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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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The
Noise of Class Ideology
in Gates’ Tour of the Rich & Famous
Editorial by Rudolph Lewis
Henry Louis Gates’s
America Beyond the Color Line
promises more than it delivers. Clearly, this two-night
“documentary” was directed toward voyeuristic white and
black audiences interested in the houses and wealth of
well-to-do blacks. But we probably should have suspected that
Harvard’s P.T. Barnum of black entrepreneurial promotion would
give African America the shaft.
No conscientious African American who
respects the memory of Dr. King or the activism of a Danny
Glover or a Harry Belafonte could be satisfied with this PBS/BBC
bunkum.
Gates interviews “successful” blacks in
the South, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. He unsuccessfully
attempts to establish the preconceived “fact” that blacks
are half responsible for their own oppression and that presently
the “green” of money is more significant than the color of
race.
He constantly steers his narration away from
conclusions drawn by many of those interviewed and reasserts
again and again the “black problem” as being the behavior of
the black underclass.
In the South, Morgan Freeman surprises Gates
by his views of his native Mississippi and the South. Though
racism remains, it is “more insidious” in the North, Freeman
points out. Mississippi, Freeman explains, is his ancestral home
and that five or six generations are buried there. So the South
has an intimacy he cannot find elsewhere.
Gates then interviews the black mayor of
Memphis Willie Herenton and
Police Chief James Bolden. The
emphasis remains on individual success of the few in the last
thirty years since Dr. King’s assassination. He ignores
however Memphis sanitation works, that group that King gave his
life for at the Lorraine Motel.
Gates pilgrimages to the city of Birmingham
and the King Memorial, then concentrates on a wealthy black
family (husband and wife corporate lawyers) living in the gated
Atlanta suburb of Sandston estates, where homes range from
$300,000 to $800,000. We receive a tour of their opulent home.
Their overall view is that their "empowerment" is the
continuation of the civil rights movement on a higher
level, despite whatever "white" criticisms the poor
might assert.
We receive a similar house tour in New Jersey
of a black Wall Street broker and later the California mansions
of Chris Tucker, Quincy Jones, and Nia Long. In California,
Gates also visits Hollywood stars Samuel Jackson, Alicia Keyes,
John Singleton, and Reggie Bythewood.
Up North, Gates interviews
Colin Powell,
Russell Simmons,
Vernon Jordan,
Franklin Raines—black men
of power in government or the corporate world.
Though the film purports to be “two
nations” in Black America, what we get in reality is Gates
lauding crass materialism and the self-indulgent conspicuous
consumption of wealthy blacks. One cannot fail to note the
overall pretentiousness of the entire project.
Because of the shortage of a broad critical
analysis and a broad swath of black life, the audience for this
film will not get the real state of black America, as Gates
suggests that he is presenting. What is starkly absent in the
film is the varied cultural and political life that actually
exists in African America.
Gates limits the perspective of his audience
to the black economics of a small sector of our community:
corporate elites (e.g.,
Raines of Fannie Mae and
Simmons the
hip-hop mogul); government officials (e.g.,
Colin Powell and
Memphis Mayor Herenton); and Hollywood movie stars (e.g.,
Samuel L. Jackson and Christ Tucker).
Though he wanted much to show the opulent
wealth of black Hollywood, Gates was overwhelmed by the
continued complaint by black actors of the problems and
economics of race in filmmaking in America. He was especially
startled by the stance of
Reggie “Rock” Bythewood, director
of Biker Boyz, his unwillingness to give in to the
insistence of white Hollywood promoters to make the stars of his
film white so that he could get $35 million funding rather than
the $15 million funding if he used black film stars. That is,
Rock was unwilling to sell out his principles in order to be the
first to do such an action film.
There are two ways in which this Gates film
could have been more representative and critically real of black
life and culture and the white world outside.
One, Gates could have, during his Southern
tour checked out Orangeburg, South, Carolina, as Joann
Wypijewshi did in her
“Black and Bruised”
(NYTimes,
1/2/04). He could have recalled the Orangeburg Massacre, where
at South Carolina State University three black college students
were murdered by white Highway Patrolmen – “the first such
use of force on an American campus.”
Orangeburg, the center of a county with a 61
per cent black population, suffers a 14.5 percent unemployment
and an average wage of $8.72. Outside “the city limits . . .
are vast medical complexes and factories making ibuprofen,
sterile tubing, and more lawnmowers and garden tractors than
anywhere in the world.” Democratic officials only come here
when they want to be certain of a black audience.
“More than 27 percent of the county’s
households survive on $15,000 a year or less, a condition of
persistent poverty that ensnares so much of the South,
especially the rural Black Belt. For some, the drug business is
a way out, [one] can spot the ‘movin’ on up’ homes that
drugs bought. . . . African Americans make up 30 percent of
South Carolina’s population but 70 percent of its prisoners,
one out of 13 black men in South Carolina is barred from voting
because he is in prison, on probation or on parole; nationwide
the rate is one in 8. And everyone says it: the poor have been
written off. The poor, the state, the South.”
Joann Wypijewshi could have also added
forcefully that the national political parties, Republicans and
Democrats, have also “written off” the black poor.
Second, instead of an uncritical boosting of
corporations, Gates might have interviewed David Callahan,
author of
The Cheating Culture: Why More American Are Doing
Wrong to Get Ahead (Review by Michael Pakenham, "Is
the United States a culture of liars cheats and thieves?"The Sun,
1/18/04). Callahan could have made clear that the corporate
world was no ethical haven in which Dr. King or any upright
African American would feel fully comfortable. King would have
shaken his head “ in disgust—disgust at the bloated pay
checks, the gilded perks, and most of all the pervasive lying by
CEOs.” In 2001, Sears paid $62.6 million “alone to avoid
criminal prosecution in deceptions solely on automobile battery
sales.”
In the 1980s and 1990s, commercial law
firms began a revolution in which they overbilled clients
and exploded clerical charges. “Only car dealers, CEOs and
stockbrokers are trusted less than lawyers,” Callahan writes.
Doctors are also high on the list that the pubic distrusts. They
operate “profit centers,” in which they tout and prescribe
“unproven and even demonstrably useless herbs and other
spurious medications for large profits.” Those professionals
who get “caught and prosecuted get extremely light sentences,
and serve light sentences, and serve them in minimum-security
facilities.”
Callahan concludes: “The actions of the
Winning Class sends a message to the Anxious Class. The message
isn’t just that the world is unfair, and the rich can get away
with murder. It’s that people who cut corners get ahead.”
But Gates knows this lesson well, his film
on Africa and now on African
America both “cut corners” and Gates, seemingly, with
the help of his promoters, gets ahead.*
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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
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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.
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In Search of Our Roots:
How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past”
By
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
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The Fiery Trial
Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
By Eric Foner
A mixture of visionary
progressivism and repugnant racism, Abraham Lincoln's
attitude toward slavery is the most troubling aspect of his
public life, one that gets a probing assessment in this
study. Columbia historian and Bancroft Prize winner Foner
(Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men) traces the
complexities of Lincoln's evolving ideas about slavery and
African-Americans: while he detested slavery, he also
publicly rejected political and social equality for blacks,
dragged his feet (critics charged) on emancipating slaves
and accepting black recruits into the Union army, and
floated schemes for colonizing freedmen overseas almost to
war's end. Foner situates this record within a lucid,
nuanced discussion of the era's turbulent racial politics;
in his account Lincoln is a canny operator, cautiously
navigating the racist attitudes of Northern whites,
prodded--and sometimes willing to be prodded--by
abolitionists and racial egalitarians pressing faster
reforms. But as Foner tells it, Lincoln also embodies a
society-wide transformation in consciousness, as the war's
upheavals and the dynamic new roles played by
African-Americans made previously unthinkable claims of
freedom and equality seem inevitable. Lincoln is no paragon
in Foner's searching portrait, but something more
essential--a politician with an open mind and a restless
conscience. 16 pages of illus., 3 maps.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Wake Up Everybody—Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes (1975)
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updated 17 February
2009
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