|
Books by Henry Louis
Gates, Jr.
Colored People /
Our Nig /
The African American Century /
The Bondwoman's Narrative /
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man
The Trials of Phillis Wheatley /
"Race," Writing, and Difference /
Wonders of the African World
In Search of Identity /
Speaking of Race, Speaking of Sex /
The Signifying Monkey
Cosmopolitanism /
Identity and Violence /
The Norton Anthology of African American Literature
* *
* * *
Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man
By Rudolph Lewis
The less said about
Skip Gates the better when the issues are controversial.
We all know that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is brilliant,
creative, and at times scholarly.
Signifying Monkey,
however mistaken and disappointing, is a major achievement in racial
literary criticism using texts of identity to search and
construct an essential self from fragments of sociology,
psychology, history and other social sciences. It is
when criticism in part becomes fiction. Skip Gates has
that kind of talent.
His
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man is
wonderful. Very creative exhibiting the diversity and
the controversial beauty of black men. What is always
clear is that Skip thinks big. Some have called him
“enterprising.” How literature and the arts pay are
important. It’s a case for Booker T. Washington. Can we
live without a Skip? Could we have progressed without
Skip in the last twenty years? I think not. Comfortable
I’d keep one hand on my wallet and one ear closed when
he speaks.
In the great scheme
of things, Professor Gates was necessary. A way of
pointing, directing, making choices. He ushered in a
new era—a wrong-headed elitism, the Talented Fifth
opposed to the Untalented Fifth. All under the Umbrella
of he Black Arts/Black Studies. How can they be made
respectable, institutionalized as areas of
specialization that can be mastered with all the manuals
and support in reprints, and at times discovery. One has
a beef with Skip Gates?
One cannot avoid
it. His snide remarks. His always failing humor. The
Black Arts under his microscope was a failed era, as if
his excellences are not a continuation and an evolved
sophistication. Gates wanted to add something new: the
notion of a successful W. E. B. Du Bois. Like many he has
taken the notion of personal responsibility and
self-indulgence to absurd heights so that one can only
snicker under one’s breath in his narration of his
documentaries.
But what IF? What
if Officer Crowley is truthful: Gates provoked the
incident. Gates took advantage of Officer Crowley’s
“stupidity”—of his youth. That’s what teachers often do:
they go pedagogical at you, if you don’t keep an ear on
them.
Gates asks Crowley, "Are you not responding to me
because you’re a white police officer and I’m a black
man?" That's something that would set the
young man back on his heels.
Gates was not concerned about race so much as his
power, wealth, and influence. He did not expect
deference on the basis of race. He is one of the leading
Harvard professors, known by presidents, scholars, and
other honored men, near and far.
Maybe Officer Crowley
did not know Skip’s résumé. Maybe it would not have
mattered to him at all. Mr. Gates, for Crowley, is only
a citizen like other residents of the area. He’s not
greater than the law. And Mr. Crowley when he is on duty
is the LAW. That means Mr. Gates must have more respect
for the law than mockery and mockery of one of its
officers.
Why the Gates
provocation? Why did Gates take advantage of the young
white man? Now? Why he put him in the spotlight? For
fun? Light-headedness, long trip? He wanted to see how
far he could go to make the cop uncool—threatening,
brutalizing . . . stupid. At bottom it could be another
story to document. Come on, Rudy. Stop being cynical.
Professor Gates would not plan such a humiliation.
All I can say is
like Kilson, Gates is “enterprising.” They will always
come up with some new way of getting controversy (dust
unsettled) going. And that means money. Like the
enterprising slave who bet his master he could make more
money than him by killing his horse making it into a
leather blanket of oracles. The slave went into
fortune-telling. There are always some coming up with
new smart ideas. Can the resentful white boys do better
than obstinacy, brutality, and bullets in the back. Any
duplication ends in failure. On the gathering for beer
on the lawn, Mr. Gates told Soledad O’Brien of CNN (a
former student),
|
Mr. Obama had “allowed
us to begin to bridge our divide and make a
larger contribution to American society.”
“Only
he could have done that,” Professor Gates
said, before catching a flight back to
Boston. “I don’t think anybody but Barack
Obama would have thought about bringing us
together.”
Professor Gates added, “He thought what
Crowley and I had discussed was just right
on target. The president was great — he was
very wise, very sage, very Solomonic.” |
Skip and Barack
seemingly are both prophetic, fortune tellers for the
nation. These guys know how to seize the day! Salute! Go
on Skip—you Barack!
*
* * * *
 |
This
is about the vulnerability of black men in
America.
By Dr. Henry Louis
Gates, Jr.
|
 |
I gave him the two IDs and I
demanded to know his name and his badge
number.
Are you not responding
to me because you’re a white police officer and I’m a
black man?
|
It
looked like a police convention, there were so many
policemen outside. I stepped out on my porch and said, I
want to know your colleague’s name and his badge number.
. . . It was
the fault of the policeman who couldn’t understand a
black man standing up for his rights right in his space.
And that’s what I did. And I would do the same thing
exactly again. . . .It was terrifying.
And I realized…
I
knew that I was in danger but I knew, too, that as
soon as my friends could get to jail, starting with
Professor Charles Ogletree, who is my friend and lawyer,
that eventually I would be OK.
But what it
made me realize was how vulnerable all black
men are, how vulnerable
all people of color are and all poor people
to capricious forces like a rogue policeman.
And this man clearly was a rogue policeman.
They took me to the Cambridge Police station
and booked me, fingerprints, mug shot, which
has now been all over the universe. |
 |
*
* * * *
Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr.,
Ph.D. (born September 16, 1950) is an American literary critic,
educator, scholar, writer, editor and public intellectual. He was the
first African American to receive the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Fellowship. He has received numerous honorary degrees and awards for his
teaching, research, and development of academic institutions to study
black culture. In 2002, Gates was selected to give the
Jefferson Lecture, in recognition of his "distinguished intellectual
achievement in the humanities." The lecture resulted in his 2003 book,
The Trials of Phillis Wheatley.
As the host of the 2006 and 2008
PBS television miniseries
African American Lives, Gates explored the genealogy of prominent
African Americans. Gates sits on the boards of many notable arts,
cultural, and research institutions. He serves as the
Alphonse Fletcher
University Professor at
Harvard University, where he is Director of the
W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.
Michael Kinsley referred to him as "the nation's most famous black
scholar."[1]
However he is criticized as non-representative of Black people by
prominent African-American scholars such as
Molefi Asante,
John Henrik Clarke, and
Maulana Karenga. . . .
On July 16, 2009, Gates returned
home from a trip to China to find the door to his house jammed. His
driver attempted to help him gain entrance. A passer-by called police
reporting a possible break-in and a
Cambridge police officer was dispatched. The resulting confrontation
resulted in Gates being arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.
Prosecutors later dropped the charges.The incident spurred a politically
charged exchange of views about race relations and law enforcement
throughout the United States. The arrest garnered national attention
after the President declared that the police "acted stupidly" in
arresting Gates. The President eventually extended an invitation to both
Gates and the officer involved to share a beer with him at the White
House.[24]
On March 9, 2010, Gates claimed on
the
Oprah Winfrey Show that he and Sgt. James Crowley, the arresting
officer in the Cambridge incident, share a common ancestor.—Wikipedia
* * *
* *
* * *
* *
*
* * * *
* * *
* *
|
Unedited video supports Sherrod’s claim she wasn't racist—The
full, uncut video of a federal agricultural official's
NAACP speech purporting racial scheming, told a different
story than the barely-three-minute snippet that cost her her
job. Despite admitting in the
edited version of the taping that she once withheld help
to the couple on the basis of race, Shirley Sherrod was
defended Tuesday by the wife of a white Georgia farmer.
Sherrod, "kept us out of bankruptcy," said Eloise Spooner,
82, of Iron City in southwest Georgia. Spooner, in an
interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
added she considers Sherrod a "friend for life." She and her
husband, Roger Spooner, approached Sherrod for help in 1986
when Sherrod worked for a nonprofit that assisted farmers.
Sherrod, who is African-American, was asked to resign Monday
night by a USDA official after videotaped comments she made
in March at a local NAACP banquet surfaced on the Web
Atlanta Journal /
NAACP /
Politico /
Politico 2 |
 |
*
* * * *
* *
* * *
posted 1 August
2009
|
