and vocation, surrounding himself with intellectual Afro-Americans, and adopting the philosophy of WEB Dubois, a black leader from the beginning of the century who advocated the unapologetically elitist notion of the 'Talented Tenth' - the belief that, by cultivating the best and brightest black minds, you will create a leadership that will then advance the interests of the black race as a whole. It is a belief that Gates still adheres to, and has helped him compensate for a lack of street credibility which has brought predictable criticism from his detractors, whom he calls 'black bourgeois-bashers'.

Gates resigned from Yale after four years, devastated at being passed over for tenure. He seems immune, though, to rancour or recrimination, and, while we are walking through the university grounds, past a tree he had planted in his mother's memory - 'It's a maple, but my mother was an oak. I'm an African violet' - he whispers conspiratorially: 'I love this place, but, don't forget, I'm a Yale man at heart.' He is also, due to his increasing visibility, via television and the New Yorker, a man of many voices, some of them seeming contradictory. He is capable of writing dense academic tomes such as The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Criticism , and also presenting a Public Service Television documentary called Wonders of the African World, which his rival, Professor Molefi Kete Asante, called 'a travesty which mocks African culture and distorts African history'.

'I adjust my voice depending on the audience I'm reaching,' he says in his defence, 'but, really, I don't see any contradiction between the registers.'

In many ways, though, as his new series often shows, Gates sounds least convincing when attempting to be most populist. Though he has access to the likes of Colin Powell and Hollywood's hottest young black actor, Chris Tucker, as well as the most successful black executives on Wall Street, he seems reluctant to ask them difficult or potentially embarrassing questions about their wealth, and their huge distance from the poverty of the majority. Perhaps, the suspicion lingers, he is simply too close to his subjects to be properly critical of them.

He seems most at home as an academic, a cultural rather than a political consciousness-raiser. In his 1992 collection of essays, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture War, he wrote that the role of Afro-American studies was nothing less than 'to redefine how the nation defines itself', yet Harvard is one of only a handful of colleges offering degrees in the subject. 'Real change,' he says, philosophically, 'takes time.' The future of his beloved faculty was assured by a $38 million private endowment, which, as Gates succinctly puts it, 'means there will always be a department of Afro-American studies at Harvard no matter what the politics.'

The politics of Afro-American studies at Harvard are currently calm, following the controversial departure for Princeton of its other star professor, Cornell West, two years ago. (West had been censured by the college authorities for devoting too much time to extra-curricular pursuits - he had recently cut a rap record.) But Gates has just secured the services of Marcyliena Morgan, a music expert from the University of California who will teach linguistics and hip-hop in his department. It is a move that is bound to unsettle Harvard's more conservative academics. Gates, though not a fan, considers rap to be 'one of the most important cultural phenomena of the second half of the twentieth century'.

Interestingly, Gates himself will take temporary leave at Princeton's Institute of Advanced Studies next year.

'At some point next year, I'll probably be confronted with the question, do I want to stay?' he says, looking uneasy, 'Right now, I can't imagine not coming back to Harvard. Anthony and I built this department. It wasn't there before us. But, two of my best friends are at Princeton, and, of course, the opportunity to build something new appeals to me.'

Only time will tell, then, if Henry Louis Gates Junior will forsake his empire in Harvard, and maybe even take on America the way he has taken on American academia. One thing is for certain: whatever he chooses to do, he won't fail for lack of self-confidence.

[Dionysus]

I know this is an unpopular opinion (at least in my neck of the woods)...but I think we need to take more responsibility for our on actions and stop blaming racism on ALL of our current downfalls. Back in the day, racism was the root of most problems, but today, I think we bring a lot of problems ourselves. I guess this kind of tie into the "we have to clean our own house first" thing.

[SummerChild]

Originally posted by Steeltrap
From a British newspaper.

The biggest brother

Black America's foremost intellectual is coming to our TV screens. With his cane and smart clothes, Henry Louis Gates looks like one of the elite - but you can call him Skip

Sean O'Hagan
Sunday July 20, 2003
The Observer

There is a small model figure of American Secretary of State Colin Powell, standing to attention, on Henry Louis Gates's inordinately tidy desk in his Harvard University office. 'You like him?' Gates asks, between poses for the Observer photographer, but before I can discern whether he is referring to the model or the actual man, he offers his own view of the eminent Republican. 'I like him a lot. I mean, he's central-right on most stuff, but left on black issues. He's a Republican, but first and foremost, he's a good brother.' This says a lot about Gates, author, scholar, activist, journalist, and chair of the department of Afro-American Studies at Harvard. He is a man who views the success of any black American as a cause for celebration, even one whose ideology - right-wing, globally expansionist, anti-welfare - is utterly at odds with his own liberal world view. Then again, he might identify with Powell because they have both excelled at the highest level in establishments where, not that long ago, black people, however gifted, were not given the chance to rise through the ranks: the academy and the military respectively.

If Powell often seems uncomfortable among the hawks and ultra-conservatives of the Republican vanguard, though, Gates is utterly at home among the Harvard elite. He has every reason to be. The department he has built almost from scratch in his own image is the foremost centre for African-American studies in America. 'There was one professor and 19 students the day I was hired in 1991,' he tells me proudly. 'Now there are 20 professors and thousands of students who have taken our courses.' Gates's own star has risen accordingly. It is difficult to imagine a British academic, never mind a British black academic, ever approaching the earning power or the public profile of Gates or his friend, Cornell West, the Princeton professor whose cult status is such that he recently had a cameo in Matrix Reloaded. They are close as it gets to the notion of the academic as celebrity.

In Harvard, though, as I find out, Gates's popularity springs from something more intimate and old-fashioned: his effortless Southern charm and unquenchable cheeriness. Everywhere we go, from the Faculty Club dining room, hung with portraits of past grandees, to the tree-lined gardens, where students lounge between lectures, he greets people and they hail him as he passes. I feel like I've wandered into a real-life The Truman Show, where everyone knows everyone else by their first name. As it turns out, everyone, but everyone, knows Henry Louis Gates by his childhood nickname. 'Hey Skip, what's happenin'?', they shout, and 'Hey Skip, how ya doin?' The guy has charisma by the bucketful.

The British public will have a chance to experience that charisma next week when Gates presents the first programme in a four-part BBC2 series, entitled America: Beyond the Colour Line. In it, he journeys from the housing projects of inner-city Chicago to the mansions of Hollywood's new black elite, from Wall Street to the deep South where affluent suburbs are being recolonised as wealthy exclusively black neighbourhoods by aspirational families escaping the cities. It is an often fascinating and always accessible series, authored by Gates, who is a natural on camera, relaxed and chatty, whether he's quizzing Samuel Jackson on why Hollywood is overwhelmingly white, or an inmate in Cook County Jail on why the prison population is predominantly black. What emerges from the four programmes is not just a gloomily familiar picture of an America still brutally divided on race lines, but the recent emergence of a new black America divided on class lines.

'Since the day Martin Luther King was killed,' Gates says, 'the black middle classes have almost quadrupled, but the percentage of black children living on or below the poverty line is almost the same. Two nations, but they're both black and they're both defined by economics, and never the twain shall meet. In fact, the class divide in the black community is now seen by some as a permanent aspect of our existence.'

The sense that the ghetto is now a place of no escape is most palpable when Gates wanders around the Ida B Wells housing project in Chicago, visibly shocked by its desolation. He interviews a young black man who works in a Popeye's fast food outlet for $600 a month, while his friends earn $6,000 a day selling crack cocaine. He meets a young single parent whose energy and optimism in the face of insurmountable odds are genuinely inspiring: on her doorstep, gangs carry on a fitful, often fatal, battle for control of the drug trade, while she strives to educate her children and look after her mother on a pittance. She is a model citizen, but she has no hope of ever breaking out of her environment.

'Entering that building brought home to me the sheer sense of hopelessness that people live under in those places,' Gates says. 'The Right insists that anyone can escape poverty by working hard but that is simply not the case. For generations to come, you feel, this family will be trapped. That's what poverty does.'

How, I ask, given the anger and optimism that fuelled the black power movement of the Sixties, has it come to this? He shakes his head. 'The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass. When I was growing up, we thought integration meant class escalation for everybody who worked hard, and affirmative action meant getting kids from the ghetto into higher education. Now, the black kids who come to, say, Harvard or Yale, are middle-class already. Nobody else gets through. If Martin Luther King came back, he'd say we need another civil rights movement built on class not race.'

The irony, of course, is that Gates himself represents the highest echelon of that new black upper-middle class. From his silver-handled cane and preppie clothes to his summer vacations in Martha's Vineyard, he epitomises the buppie, or black yuppie. Unlike, say, James Baldwin before him, he has none of the simmering anger nor what the West Indian poet Derek Walcott once memorably called 'the problems of belonging' that bedevilled previous generations of black intellectuals operating in an overwhelmingly white world.

'Am I guilty about being part of the black middle class?' he says, when I put this to him. 'No. I was raised for this. Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am. This,' he continues, extending his arms as if to embrace the corridors and classrooms, courtyards and cloisters beyond the Faculty Club, 'is who I am, it's who I was raised to be.' How then, given that most of his students are white and well-off, does he propose to counter the elitism of the Ivy League? How can Harvard reach out to the people he encountered in the Chicago projects, trapped, impoverished and disempowered?

'My TV series is really about that very dilemma. What I call the black cultural nationalist imaginary - the belief that we are all united because we are black and descended from slaves and have a common enemy called 'whitey' - no longer applies. It's not white versus black any more, it's haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underclass, tension between them is inevitable. What we, the black middle class have to do, is think of a strategy to avert that.' He does not, though, enlighten me as to what that strategy might be.

Henry Louis Gates Jr was born in Piedmont, West Virginia in 1950, a remarkably integrated part of the South, which he hymns in his rose-tinted memoir, Coloured Folks. His father worked in the local paper mill, while his mother was a house cleaner and, revealingly, the first black woman to serve on the local PTA. He was, he admits a mummy's boy. 'My mother bred a tremendous amount of self-confidence in my brother and me,' he once said, 'and we always knew that we would be loved no matter what.' When, aged 46, she was hospitalised with clinical depression, the 12-year-old Gates embraced fundamentalist Christianity for a while, though more out of desperation than a sense of spiritual epiphany. At 14, he collapsed at school with a serious hip injury - a slipped epithesis - which, initially misdiagnosed as psychosomatic, left him permanently damaged. He now wears an elevated shoe and walks with a cane which has become as much a signature as his smart clothes and bright demeanour.

The social upheavals of the Sixties, which he saw on television, and his concurrent reading of Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, galvanised him politically. He organised a successful boycott of his school on the day of Martin Luther King's funeral. His application to Yale included a Personal Statement, that began, 'My grandfather was coloured, my father was Negro, and I am Black', and ended, 'As always, whitey now sits in judgment, preparing to cast my fate. It is your decision to either let me blow with the wind as a non-entity or to encourage the development of self.. Allow me to prove my self.'

Along with 95 other black students, Gates was accepted by Yale in 1973. There he met Sharon Adams, a white campaign worker for Jay Rockefeller, and he married her seven years later. Having graduated with a history degree, Gates won a fellowship to England, and attended Cambridge, where he befriended Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, who would become a Nobel laureate, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, who would later join Gates at Harvard and become his friend and co-editor on many academic projects. In London, in the mid-Seventies, he worked as a correspondent for Time magazine, before returning to America to lecture at Yale.

There, Gates seems to have found both his inspiration and vocation, surrounding himself with intellectual Afro-Americans, and adopting the philosophy of WEB Dubois, a black leader from the beginning of the century who advocated the unapologetically elitist notion of the 'Talented Tenth' - the belief that, by cultivating the best and brightest black minds, you will create a leadership that will then advance the interests of the black race as a whole. It is a belief that Gates still adheres to, and has helped him compensate for a lack of street credibility which has brought predictable criticism from his detractors, whom he calls 'black bourgeois-bashers'.

Gates resigned from Yale after four years, devastated at being passed over for tenure. He seems immune, though, to rancour or recrimination, and, while we are walking through the university grounds, past a tree he had planted in his mother's memory - 'It's a maple, but my mother was an oak. I'm an African violet' - he whispers conspiratorially: 'I love this place, but, don't forget, I'm a Yale man at heart.' He is also, due to his increasing visibility, via television and the New Yorker, a man of many voices, some of them seeming contradictory. He is capable of writing dense academic tomes such as The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Criticism , and also presenting a Public Service Television documentary called Wonders of the African World, which his rival, Professor Molefi Kete Asante, called 'a travesty which mocks African culture and distorts African history'.

'I adjust my voice depending on the audience I'm reaching,' he says in his defence, 'but, really, I don't see any contradiction between the registers.'

In many ways, though, as his new series often shows, Gates sounds least convincing when attempting to be most populist. Though he has access to the likes of Colin Powell and Hollywood's hottest young black actor, Chris Tucker, as well as the most successful black executives on Wall Street, he seems reluctant to ask them difficult or potentially embarrassing questions about their wealth, and their huge distance from the poverty of the majority. Perhaps, the suspicion lingers, he is simply too close to his subjects to be properly critical of them.

He seems most at home as an academic, a cultural rather than a political consciousness-raiser. In his 1992 collection of essays, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture War, he wrote that the role of Afro-American studies was nothing less than 'to redefine how the nation defines itself', yet Harvard is one of only a handful of colleges offering degrees in the subject. 'Real change,' he says, philosophically, 'takes time.' The future of his beloved faculty was assured by a $38 million private endowment, which, as Gates succinctly puts it, 'means there will always be a department of Afro-American studies at Harvard no matter what the politics.'

The politics of Afro-American studies at Harvard are currently calm, following the controversial departure for Princeton of its other star professor, Cornell West, two years ago. (West had been censured by the college authorities for devoting too much time to extra-curricular pursuits - he had recently cut a rap record.) But Gates has just secured the services of Marcyliena Morgan, a music expert from the University of California who will teach linguistics and hip-hop in his department. It is a move that is bound to unsettle Harvard's more conservative academics. Gates, though not a fan, considers rap to be 'one of the most important cultural phenomena of the second half of the twentieth century'.

Interestingly, Gates himself will take temporary leave at Princeton's Institute of Advanced Studies next year.

'At some point next year, I'll probably be confronted with the question, do I want to stay?' he says, looking uneasy, 'Right now, I can't imagine not coming back to Harvard. Anthony and I built this department. It wasn't there before us. But, two of my best friends are at Princeton, and, of course, the opportunity to build something new appeals to me.'

Only time will tell, then, if Henry Louis Gates Junior will forsake his empire in Harvard, and maybe even take on America the way he has taken on American academia. One thing is for certain: whatever he chooses to do, he won't fail for lack of self-confidence.

Ah thanks for the article Soror.
This work by Mr. Gates is exactly what I was referring to.

[Steeltrap]

Originally posted by SummerChild
Ah thanks for the article Soror.
This work by Mr. Gates is exactly what I was referring to.

You're welcome, Soror.
But it rings true. The community is bifurcated, and honestly, I'm not surprised because whole populations don't advance in lockstep from poverty to affluence.

[Professor]

I agree - too many of us have become comfortable even many of us that are members XYZ organization - we don't volunteer, give back to the community or want to support causes with our dollars and time - - - I say AA need to mobilize to help their own. We need to be a determining factor in politics, education and economic development.
For starters we need to vote - - -

Originally posted by SummerChild
Encouraging middle class Black people to go back into our communities and spend some time volunteering and working with those who have not "made it." According to Henry Louis Gates, who just published a new book on this subject by the way, we now have *two* nations in Black America - the middle class and the lower-class. We have got to begin to think of our race collectively once again. Instead of each person who has "arrived" turning his back and pretending that the ills that are in our community do not exist.

SC

[TonyB06]

I agree with what's been said; particulary with Professor's take on voting, but it goes beyond that..

We need to build alliances around our strengths, not just our race (because, contrary to popular belief, we DON'T all think alike). To the extent possible we need to build alliances around our religious (church) and professional endeavors (associations of Black XYZ) and personal interests (Black investment clubs, etc...). These translate into economic power, which creates a progress agenda that translates into political power.

I think these are regional at best, because we're affected by different geographical, and to a lesser degree cultural forces.

No disrespect intended, but that's why I think some national orgs, such as NAACP are less effective than they once were. Solutions have to begin where the problems manifest most acutely --- at the local level. National mandates don't work as well in this day and time. (If you have strong NAACP-type chapter where you are, great; but that's not the case here, so other organizations have to take the leadership role.)

Once our economic/social development house is in order, politicians and political parties (both D and R) will see us as the force we should be and not as they do today.

peace.