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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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Books by Martin Kilson
Apropos of Africa /
The African Diaspora /
New States in the Modern World /
Political Change in a West African State
History as Guide /
Africa (Seen) from the Viewpoint of American Negro Scholars /
Political Awakening of Africa
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Master of
the Intellectual Dodge
A Reply to Henry Louis Gates
By Martin Kilson
Frank G. Thomson
Research Professor Harvard University
(These Comments Are In
Response To Henry Gates' Rebuttal of Professor Ali
Mazuri's Critique Of Gates' Film Series "Wonders of The
African World") Gates' Reply Was Put On Internet Nov. 12th,
1999.
As far as I am able to determine, none of the
African-American Intellectuals here at Harvard University has
contributed thus far to the very important discussion indeed
firestorm around my colleague Henry Louis Gates' film series,
"Wonders of the African World." I am now on the
elderly side of the African-American faculty around Harvard
these days (I formally retired as of Spring Term 1999 at 68
years of age) and I was expecting someone among the younger
age-cohort of progressive Black intellectuals here at Harvard to
join the ranks of Black intellectuals who have rightly
challenged the
intellectually atrocious film series that
Henry Gates has served up for
American viewers for White viewers mainly I think. Among
the younger age cohort of progressive Black intellectuals at
Harvard whom I thought would
join this discussion were the following: Christopher
Edley and Lani Guinier in the Law School; Cornel West in
Theology/Afro-American Studies; Loran
Matory in Anthropology/Afro-American Studies; Larry Bobo
in Sociology; and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham in
History/Afro-American Studies. So the absence so far of any
participant from my Black colleagues here at Harvard in
critiquing Gates' intellectually shameful film series, has
partly sparked my decision to join this criticism.
But it was especially Henry Gates' response
to his critics especially to Professor Ali Mazuri-that really
pushed me over the edge, so to speak; that fired me up enough to
join the discussion. I've
known Henry Gates as an academic colleague quite well during the
past decade of his tenure here at Harvard. I was part of the
Afro-American Studies Appointments Committee that selected him
in fact. I had a good collegial academic
relationship with Henry Gates up to about
1995/1996 academic year, at which point I decided to probe
Gates' particular style and modus operandi as a Black academic
entrepreneur intellectual , in context of forerunner Black
academic entrepreneur intellectuals like the Sociologist Charles
Spurgeon Johnson and the Historian Carter G. Woodson both of
whom I worship. My probe of Gates was for a chapter in an
ongoing three volume study of the 20th century African-American
Intelligentsia.
My study is titled THE MAKING OF BLACK
INTELLECTUALS: STUDIES ON THE AFRICAN AMERICAN INTELLIGENTSIA,
Volume I of which might get published by late 2000.The chapters
in the three volume manuscript (now nearly all written after 25
years or so in the making) comprise mainly case study probes of
the intellectual careers of specific individuals (Horace Mann
Bond, John Aubrey Davis, Ralph J. Bunche. Martin Kilson--myself
that is); case study Probes of Black political class
professionals (Adam Clayton Powell, Gen. Colin Powell); and case
study probes of intellectual discourse produced by a Given Black
intellectual which make up the majority of the chapters in the
Three volumes (e.g., Harold Cruse, E. Franklin Frazier, Carter
G. Woodson , Ira Reid, Ida Wells Barnett, St. Clair Drake, Kwame
Anthony Appiah, Orlando Patterson et. al. - the latter two are
part of an extended dissection and probe of contemporary Black
establishmentarian and conservative intellectuals in Volume II
and Volume III).
My chapter on Henry Gates deals with his
intellectual discourse over the past decade or so. As I searched
the numerous articles he has published (including his memoir
COLORED PEOPLE) dealing with the character of African-American
social, cultural and political patterns, I discovered two things
that I disliked about Gates' intellectual discourse. One was an
almost neurotic need to couch discourse on African-American
socio-cultural and political patterns in what I call "Black
put-down terms," a mode of intellectual discourse on
Black realities that Gates' intellectual confrere Kwame Anthony Appiah is also addicted to, I should
add. Second, much of Henry Gates' discourse on African-American
socio-cultural and political patterns exhibits a thoroughly
chameleon trait an almost manic need to produce a discourse on
Black realities that migrates between a
"Black put down" or "Black averse"
mode, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a seemingly
redeeming "Black friendly" mode, though in ultimate
essence the redeeming posture is phony.
This chameleon trait so fundamental I think
to Henry Gates as an Intellectual stood out as I read his reply
to Professor Ali Mazuri's fully valid critique of Gates' film
series "Wonders of the African World." The overall
character of Gates' reply is one of "an intellectual
dodge." By which I mean, a clever bid to translate the
overwhelming negatives of his film series into intellectual
positives. By "overwhelming negatives",
I refer to 1) the numerous intellectually
convoluted or twisted put downs of African realities in the film
series, and 2) the Eurocentric derived irreverent posturings
toward African realities by Henry Gates, even while
simultaneously characterizing a given African reality as
positive, as "an African Wonder." As Ali Mazuri
rightly put it: "Gates seemed incapable of glorifying
Africa without demonizing it in the second breath."
Henry Gates' reply to Professor Ali Mazuri's
valid critique of "Wonders Of the African World" is,
then, a premier example of discourse as an intellectual dodge,
something Gates is quite adept at, I suggest. Henry Gates paints
several self-serving images of himself seemingly objectively
rendered and weaves betwixt and-between them, straining, for
what might be called a self-portraiture crescendo to hook his
readers on. But don't be caught by any of it, snared in Gates'
self-portraiture trap so to speak.
For starters, Henry Gates would have his
readers believe that an academic year spent in the village
society of one of the few genuinely progressive African states
in the early 1970s Tanzania translated automatically into a
socialist friendly demeanor on his part. Gates would have us
believe, furthermore, that courses taken at the University of
Cambridge by him in the 1970s under a genuinely progressive
African intellectual like Wole Soyinka also automatically
translated into a progressive friendly demeanor on Gates' part.
But don't you believe it. Henry Gates' intellectual arrogance is
such that he thinks he can get people to believe just about
anything. With this verbal trickery, then, Gates is pretending a
kind of "progressivism by association syndrome," so to
speak. But what has been unique about Wole Soyinka whom Gates
parades around in his speaking and writing as his African
intellectual mentor is precisely Soyinka's lack of verbal
trickery.
For Gates, however, verbal trickery is his
stock in trade. During the past 30 years of predatory and
kleptocratic governing classes in most African states including
especially Soyinka's own country of Nigeria, Wole Soyinka has
exhibited a courageous and rare commitment to a Progressive
African intellectual identity. The kind I wish I could live up
to if required. The kind that the great Frantz Fanon and the
great Camara Laye (in Sekou Toure's Guinea) represented in their
intellectual careers. The kind, that is, that dares to critique
and challenge what's vicious, venal, and predatory among one's
own natal cultural and political milieu one's own ethnic/tribal
and nation state milieu that is and thereby run the clear risk
of autocratic and cruel retaliation that has been a built in
component most independent African states over the past 30
years. It takes a
special
kind of intellectual gall and chutzpah-as
well as an incredible capacity for intellectual fantasy for a
Henry Gates to portray himself at intellectual parity with Wole
Soyinka . Such self-portrayal by Gates is not just an historical
travesty, but just plain laughable, I submit.
I hope Wole Soyinka is aware of how his name is being
manipulated by Henry Gates.
What is more, note that Gates does this with
the use of what he thinks is a hip term -"tough love." I seriously doubt that in articulating the proposition that
"Criticism, like charity, starts at home," Soyinka was
trying to teach what Gates characterizes as a "tough
love" lesson to his Nigerian intellectual colleagues who
were more reluctant to challenge
authoritarian regimes in their country. Put
another way, Soyinka was not beating his chest in public around
attributes of his own genuinely progressive intellectual makeup,
he was not showing off with his political discourse that
is-something Henry Gates is manicly addicted to, I think. Though
Henry Gates is not aware of it, "tough love" is a
lightweight pop journalistic term that tells us nothing about a
genuinely courageous and independent progressive African
intellectual like Wole Soyinka.
On the other hand, however, "tough
love" has much utility for Henry Gates' perpetual bid to
cloak his penchant for what I call Black put down discourse in
seemingly high minded language like "tough love." In
doing so, Gates aims to deflect attention from the true goal
that his Black put down discourse serves-namely, the
establishmentarian and
conservative patterns in contemporary
American society, and globally too. In putting "tough
love" into Soyinka's mouth, Henry Gates is, above all,
trying to play back his way to a special public
self-portraiture-one he consider politically serviceable.
At bottom, Henry Gates' myopia regarding his
own self-importance can be viewed as the main source of both the
filmic failure of "'Wonders of the African World" and
the intellectually tacky Black put down aura that pervades it-an
aura that bespeaks the film series' politics, actually.
What else can explain the absence of a
serious didactic format for the narration of the series a
formalized instructional design or format for conveying to
American viewers a serious quantum of substantive information
about African History and Culture? What else can explain the
unbelievably arrogant irreverence that Henry Gates exhibited at
so many levels in the series?
The irreverence associated with wearing the lounge attire
Found in bourgeois quarters of our American suburbs when
visiting traditional sanctuaries of the Ethiopian Coptic Church,
for example.
The irreverence associated with snide
comments about the historical authenticity of the Coptic
Church's claim of possessing the Ark, and the related
irreverence associated with Gates' posturing about climbing the
gate to the hallowed site where the Ark is located. Henry Gates
wouldn't dare behave with such flippant and infantile
irreverence in a comparable visit to a traditional sanctuary of
Judaism in Israel, of the Church of England, of the Holy See In
Rome, or anywhere else in the West. He wouldn't dare, I assure
you....This kind of behavior by Henry Gates is reserved only for
Black world realities! And that Gates can quote to his readers a
fawning comment on "Wonders of the African World" by
the current governing class in Ethiopia as a serious rebuttal of
the charge by Mazuri and others that his demeanor as interviewer
was irreverent toward traditional sanctuaries of African
civilization is another dimension of Gates' myopic self
importance.
His chutzpah too.
Above all, the irreverence associated with
Henry Gates' characterization of the historical dynamics of the
Atlantic Slave Trade-the man's lack of simple decency of spirit
toward that devastating historical trauma visited upon Black
people in the tens of millions by capitalist Christendom at its
crudest-struck me as the foulest of all. If American
viewers-White Americans especially-were relying upon Henry
Gates' "Wonders of the African World" for a chance to
finally come-to grips with the raw cultural barbarity of the
Atlantic Slave Trade that our own component of the capitalist
Christian state system helped to perpetrate against African
peoples, their disappointment must have been gigantic.
Or perhaps not., for what Henry Gates dished
up in his film series was a characterization that enabled many
of our White American compatriots to persist in their
longstanding, arrogant, and stubborn condition of moral
denial-denial of systemic collaboration in and much
responsibility for what can only be called the "Black
Holocaust." Like Ali Mazuri and other critics of
"Wonders of the African World," I was aghast at Henry
Gates' Indecent verbal maneuvers in his interviews relating to
the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Verbal maneuvers that emphasized almost
solely the role of African errand boys for European dominance
(African slave raiders, predatory African traditional chiefs and
kings and religious authorities, etc.) in fostering the Atlantic
Slave Trade. As Blackworld scholars for a century now-from the
great W.E.B.Du Bois (the research institute Gates directs at
Harvard bears his name) to the late Trinidad scholar Eric
Williams and the late
Nigerian scholar and dear friend of mine
Kenneth 0. Dike - have uncovered along with the White scholars,
the Atlantic Slave Trade stemmed overwhelmingly from the
military, naval technological prowess, and political economic
prowess of Europe vis a vis African peoples and other world
peoples too, Regardless of what African errand boys (or. as the
case may be, Chinese errand boys in the East Asia context, Arab
errand boys in the Middle East context, so forth and so on) did
or did not do.
As Ali Mazuri rightly characterized this part
of Henry Gates' series: "Gates manages to make an African
to say that without the participation of Africans there would
have been no slave trade! How naive about power can we
get?" Indeed.
Just the slightest glance at instances in ancient and medieval
history of imperial and feudalistic predatory state societies
(or just a visit to the movie "Brave Hearts") would
inform Henry Gates about the comparative history of slaving
dynamics. Those dynamics were overwhelmingly power class
dynamics, with vicious and predatory power classes among
vanquished societies typically preferring power benefits from
participation in imperially imposed slaving dynamics over
loyalty to their natal cultural/political unit (the tribe,
province, region, etc.).
But this historical ignorance on Henry Gates'
part in regard to the comparative history of slaving systems is
only part of Gates' problem-his "Black problem", if
you will. At the core of Henry Gates' insensitivity toward the
massive historical trauma for the everyday oppressed and
violated African persons (children, women, and men) in the long
night of
The Atlantic Slave Trade is Gates' deep
personality need to participate in contemporary
establishmentarian and conservative put down discourse toward
Black world realities.
And, as already noted, for Henry Gates this
is always a chameleon choreographed Black put down modality,
which can find him at one time both putting down Blackness and
pretending to affirm Blackness too. But Henry Gates knows well
that the American establishment, in its several formations, gets
the message of his intellectual maneuvers. And I'm sure it does.
One last theme relating to Henry Gates' intellectual persona
requires mentioning. Gates makes a major effort to rebut Ali
Mazuri's charge that "Wonders of the African World"
series does not make rigorous use of authoritative scholars that
one expects from a serious documentary film.
Gates gets around this criticism from Mazuri
partly by claiming that his film was not quite a documentary but
rather "was framed as a travelogue which allowed me to show
both the diversity of the vast African continent and the African
peoples themselves." This is bunkum, I submit. The best
travelogues are anchored by a keen and careful documentary type
infrastructure, which means they seek to have a serious didactic
thrust, and such a thrust implies leaning on serious
authoritative advice.
Of course, Henry Gates lined up a show list
of official authoritative advisers for his series as he eagerly
points out in last section of his reply to Professor Mazuri.
Gates is too shrewd an academic entrepreneur intellectual not to
protect himself on this flank, need I add. But lining up
authoritative advisers is one thing; honestly and effectively
employing their advice and knowledge is quite another matter
altogether. A matter I think that was of very little interest to
Henry Gates when making "Wonders of the African
World."
As I started off these comments, I've known
Henry Gates for a decade and I can say that I watched and probed
his "MO" as
much as any of his Harvard colleagues have. At the center of
Gates' "MO" is a convoluted autocratic component, and
at the level of his academic/administrative functioning that
autocratic component of Gates' persona is never far from the
surface. I speak from institutional experience in this matter of
Henry Gates' autocratic trait, for throughout his decade
presence at Harvard I (along with Professor Preston
Williams-Divinity School-Professor Charles Willie-School of
Education-Professor Peter Gomes-Divinity School-Professor Werner
Sollors Comparative Literature -and Several others) have been on
the Advisory Board of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute. Like the
advisory boards of other research institutes or centers at
Harvard, the presumption is that the chair or director of such
centers will confer with such boards through maybe two meetings
a semester-depending upon relevant situations and sometimes more
frequently.
If I recall correctly, the Du Bois Institute
Advisory board was convened twice a year during Gates' first
year, once a year during the following two years (at which
meetings Gates presented a self-serving balance sheet of his
achievements), and since
then the Advisory Board of the DuBois Institute has not been
convened-a period of about six years!!
All decisions from the character of the
Institute's funding, choice of lecturers for lecture series like
the Du Bois Lecture and the Nathan Huggins Lecture, etc.
demanate from the very wise head of Henry Louis Gates. A couple
of Advisory Board members have discussed Gates' tacky autocratic
"MO" within the affairs of the Du Bois Institute among
ourselves, but none of us has ever moved in any substantive way
to redress this Gatesian autocracy, and I don't even think any
of us knows what the formal Harvard rules are (if there are any)
for redressing this Gatesian autocracy. I have personally
queried Henry Gates regarding the state of the Dubois
Institute's Advisory Board (I queried Gates quite candidly on
many other issues too) a state of affairs that is an insult to
the members of the Advisory Board. I can report that Henry Gates
could care less.
There is also another dimension to my
skepticism that Henry Gates made any serious use of his show
list of authoritative advisors for his film series. My Du Bois
Institute experience with Gatesian autocracy led me, a couple of
years ago, to decline several persistent requests from Henry
Gates to join the Advisory Board of the proprietary structure
that he formed to produce the Microsoft ENCARTA CDROM on Black
History and the hard copy ENCYCLOPEDIA AFRICANA version,
recently out from Basic Books. Henry Gates and Kwame Anthony
Appiah transformed the original plans that the late Professor
Nathan Huggins created to produce the ENCYCLOPEDIA AFRICANA from
the academic realm of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute to a
privatistic structure-a private firm, 20 if you will, headed by
Gates and Appiah as sole proprietors .
I queried around about whether this was
officially kosher, this transforming a Professor Huggins'
designed research project within the academic realm of the
Harvard DuBois Institute into a proprietary structure. I did so
in an informal way I might add, dropping notes on the matter to
my longstanding friend Archie Epps (who was Dean of Students-the
first African-American Administrator in Harvard College) and to
one of my progressive Harvard academic colleagues who happened
to be a part of the Afro-American Studies faculty, Professor
Cornel West. Epps said that he didn't know what the formal
Harvard rules were, so I told Epps that I wasn't that concerned
about the matter, so he need not inquire any further.
My progressive academic colleague Cornel West
never got back to me about the matter at all, as I recall. As I
told both Epps and West in my notes to them, it was my simple
minded understanding that a project conceived as Professor
Huggins conceived the ENCYCLOPEDIA AFRICANA project to be a
research production of the Du Bois Institute, ought to remain an
Institute affair in substance whatever privatistic
choreographing might be done to it. So whatever financial
benefits that resulted from the end product of Professor
Huggins' ENCYCLOPEDIA AFRICANA project (such as the Microsoft
ENCARTA CD-ROM on Black History and the hard copy version) ought
to become part of the research funds or endowment of the W.E.B.
Du Bois Institute which God knows deserves serious financial
endowment after nearly 30 years existence.
For me anyway, this is the only academically
honorable thing to do in this kind of situation. One should not
cynically pursue one's own self serving and money enhancing
agenda as a scholar, which is what the privatistic arrangement
set up in regard to Professor Huggins' original plans for the
ENCYCLOPEDIA AFRICANA project By Henry Gates and Kwame Anthony
Appiah looks like to me. But maybe I'm just a naive old
fashioned academic in these matters, I suspect. Thus, I want to
conclude these critical reflections on Henry Gates' film series
- "Wonders of the African World"- and on the
intellectually convoluted character of Henry Gates himself with
some thoughts on the future interaction between progressive
African-American intellectuals, on the one hand, and the
establishmentarian and politically cagey Henry Gates on the
other hand.
First of all, there should be no doubt among
progressive African-American intellectuals that Henry Gates as
the leading African-American academic entrepreneur intellectual
in the country these days has an intellectual persona and modus
operandi vis a vis Black
world realities that is riddled through with
establishmentarian and sometimes anti-Black purposes. Henry
Gates, therefore, warrants much more scrutiny by progressive
African-American intellectuals than he has received to date.
Happily for us in this regard, Henry Gates has unwittingly
helped us with the intellectually tacky and arrogant Black put
down aura that pervades his BBC/PBS film series.
However, to be effective in the important
task of scrutinizing an Incredibly cagey academic entrepreneur
intellectual like Henry Gates requires, I think, any progressive
Black intellectual to keep a kind of respectful distance from
the chap. Why? Because Henry Gates is not only a master of the
intellectual dodge as I have tried to delineate in these
comments. Henry Gates is also a masterful manipulator of
strategic goodies at his disposal as a Black academic
entrepreneur. I suppose that's how Gates maneuvered my old
friend Professor Ali Mazuri to pen a friendly blurb for the
coffee table book version of "Wonders of the African
World." I say this because when the secretary at the DuBois
Institute mailed notices to Advisory Board members regarding the
lecturers for the Nathan Huggins Lecture Series always selected
solely from the wise head of Henry Gates by the wav, since the
Advisory Board is operationally superfluous-I discovered that on
the List of future lecturers was Professor Ali Mazuri (November
2000 1 think).
To perform the much needed task of
intellectually scrutinizing a cagey and politically
opportunistic academic entrepreneur American intellectual like
Henry Gates (or, say, like Professor Samuel Huntington who's in
International Studies here at Harvard and others like this at
Harvard and other universities around the country) , it is best
for anyone who is a progressive intellectual and scholar to keep
a respectful distance visa versa resources (goodies) at Gates'
disposal. Even rather simple ones like invitations to strategic
dinners at his house. For Henry Gates anyway they're his fish
hooks, so to speak. And he has snared a lot of strategically
useful fish I might add, some who could otherwise contribute to
the important task of intellectually scrutinizing the latter day
Booker T. Washington accommodationism dimension of Henry Gates'
intellectual persona.
Remember that it is not easy to "drink
the King's wine and challenge the King too...."
For me anyway, this is not an easy issue even
though I Know that there are times when "the King"
must be challenged, whether one sups his table or not. So for
myself here at Harvard University during the past decade of
Henry Gates' tenure here, I've kept a respectful distance from
Henry Gates' goodies in order to reserve my independence of
action. Luckily for me of course, my academic appointment needs
and resources, here at Harvard have not overlapped with
"King Gates", unlike the situation for other
African-American faculty here whose appointment Henry Gates had
a hand in-such as Professor William Wilson--and thus who are
inclined to be rather discreet in their interactions with
"King Gates."
I have no such dependence ties to "King
Gates." So when there was one instance in the past
decade when my resource needs relating to a Fiftieth Anniversary
Conference on Gunnar Myrdal's "An American Dilemma"
that I conceived and mainly organized (with marvelous assistance
from Dr. Randall Burkett then associate administrator at the
DuBois Institute but who was later unceremoniously dismissed by
Henry Gates) became
something of an issue between me and Henry
Gates, I let Gates know that I was willing to do battle if
necessary. One should never act weak in the midst of Gatesian
autocracy, or any autocracy for that matter. Wole Soyinka has
taught us that nobly.
Not, of course, in the pop journalistic way
that Henry Gates characterizes Soyinka's intellectual courage so
as the advance Gates' own phony public self portraiture.
So I try to advise my progressive Black
intellectual peers especially to be wary of "King
Gates" strategic offerings his fish hooks, if at all
possible. And I'd like to address this especially to the up
coming younger generation of African-American intellectuals and
scholars, particularly those who seek to fashion a progressive
outlook for themselves. Finally, we progressive Black
intellectuals especially do indeed have to perform the
scrutinizing task in regard to establishmentarian and/or
conservative Black intellectuals like Henry Gates, because no
one else will. Above all, we progressive Black intellectuals
still have a serious Black people agenda to attend to. Namely:
Protecting, advancing, and redeeming Black folks' honor, both
here in the United States and elsewhere in the globe.*
* * * *
 |
Harvard University’s
Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government Emeritus, Dr.
Martin L. Kilson, Jr. bears his professional prominence very
easily, descending from three generations of clergy with
skills of persuasion, presentation and organization. Before
the Civil War, his great-great-grandfather, The Reverend
Isaac Lee, founded the first A.M.E. church among free
Negroes in Kent County, Maryland. Dr. Kilson’s maternal
great-grandfather was also among the founders of a church. .
. . Dr. Kilson rose through the ranks to become the first
African American scholar to achieve a Full Professorship in
Harvard College, where he taught for forty-two years before
retiring in 1999.
. . .
Kilson is co-author of
Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience
—BlackPast |
*
* * * *
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
*
* * * *
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on DVD
DVD
Description of
America beyond the Color Line
Henry Louis Gates Jr. travels the length and breadth of the
United States to take the temperature of black America at the
start of the new century. Gates visits the East Coast, the deep
South, inner-city Chicago and Hollywood to explore the rich and
diverse landscape, social as well as geographic.
* *
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DVD Description of
African American Lives
Renowned scholar Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., W.E.B. DuBois
professor of the Humanities and chair of African and
African-American Studies at Harvard University, takes Alex
Haley’s Roots saga to a whole new level. Using genealogy and DNA
science, Dr. Gates tells the personal stories of eight
accomplished African Americans, tracing their roots through
American history and back to Africa. Participants include Dr.
Ben Carson, Whoopi Goldberg, Bishop T.D. Jakes, Dr. Mae Jemison,
Quincy Jones, Dr. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Chris Tucker and
Oprah Winfrey.
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DVD Description of
Wonders of the African World
Africa is a continent of magnificent
treasures and cultures--from the breathtaking stone architecture
of 1,000-year-old ruins in South Africa to an advanced 16th
century international university in Timbuktu. However, for
centuries, many of these African wonders have been hidden from
the world, lost to the ravages of time, nature and repressive
governments. Uncover the richness of these African Wonders with
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as he explores the many cultures,
traditions and history of the African continent.
* *
* * *
In Search of Our Roots:
How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past”
By Henry Louis Gates J
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Remarks by the
President and the First Lady at Presentation of the National
Medal of the Arts and the National Humanities medal.—November
5, 1998—THE PRESIDENT: Near the beginning of this century,
W. E. B. Du Bois predicted a "black tomorrow" of African
American achievement. Thanks in large measure to Henry Louis
Gates, that tomorrow has turned into today. For 20 years he
has revitalized African American studies. In his writing and
teaching, through his leadership of the Dream Team of
African American scholars he brought together at Harvard,
Gates has shed brilliant light on authors and traditions
kept in the shadows for too long. From "signifying monkeys"
to small-town West Virginia, from ancient Africa to the new
New York, Skip Gates has described the American experience
with force, with dignity and, most of all, with color.
Ladies and gentlemen, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Applause.) The
Medal is presented.)—clinton6
The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American
Literary Criticism (1989)
Colored People: A Memoir (1994, memoir) |
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Wake Up Everybody—Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes (1975)
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Malcolm X
A Life of Reinvention
By
Manning Marable
Years
in the making-the definitive biography of
the legendary black activist.
Of the great figure in twentieth-century
American history perhaps none is more
complex and controversial than Malcolm X.
Constantly rewriting his own story, he
became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and
an icon, all before being felled by
assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine.
Through his tireless work and countless
speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands
of black Americans to create better lives
and stronger communities while establishing
the template for the self-actualized,
independent African American man. In death
he became a broad symbol of both resistance
and reconciliation for millions around the
world. |
Manning Marable's
new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement.
Filled with new information and shocking revelations
that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a
sweeping story of race and class in America, from the
rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the
struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties
and sixties.
Reaching into
Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his
parents' activism through his own engagement with the
Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the
world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the
never-before-told true story of his assassination.
Malcolm X will stand as the definitive work on one of
the most singular forces for social change, capturing
with revelatory clarity a man who constantly strove, in
the great American tradition, to remake himself anew.
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Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). —Booklist |
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Lincoln on Race and Slavery
Edited By Henry Louis Gates and Donald
Yacovone
Generations of Americans have debated
the meaning of Abraham Lincoln's views
on race and slavery. He issued the
Emancipation Proclamation and supported
a constitutional amendment to outlaw
slavery, yet he also harbored grave
doubts about the intellectual capacity
of African Americans, publicly used the
n-word until at least 1862, and favored
permanent racial segregation. In this
book—the first complete collection of
Lincoln's important writings on both
race and slavery—readers
can explore these contradictions through
Lincoln's own words. Acclaimed Harvard
scholar and documentary filmmaker Henry
Louis Gates, Jr., presents the full
range of Lincoln's views, gathered from
his private letters, speeches, official
documents, and even race jokes, arranged
chronologically from the late 1830s to
the 1860s. |
Complete with definitive texts, rich historical
notes, and an original introduction by Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., this book charts the progress of a war
within Lincoln himself. We witness his struggles
with conflicting aims and ideas—a hatred of slavery
and a belief in the political equality of all men,
but also anti-black prejudices and a determination
to preserve the Union even at the cost of preserving
slavery. We also watch the evolution of his
racial views, especially in reaction to the heroic
fighting of black Union troops.
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Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality,
1890-2000
By Adam Fairclough
Better Day Coming is intended,
in author Adam Fairclough's words, as
"neither a textbook nor a survey, but an
interpretation" (p. xiv) of the
circuitous struggle for racial equality
pursued by African Americans and their
occasional allies between 1890 and 2000.
Chronologically organized, the narrative
moves from an evaluation of the
hard-pressed, contending forces vying
for ascendancy in the black South at the
nadir to the interwar period and well
beyond, into the urban cauldron of the
northern ghettoes at the high point of
the Black Power movement. Fairclough
brings to his project a fluent
understanding of the shifting
institutional configurations of
opposition to Jim Crow and a keen
sensitivity to the ways in which the
efforts of those who fought it were
hampered, circumscribed, and
occasionally crushed by the pressures of
operating in a society formally
committed—for most of the period under
discussion—to aggressive defense of the
racial status quo.
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Fairclough's "basic argument" seems at first glance
uncontroversial: that "although blacks differed . .
. about the most appropriate tactics in the struggle
for equality, they were united in rejecting
allegations of racial inferiority and in aspiring to
a society where men and women would be judged on
merit rather than by race or color" (p. xii).
But his ultimate aim is more ambitious: he sets out
to rehabilitate the accommodationist tradition
represented by Booker T. Washington which, though
"apparently unheroic," in the author's view "laid
the groundwork for the militant confrontation of the
Civil Rights Movement" (p. xiii).—h-net
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. |
This collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered
the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It
By H. W. Brands
In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent |
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U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance
helped transform economies in countries ranging from
Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China
today.
He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008
world financial debacle, which exposed the power--and
the enormous risks--of the dollar's worldwide reign. The Economy
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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