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

*   *   *   *   *

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 Harrington 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 Johnson, 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 Harrington); 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, 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.

*   *   *   *   *

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.

*   *   *   *   *

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.

*   *   *   *   *

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.

*   *   *   *   *