Will Gates listen to his critics from whom he has been protected by powerful moneyed forces, which have given him the ability to make or break academic careers, preside over the decision-making of patronage and grant-awarding institutions? Houston A. Baker, Jr.’s Betrayaclass="underline" How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned The Ideals Of The Civil Rights Era offers mild criticisms of Gates, West and other black public intellectuals, who, according to him, are “embraced by virtue of their race-transcendent ideology.” His book went from the warehouse to the remainder shelves. The Village Voice promised two installments of courageous muckraking pieces about Gates written by novelist, playwright and poet Thulani Davis; Part Two never appeared. Letters challenging Gates by one of Gates’ main critics at Harvard, Dr. Martin Kilson, have been censored. Kilson refers to Gates as “the master of the intellectual dodge.” And even when Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell at The Nation’s blog defied the 24-hour news cycle that has depicted Gates, a black nationalist critic, as an overnight black nationalist — she calls him “apolitical”—she had to pull her punches. As an intellectual, she has more depth than all of the white mainstream and white progressive media’s selected “leaders of black intellection,” among whom are post-modernist preachers who can spew rhetoric faster than the speed of light.
It remains to be seen whether Gates, who calls himself an intellectual entrepreneur, will now use his “wake up call” to lead a movement that will challenge racial disparities in the criminal justice system. A system that is rotten to the core, where whites commit the overwhelming majority of the crimes, while blacks and Hispanics do the time. A prison system where torture and rape are regular occurrences and where in some states the conditions are worse than at Gitmo. California prisons hospitals are so bad that they have been declared unconstitutional and a form of torture, over the objections of Attorney General Jerry Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who leased his face to the rich and was on television the other day talking about how rough they have it. A man who is channeling his hero the late Kurt Waldheim’s attitudes toward the poor and disabled.
Gates can help lead the fight so that there will be mutual respect between law enforcement and minorities instead of their calling us niggers all the time and being Marvin Gaye’s “trigger happy” policemen. Not all of them but quite a few. Or Gates can coast along. Continue to maintain that black personal behavior, like not turning off the TV at night, is at the root of the barriers facing millions of black Americans. Will he return to the intellectual rigor espoused by his hero W.E.B. DuBois or will he continue to act as a sort of black intellectual Charles Van Doren? An entertainer. (An insider at PBS told me that the network is demanding that Gates back up his claims about the ancestry of celebrities with more solid proofs.)
Gates has discussed doing a documentary about racial profiling. I invite him to cover a meeting residents of my Oakland ghetto neighborhood have with the police each month. (Most of our problems incidentally are caused by the offspring of two family households. Suburban gun dealers who arm gang leaders. The gang leader on our block isn’t black! An absentee landlord who owns a house where crack operations take place.) He can bring Bill Cosby with him. He’ll find that the problems of inner citizens are more complex than “thirty-five-year-old grandmothers living in the projects” and rappers not pulling up their pants and that racism remains in the words of the great novelist John A. Williams, “an inexorable force.”
Finally, in his 2002 Jefferson lecture, delivered at the Library of Congress, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., during remarks about the eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley in which he excoriated the attitudes of her critics in the Black Arts movement, one more time, ended his lecture with: “We can finally say: Welcome home, Phillis; welcome home.”
If Gates ceases his role as just another tough lover and an “intellectual entrepreneur,” and takes a role in ending racial traffic and retail profiling, and police home invasions, issues that have lingered since even before Chesnutt’s time, we can say, “Welcome home, Skip; welcome home.”
Why the Media and its “General Public” Bought Sgt. Crowley’s Lie
Let’s All Have a Beer13
It’s not surprising that some whites, who monopolize the means of expression both electronically and in print, mainstream and progressive, would automatically take Sgt. James M. Crowley’s word against Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s even though Crowley’s account of the Gates arrest has been disputed by both Gates and Lucia Whalen, the woman who called 911.
They also disapprove of President Obama calling the action “stupid.” According to a CNN poll, fifty-nine percent of blacks believe that Officer Crowley acted stupidly; twenty-nine percent of whites.
Whalen said nothing about “two black men with back packs,” during her 911 call as noted by The New York Times, the day after two of its reporters embraced Crowley’s version of the incident. She never used the word black. Crowley’s invisible “two black men with back packs” came from the same part of the American imagination as Susan Smith’s black man wearing a knitted cap, Bonnie Smith’s invisible car-jacking black men and Charles Stuart’s invisible black-male murderers. The same place as Barack Obama’s invisible Kenyan birth certificate, a hoax accepted by the Gothic South where the uniform of its homegrown terrorist movement is that of Casper the Friendly Ghost.
Even twelve-year-old Christopher Pittman got into the act. After blowing his grandparents to Kingdom Come with a shotgun, young Pittman blamed the murders on an invisible over-six-feet-tall black man.
Now that there are fears of black and brown uprisings, fears stoked by Rupert Murdoch and CNN’s Jonathan Klein, for ratings, the country is revisiting Cotton Mather, the real founding father, who wrote a book about his personal hallucinations called The Wonders of the Invisible World Being an Account of the Trials of Several Witches Lately Executed in New England. His Salem Woods were full of invisible black men. He was one of those nuts who sparked the witch hysteria, which has become the Obama hysteria, inflamed by Klein and Murdoch who go after eyeballs like vampires go after an exposed neck.
Birthers, the creator of Obama as the Joker, tea baggers and assorted anti-Obama nuts are always welcomed at birther-loving CNN, MSNBC and Fox. I don’t know what all of this is leading up to, but I hope that members of President Obama’s Secret Service detail have been rigorously screened. Abraham Bolden, author of The Echo from Dealey Plaza, writes about the racist attitudes of the men who “guarded” JFK. One of them said that he’d never take a bullet for a “nigger lover.”
One of those who is under the post-race spell is Stuart Taylor, senior columnist for National Journal. Appearing on the August 3 edition of the Washington Journal, Taylor said that the Gates arrest had nothing to do with race. When a black caller from Michigan accused Crowley of lying, Taylor said that “there was no proof of a significant misstate- ment” by Officer Crowley. He argued that we’ve entered a post-race period because of Obama’s election and that “there was not a single example of discrimination against Obama in his entire life,” even though Obama says that he experienced racial profiling while serving in the Illinois Legislature. Taylor also denied the existence of racial profiling saying that “a lot of white people get treated worse by the police” than blacks.
Taylor also said that whites don’t do crack, when studies I’ve read indicate that whites consume most of the crack; they just don’t get sentenced for its possession and sale. “Crack penalties appear to hit minorities harder,” was the headline of a Los Angeles Times story published in May 1995.