How Henry Louis Gates Got Ordained as the Nation's "Leading Black Intellectual"
Post-Race Scholar Yells Racism

By ISHMAEL REED

Now that Henry Louis Gates� Jr. has gotten a tiny taste of what �the 
underclass� undergo each day, do you think that he will go easier on 
them? Lighten up on the tough love lectures? Even during his encounter 
with the police, he was given some slack. If a black man in an inner 
city neighborhood had hesitated to identify himself, or given the 
police some lip, the police would have called SWAT. When Oscar Grant, 
an apprentice butcher, talked back to a BART policeman in Oakland, he 
was shot!

Given the position that Gates has pronounced since the late eighties, 
if I had been the arresting officer and post-race spokesperson Gates 
accused me of racism, I would have given him a sample of his own 
medicine. I would have replied that �race is a social construct�--the 
line that he and his friends have been pushing over the last couple of 
decades.

After this experience, will Gates stop attributing the problems of 
those inner city dwellers to the behavior of �thirty five-year-old 
grandmothers living in the projects?� (Gates says that when he became 
a tough lover he was following the example of his mentor Nobel 
Laureate Wole Soyinka as though his and Soyinka�s situations were the 
same. As a result of Soyinka�s criticisms of a Nigerian dictator, he 
was jailed and his life constantly
threatened.)

Prior to the late eighties, Gates� tough love exhortations were aimed 
at racism in the halls of academe, but then he signed on to downtown 
feminist reasoning that racism was a black male problem. Karen Durbin, 
who hired him to write for The Village Voice, takes credit for 
inventing him as a �public intellectual.� He was then assigned by 
Rebecca Penny Sinkler, former editor of The New York Times Book 
Review, to do a snuff job on black male writers. In an extraordinary 
review, he seemed to conclude that black women writers were good, not 
because of their merit, but because black male writers were bad. This 
was a response to an article by Mel Watkins, a former book review 
editor, who on his way out warned of a growing trend that was exciting 
the publisher�s cash registers. Books that I would describe as high 
Harlequin romances, melodramas in which saintly women were besieged by 
cruel black male oppressors, the kind of image of the brothers 
promoted by confederate novelists Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon.

Gates dismissed a number of black writers as misogynists, including 
me, whom he smeared throughout the United States and Europe, but when 
Bill Clinton was caught exploiting a young woman, sexually, he told 
the Times that he would �go to the wall for this president.� 
Feminists like Gloria Steinem defended the president as well, even 
though for years they�d been writing about women as victims of male 
chauvinists with power, the kind of guys who used to bankroll Ms. 
magazine.

Not to say that portraits of black men should be uniformly 
positive--I�ve certainly introduced some creeps in my own work--but 
most of the white screenwriters, directors and producers who film this 
material--and the professors and critics who promote it-- are silent 
about the abuses against women belonging to their own ethnic groups. 
Moreover, Alice Walker, Tina Turner and bell hooks have complained 
that in the hands of white script writers, directors and producers, 
the black males become more sinister straw men than they appear in the 
original texts.

There are big bucks to be made in promoting this culture.
Two studios are currently fighting over the rights to a movie called 
�Push� about a black father who impregnates his illiterate Harlem 
daughter. A representative of one, according to the Times, said that 
the movie would provide both with �a gold mine of opportunity.�

As an example of the double standard by which blacks and whites are 
treated in American society, at about the same time that the Gate�s 
article on black misogyny was printed, there appeared a piece about 
Jewish American writers. Very few women were mentioned.

Gates was also under pressure for making himself the head black 
feminist in the words of feminist Michele Wallace as a result of his 
profiting from black feminist studies sales because, as she put it in 
the Voice, he had unresolved issues with his late mother, who was, 
according to Gates, a black nationalist. The black feminists wanted 
in. As a result, Gates invited them to join his Norton anthology 
project. The result was the Norton Anthology of African American 
Literature. One of the editors was the late feminist scholar Dr. 
Barbara Christian. She complained to me almost to the day that she 
died that she and the late Nellie Y. McKay, another editor, did all of 
the work while Gates took the credit. This seems to be Gates� pattern. 
Getting others to do his work.
Mother Jones magazine accused him of exploiting those writers who 
helped to assemble his Encarta Africana, of running an academic sweat 
shop and even avoiding affirmative action goals by not hiring blacks. 
Julian Brookes of Mother Jones wrote:

�Henry Louis Gates Jr. has never been shy about speaking up for 
affirmative action. Indeed, the prominent Harvard professor insists 
that he wouldn't be where he is today without it. Odd, then, that when 
it came to assembling a staff to compile an encyclopedia of black 
history, Gates hired a group that was almost exclusively white. Of the 
up to 40 full-time writers and editors who worked to produce Encarta 
Africana only three were black. What's more, Gates and co-editor K. 
Anthony Appiah rejected several requests from white staffers to hire 
more black writers.
Mother Jones turned to Gates for an explanation of this apparent 
inconsistency.

�Did the staff members who expressed concern that the Africana 
team was too white have a point?�

Gates responded:

�It's a disgusting notion that
white people can't write on black history--some of the best scholars 
of Africa are white. People should feel free to criticize the quality 
of the encyclopedia, but I will not yield one millimeter[to people who 
criticize the makeup of the staff]. It's wrongheaded. Would I have 
liked there to be more African Americans in the pool? Sure. But we did 
the best we could given the time limits and budget.�

While his alliance with feminists gave Gates� career a powerful boost, 
it was his Op ed for the Times blaming continued anti-Semitism on 
African Americans that brought the public intellectual uptown. It was 
then that Gates was ordained as the pre-eminent African American 
scholar when, if one polled African-American scholars throughout the 
nation, Gates would not have ranked among the top twenty five. It 
would have to be done by secret ballot given the power that Gates� 
sponsors have given him to make or break academic careers. As Quincy 
Troupe, editor of Black Renaissance Noire would say, Gates is among 
those leaders who were �given to us,� not only by the white mainstream 
but also by white progressives. Amy Goodman carries on about Gates and 
Cornel West like the old Bobby Soxers used to swoon over Sinatra. Last 
week Rachel Maddow called Gates �the nation�s leading black 
intellectual.� Who pray tell is the nation�s leading white 
intellectual, Rachel? How come we can only have one?
Some would argue that Gates hasn�t written a first rate scholarly 
work since 1989.

CNN gave Gates� accusation against blacks as anti-Semites a worldwide 
audience and so when I traveled to Israel for the first time in the 
year, 2000, Israeli intellectuals asked me why American blacks hated 
Jews so. In print, I challenged Gate�s libeling of blacks as a group 
in my book, Another Day at the Front, because at the time of his 
Op-ed, the Anti-Defamation League issued a report that showed the 
decline of anti-Semitism among black Americans. I cited this report to 
Gates. He said that the Times promised that there would be a follow up 
Op-ed about racism among American Jews. It never appeared. Barry 
Glassner was correct when he wrote in his �The Culture of Fear� that 
the whole Gates-generated black Jewish feud was hyped.

Under Tina Brown�s editorship at The New Yorker, Gates was hired to do 
hatchet jobs on Minister Louis Farrakhan and the late playwright 
August Wilson.

The piece on
Wilson appeared after a debate between Robert Brustein and Wilson 
about Wilson�s proposal for a black nationalist theater. Gates took 
Brustein�s side of the argument.
Shortly afterward, Brustein and Gates were awarded a million dollar 
grant from the Ford Foundation for the purpose of holding theatrical 
Talented Tenth dinner parties at Harvard at a time when regional black 
theater was heading toward extinction. Tina Brown, a one-time Gates 
sponsor, is a post-racer like Gates. Like Andrew Sullivan, a Charles 
Murray supporter, she gets away with the most fatuous comments as a 
result of Americans being enthralled by a London accent. On the Bill 
Maher show, she said that issues of race were pass� because the 
country has elected a black president. This woman lives in a city from 
which blacks and Latinos have been ethnically cleansed as a result the 
policies of Mayor Giuliani, a man who gets his talking points from The 
Manhattan Institute. Thousands of black and Hispanic New Yorkers have 
been stopped and frisked without a peep from Gates and his Harvard 
circle of post-racers such as Orlando Patterson.

Even the Bush administration admitted to the existence of racial 
profiling, yet Gates says that only after his arrest did he understand 
the extent of racial profiling, a problem for over two hundred years. 
Why wasn�t �the nation�s leading black intellectual� aware of the 
problem? His exact words following his arrest were �What it made me 
realize was how vulnerable all black men are, how vulnerable are all 
poor people to capricious forces like a rogue policemen.� Amazing! 
Shouldn�t �the nation�s leading black intellectual� be aware of writer 
Charles Chesnutt who wrote about racial profiling in 1905!

The Village Voice recently exposed the brutality meted out to black 
and Hispanic prisoners at New York�s Riker�s Island and medical 
experiments that have damaged black children living in the city. Yet 
Maureen Dowd agrees with Tina Brown, her fellow New Yorker, that 
because the president and his attorney general are black--in terms of 
racism--it�s mission accomplished. Makes you understand how the German 
citizens of Munich could go about their business while people were 
being gassed a few miles away.
You can almost forgive Marie Antoinette. She was a young woman in her 
thirties with not a single face lift operation.

What is it with this post-race Harvard elite? I got to see Dick 
Gregory and Mort Sahl perform in San Francisco the other night, the 
last of the great sixties comedians. During his routine, Gregory said 
that he�s sending his grand kids to black historical colleges because 
even though he lives near Harvard and can afford to send them there, 
he wouldn�t �send his dog to Harvard.� Maybe he is on to something.

When Queer Power became the vogue, Gates latched on to that movement, 
too. In an introduction to an anthology of Gay writings, Gates argued 
that Gays face more discrimination than blacks, which is disputed even 
by Charles Blow, Times statistician, who like Harvard�s Patterson and 
Gates, makes tough love to blacks exclusively. Recently, he reported 
that the typical target of a hate crime is black, but failed to 
identify the typical perpetrator of a hate crime as a young white 
male.

Moreover, what�s the percentage of Gays on death row? The percentage 
of blacks? Which group is more likely to be redlined by banks, a 
practice that has cost blacks billions of dollars in equity? Would 
Cambridge police have given two white Gays the problems that they gave 
Gates? Why no discussion of charges of Gay racism made by Marlon 
Riggs, Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde? How many unarmed white Gays have 
been murdered by the police? How many blacks?
Undoubtedly, there are pockets of homophobia among blacks but not as 
much as that among other ethnic communities that I could cite. The 
best thing for blacks would be for Gays to get married and blacks 
should help in this effort, otherwise all of the oxygen on the left 
will continue to be soaked up by this issue.

For white Gays and Lesbians to compare their struggle to that of the 
Civil Rights movement is like Gates comparing his situation with that 
of Wole Soyinka�s. Moreover, Barbara Smith says that when she tried to 
join the Gay Millennial March on Washington, the leaders told her to 
get lost. They said they were intent upon convincing white 
Heterosexual America that �We�re just like you.�

Will the pre-late-80s Gates be resurrected as a result of what MSNBC 
and CNN commentator Tour� calls Gates� wake up call? (This is the same 
Toure, a brilliant fiction writer, who just about wrote a post-race 
manifesto for The New York Times Book Review, during which he 
dismissed an older generation of black activists as a bunch of
�Jesses�.)

Will Gates let up on what Kofi Natambu the young editor of the 
Panopticon Review calls his �opportunism.� Will he re-think remarks 
like the one he made after the election of his friend, the tough love 
president Barack Obama? Gates said that he doubted that the election 
would end black substance abuse and unmarried motherhood?

Is it possible that things are more complicated than tough love sound 
bites which are designed to solicit more patronage? Will he reconsider 
the post-race neocon line of his blog, TheRoot.com, bankrolled by The 
Washington Post?
Will he invite writers Carl Dix and Askia Toure, who represent other 
African American constituencies, as much as he prints the views of far 
right Manhattan Institute spokesperson and racial profiling denier, 
John McWhorter.

Will he continue to advertise shoddy blame-the-victim and black 
pathology sideshows like CNN�s �Black In America,� and �The Wire?�
(Predictably CNN�s Anderson Cooper turned Gates�
controversy into a carnival act. The story was followed by one about 
Michael Jackson�s doctors. CNN is making so much money and raising its 
ratings so rapidly from black pathology stories that it�s beginning to 
give Black Entertainment Network a run for its money, so to speak.)

Predictably, the segregated media--the spare all white jury dominating 
the conversation about race as usual--gave the Cambridge cop the 
benefit of the doubt and the police unions backed him up. The police 
unions always back up their fellow officers even when they shoot 
unarmed black suspects in the back or, in the case of Papa Charlie 
James, an elderly San Francisco black man, while he was laying in bed. 
They back each other up and �testilie� all of the time.

Will Gates listen to his critics from whom he has been protected by 
powerful moneyed forces, which have given him the ability to make or 
break academic careers, preside over the decision-making of patronage 
and grant-awarding institutions. Houston A. Baker Jr.�s Betrayal: How 
Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned The Ideals Of The Civil Rights Era 
offers mild criticisms of Gates, West and other black public 
intellectuals, who, according to him, are �embraced by virtue of their 
race transcendent ideology.� His book went from the warehouse to the 
remainder shelves. The Village Voice promised two installments of 
courageous muckraking pieces about Gates written by novelist, 
playwright and poet Thulani Davis; part two never appeared. Letters 
challenging Gates by one of Gates� main critics at Harvard, Dr. Martin 
Kilson, have been censored. Kilson refers to Gates as �the master of 
the intellectual dodge.� And even when Professor Melissa 
Harris-Lacewell at The Nation�s blog defied the 24-hour news cycle 
that has depicted Gates, a black nationalist critic, as an overnight 
black nationalist-- she calls him �apolitical�--she had to pull her 
punches. As an intellectual, she has more depth than all of the white 
mainstream and white progressive media�s selected �leaders of black 
intellection,� among whom are post-modernist preachers who can spew 
rhetoric faster than the speed of light.

It remains to be seen whether Gates, who calls himself an intellectual 
entrepreneur, will now use his �wake up call� to lead a movement that 
will challenge racial disparities in the criminal justice system. A 
system that is rotten to the core, where whites commit the 
overwhelming majority of the crimes, while blacks and Hispanics do the 
time. A prison system where torture and rape are regular occurrences 
and where in some states the conditions are worse than at Gitmo. 
California prisons hospitals are so bad that they have been declared 
unconstitutional and a form of torture, over the objections of 
Attorney General Jerry Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who leased 
his face to the rich and was on television the other day talking about 
how rough they have it. A man who is channeling his hero the late Kurt 
Waldheim�s attitudes toward the poor and disabled.

Gates can help lead the fight so that there will be mutual respect 
between law enforcement and minorities instead of their calling us 
niggers all the time and being Marvin Gaye�s �trigger happy� 
policemen. Not all of them but quite a few. Or Gates can coast along. 
Continue to maintain that black personal behavior, like not turning 
off the TV at night, is at the root of the barriers facing millions of 
black Americans. Will return to the intellectual rigor espoused by his 
hero W.E.B Dubois or will he continue to act as a sort of black 
intellectual Charles Van Doren? An entertainer. (An insider at PBS 
told me that the network is demanding that Gates back up his claims 
about the ancestry of celebrities with more solid
proofs.)

Gates has discussed doing a documentary about racial profiling. I 
invite him to cover a meeting residents of my Oakland ghetto 
neighborhood have with the police each month.
(Most of our problems incidentally are caused by the off-springs of 
two family households. Suburban gun dealers who arm gang leaders. The 
gang leader on our block isn�t black! An absentee landlord who owns a 
house where crack operations take place.) He can bring Bill Cosby with 
him.
He�ll find that the problems of inner citizens are more complex than 
�thirty five year-old grandmothers living in the projects� and rappers 
not pulling up their pants and that racism remains in the words of the 
great novelist John A. Williams, �an inexorable force.�

Finally, in his 2002 Jefferson lecture, delivered at the Library of 
Congress, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., during remarks about the 
18th-Century poet Phillis Wheatley in which he excoriated the 
attitudes of her critics in the Black Arts movement, one more time, 
ended his lecture with: �We can finally say: Welcome home, Phillis; 
welcome home.�

If Gate�s ceases his role as just another tough lover and an 
�intellectual entrepreneur,� and takes a role in ending racial traffic 
and retail profiling, and police home invasions, issues that have 
lingered since even more Chesnutt�s time, we can say, �Welcome home, 
Skip; welcome home.�

Ishmael Reed is the
publisher of Konch. His new book, "Mixing It Up, Taking On The Media 
Bullies" was published by De Capo.

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s. e. anderson is author of "The Black Holocaust for Beginners"
Social Activism is not a hobby: it's a Lifestyle lasting a Lifetime 
http://www.blackeducator.org http://blackeducator.blogspot.com
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