Head Negro In Charge: Part 2


For his part, Gates has heard it all before. In between doing his New Yorker article on loyalty, a Michael Jordan profile, his BBC series on Africa, and the zillion other things on his plate, he even managed, in a recent PBS Frontline piece, to ask the same questions about the obligations of black intellectuals. “Cornel and I have been asked a million times what we’re doing for the black community,” Gates says. “My whole life is a commitment to the black community. That’s the truth—and that’s what I respond. My work is in African American studies. Who else is that for if not primarily the black community?”

To some extent, Gates takes Rivers’s criticism with a grain of salt. “I like Eugene,” he says. “He does very important work. In his politics, he’s such a generous person. Here’s a person who is obviously brilliant, who has committed his life to people on the street. And that is very noble and compassionate work.
“But I think that some of his public comments about other black intellectuals are unfortunate. The part I object to was when he said they’re over there having parties and they’re not building some powerful fighting machine. Well, that’s bullshit.”

Gates further contends that the 1996 addition of sociologist William Julius Wilson to the Dream Team was a means of addressing the serious policy issues that Rivers and others ask about. “I think the work that these guys are producing will have a tremendous impact over the long term. And that’s what we are playing for. This is playing for the long haul.

“Nobody predicted that the black middle class and the black underclass would be at their highest point simultaneously 30 years after Martin Luther King’s death. Nobody knows why that is the case. We need to throw out those old traditional approaches. What we are trying to do is figure out how to get more black people into the middle class. How to ameliorate the suffering of the 45 percent of black kids who live at or beneath the poverty line.

“You have to do what you have talents to do. For me, it is being an academic. I’m not going to be carrying signs. And I’m not going to be a politician. And I’m not going to be this, that, and the other thing. I have to do what I have to do. Just as I think it is as valid to be an investment banker or a corporate lawyer or a criminal lawyer or a nurse, there are many ways you can serve the black community, and you don’t have to be teaching literacy out on the street to be serving the black community. Those people who think the only way you can make a viable contribution to the black community is to work in the ghetto 24 hours a day—they’re just shortsighted. The battle’s got many fronts, and we need people fighting on all these fronts or else we ain’t gonna make it.”

Scholar, administrator, fundraiser, author, journalist, and literary archaeologist Henry Louis “Skip” Gates says, “The thing is, you can’t do everything.”

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FOR THE RECORD: The forum that followed the publication of Rivers’s Boston Review article was organized by that magazine, not by the Kennedy School of Government.

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