[Peace-discuss] Welcome home Skip

[C. G. Estabrook]

   July 27, 2009
   Post-Race Scholar Yells Racism
   How Henry Louis Gates Got Ordained as the Nation's 
   "Leading Black Intellectual"
   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 Gates' 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 passé 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 of 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 Touré 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, Gates ended his lecture with: “We can finally say: 
Welcome home, Phillis; welcome home.”

If Gates 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.