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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
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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 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, directions, 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),
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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. |
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posted 1 August
2009 |
