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CROSS: Make a relationship for me between the brain trust that you're pulling together here and the 'grizzled elders' that you want to interview for this documentary......

GATES: The analogy that's most commonly used is between the group of scholars put together by Charles Hamilton Houston, the star of which group of course was Thurgood Marshall, at Howard plotting the strategy that led to Brown v. Board. The comparison with the civil rights movement is not an apt one because these people were thrown together out of necessity, often had enormous jealousies between them. our group of people, we're very good friends.

CROSS: All homies.

GATES: Yeah. And it's real, because it's not based on ideology. It's not based on adversity. Just the opposite. We're very amenable to each others' ideas. We have enormous respect for each other. It's wonderful. Look, it's happening in other places as well, we just get a lot of attention. There are several other really good African-American studies departments. My model was Princeton most recently when Cornel West was there Princeton, under Neil Rudenstine first and then Ruth Simmons, had decided to make a strong commitment to Afro-American studies. But they didn't have a department.

We are a department. The difference between a department and a program, which Princeton is that we can make our own tenured appointments. Gives you an equal place at the table. And so we all wanted to be at a place where we could use departmental status to recruit people on our own, or jointly with other departments or schools and then eventually would have a Ph.D. program because we all believe in the integrity and the relevance of a Ph.D. in African-American studies. So that the analogy with the civil rights leaders doesn't really fit. And we're not politicos.

CROSS: Back to the Howard group then. Was Kenneth Clark part of that group originally?

GATES: Yeah, they were all -- see, I've always thought that Howard University should do what Radcliffe College did after coeducation became the norm. It decided to become the center for women's studies in the United States so they created this great library, the Schlesinger library, full of magnificent holdings by and about women. Howard University already has the library, and at one time Howard had all the great black intellectuals or most of the great black intellectuals. Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall went to law school there. Alain Locke, the Harvard-trained philosopher, Sterling Brown, master's degree in English from Harvard, E. Franklin Frazier, Bedford Logan, Ph.D. from Harvard in history, and lots more. All these people were on the faculty at the same time. I mean we would need 50 more appointments to equal the stellar people who were at Howard say in 1940 to 1960.

What happened, of course, is the integration of historically white research institutions such as Harvard. They integrated their students in 1968, 1969 and then slowly began recruiting faculty members, as you know. Now, 20 years later, 25 years later, we don't want to be the only one on the block. We want to be with other people of color and other non-black people who study people of color to cross pollinate, cross fertilize each other. And you have enormously more strength in numbers than you do as the most highly rewarded person if you're all by yourself.

CROSS: I asked about Kenneth Clark because I remember back-- I think it was in the middle 70s when we were first having those battles over how integration was actually going to be accomplished by the time we actually got around to it. And Dr. Clark would always say to me was, we didn't really anticipate that one of the things that was going to happen was that the historically black colleges would close and that the black students would be sent to the white colleges. What we anticipated was that some white professors would go to the historically black colleges, some black professors would go to the historically white colleges, but somehow it didn't work out like that.

GATES: The impact on historically black colleges has been complicated.

CROSS: The impact on society--I use that as a metaphor for the society at large. The criticism that I heard, from those that were involved with Thurgood in that initial brain trust group, is that it didn't work out the way we planned it.

GATES: But nobody planned it.

CROSS: We were going to have integration but on what terms?

GATES: You have to start with the following observation. No one planned the impact of integration because no one could imagine it. We didn't know when we would ever be integrated and we're still not integrated. Benjamin Mays said famously that 11:00 on Sunday morning was the most segregated hour in America. Well, I got news for Benjamin Mays. 11:00 on Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour in America but the difference is, today it's by choice. Then it was by force. We had no plan for our larger movement into American society. None of us could possibly plan for that. That's what the HU group is doing and if we could we didn't.

Now, you cite Kenneth Clark. I think the difference between the sort of institution that we're trying to build and the loosely-organized group of leaders that we're referring to as the grizzled elders of the civil rights era is epitomized by the treatment of Kenneth Clark. Kenneth Clark's scholarship was judged by many people in the radical element of the larger black political movement to be politically incorrect, to be retrograde, to be not what we want to affirm, and there are scholars still writing books trying to refute his famous doll studies. And then slippage easily made goes like this: I don't like your work, I don't find it useful to my political goals, therefore I don't like you. I think that you're a traitor to our people. I think that you have been used by the white power establishment. I think that you are an agent of The Man. I think that you are an Uncle Tom.

That will never happen here, and it shouldn't happen anywhere. Scholarship is scholarship. You have to encourage people to do their work. You refute them on a scholarly basis. But this business of declaring people in and outside of the race or the business of making someone an enemy of the people is disgusting and we need to get rid of that, and at the finest institutions we have gotten rid of that.

CROSS: How do we make a link between what you're trying to do here, what Howard did, and the people that we're going to talk to.

GATES: The intellectuals at Howard were united by the civil rights movement. They were planning. They were like the army officers planning a military campaign. They were at war. And they knew that they had the secret weapon and the secret weapon was the law and they decided that they were going to plot a strategy step by step, case by case which culminated in 1954, the famous Brown v. Board decision and then inevitably ten years later led to the passage of the civil rights act of '64 and then in 1965 the voting rights act.

That movement was dead the day the voting rights act was passed. It had nowhere to go. It didn't know it was dead but in retrospect it was. That was the culmination of de jure segregation. That was the culmination of the movement that Du Bois on the one hand, one of the founders of the NAACP, Charles Hamilton Houston, so pivotal to the legal struggle, that they and a lot of other people had planned.

But after 1965 we were in a crisis. All of our ills and woes were to be resolved by integration. Well, what did integration mean? We didn't know. How would they be resolved? We didn't know. What would the end of de jure segregation actually mean for an average African-American? Well, what it's meant for the African-American community is as follows: if you were in the middle class and positioned to take advantage of what we now call affirmative action then you became more firmly established within the larger American society. As it were you were integrated into the economy and petty forms of American apartheid -- whom you could marry, where you can buy a home, where you can vacation -- slowly disappeared, more or less. And you always have to say that because -- I mean as you know.

But the larger implications for the overall community, we're still only beginning to understand those. What will it take to wipe out that 45% level of black children living in poverty? We don't know. What will it take to put black people to work in a highly technological world, 21st century global economy? We don't know. What will it take, if anything, to turn the inner city into some sort of economic oasis? Is that possible? I frankly don't think so. Other people are much more optimistic. What will it take in an era of -- how can we put it? -- the reconsideration of gerrymandering as a viable tool of social engineering to elect more black officials? What will it take to ensure that the number of black elected officials stays high? Well, we all thought that in the recent election five congresspersons would be turned out because they had been redistricted out of majority black districts. They all won. No one knows what that means.

Do you need a majority black district in order to get black people elected? Obviously you don't. Ask Doug Wilder. Ask some of the mayors from cities like Denver, Willie Brown in San Francisco. We make a lot of glib assertions about race and race identity and we haven't thought those through. I was attacked at our own conference here observing the 100th anniversary of Plessy v. Ferguson by an official of the NAACP legal defense fund for an essay I'd just written in April number of The New Yorker in which I said we have ethnicized our electorate. We think that black people can only be elected in a majority black district. I don't like that. I think that that's wrong, though on the other hand I think it's wonderful that we have so many black people in Congress.

But in the end you have to appeal to a majority of your constituents to be elected. That's what democracy is. Does that mean that only black people are going to vote for a black person, only Hispanic people are going to vote for an Hispanic person, only an Asian person can represent Asian people? I don't want to live in a world like that. I don't think that's what America is all about and this election proved that it doesn't have to be that way.

Gary Franks, who lost this election, did not lose because he's a black person in predominantly white state like Connecticut, he lost because people didn't like his performance, but he won a few years ago precisely because they did like his stand. And I'm trying to say what Hegel said when he defined tragedy as the war not between good and evil but the war between two competing goods, and often the dilemmas that confront us are in fact the war between two competing goods.

The problem with the strategy of gerrymandering districts to ensure black majority is that it means that black elected officials are dependent upon their constituents, their black constituents staying in these predominantly black neighborhoods which all too often are economically deprived. So what happens if jobs develop outside of this district? What happens if economic development -- and this happens all the time -- does not occur in the inner city but occurs in another region of the same town like out in the suburbs or someplace outside the city? And we all know about this. Well, do the elected officials want their constituents to move? Absolutely not.

So you see, they might not necessarily be speaking to the best interests of their own constituents because they're dependent upon black people staying in those districts. That's wrong. That's bad for our collective economic health. Why should the inner city be developed? Are there good sound economic reasons for that? And where there are it should be developed, but because of some nostalgia? For black people all living together? That's not a good reason to me.

I think that we have to look long and hard about patterns of migration and how we encourage black people to respond to expanded opportunities. I think we need to move people from the inner city to the jobs instead of holding our breath waiting for the jobs to miraculously appear in the inner city. I would rather a black person live a middle class life in a minority status in that district than to live in a majority black district in an underclass.

These kind of concerns are things that need to be addressed by the black leadership, and there's a great deal of muddled thinking about these issues, particularly about maintaining a black presence in places like the Congress of the United States and what redistricting. I think that we've always been a migratory people and certainly in this century and we have followed economic opportunities and I think that we have to be encouraged at the end of this century to follow economic opportunities first and foremost rather than sitting idly by waiting for the inner city to develop.

CROSS: Black Americans are different than other immigrant groups who have come to America in that as we move into the middle class in some ways our middle class is clinging to our past more tightly than any other immigrant group that's come here. How do you explain that? The Afrocentric thing.

GATES: I think that one of the things that would surprise Dr. King were he to come back is the extent of petty black nationalism, bourgeois nationalism and by petty black nationalism I mean the trappings of black nationalism. You see brothers get out of their black BMWs with their kente cloth cummerbunds and ties to go with their tuxedos just to show that they're down with the brothers. You go into someone's house there's John Coltrane on the wall, there's the obligatory Jacob Lawrence or Bearden print, complete works of Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

You know, that it's a way of staying in touch, overcoming a sense of estrangement, but even more important it's overcoming the guilt of the survivor, and scholars have written reams of books about the guilt of the survivor. It's a phenomenon that applies to many people in many situations. It's developed in relationship to Jewish people who were not killed during the holocaust and what that means is a sense of responsibility to those who were left behind and that certainly is true of the black middle class today. So that we see black middle class people celebrating their culture.

Kwanzaa. I mean Kwanzaa was invented in Long Beach, California by Ron Karenga and doesn't have anything to do with Africa directly certainly, but buying books about Kwanzaa, celebrating Kwanzaa, wanting Kwanzaa celebrated in your kid's school to show that we are a black presence. In part it's a love for African-American culture which I certainly love and celebrate and even teach. In part it is the use of culture as a bridge to connect those people who have escaped from the black community, that is the inner city black community, with those who have not. It's also a bandage covering a wound, salving a wound and I'm not sure that is --

CROSS: What's the wound?

GATES: The wound is the severance of the black community. The wound is knowing deep down that it's highly unlikely that the American people are willing to do anything serious about diminishing the number of those black children who are born at or beneath the poverty line. What does that mean? Can you enjoy your success as a black upper middle class person knowing that the opportunities for every other black child are severely limited by structural causes over which they have no control and that the collective will to make the structural changes necessary to deal with these problems, to change the possibility of opportunity for these children, that will is gone. That will is left somewhere in the great society of the late 1960s.

Then trying to decide what can we do collectively to if all the black people in the middle class liquidated all their assets it still would not solve the structural problems confronting the African-American people. What do all these metaphors of family, brother, sister, we are people, we are family, we're black love, what's all that mean? What does it mean? Is it realistic? Is it romantic? Is it nostalgia? Is it wishful thinking? Essentially people follow their economic interests and we were encouraged to follow our economic interests by the black community. Get all the education you can, boy or girl, then no white racist can control your life. OK, well, we did that. Then you get a good job. Then you move out to the suburbs because you don't want your children to go to bad schools and you don't want your life confined by crime, determined by crime, etc, etc. So you do all that.

How can you maximize those kind of marvelous things for other people who look like you? Now, it just so happens that even middle class black people vote like underclass black people when underclass black people vote. We vote overwhelmingly for left of center democrat candidates, just like the Jewish people do and like Puerto Ricans do. The class differences do not manifest themselves in how we vote and the reason is because the most important thing to the average black person is racism and they see themselves first and last, generally, as African-Americans because that's how the society sees you. That's how the police department sees you. That sense of vulnerability that you have, the sense of limitation you have in your job, the knowledge that the glass ceiling has been constructed for people who look like you brings people together who don't have quite frankly any common, or very little common economic interest, and I find that fascinating and I think it's true for other ethnic groups as well.

Does that justify us in talking about black people as if 35 million people think with one mind and speak with one mouth? Absolutely not and I think that one of the things that we're trying to do here is encourage an expanded definition of blackness, that maybe there are 35 million ways of being black, that we all don't have to think alike, act alike, talk alike in order to be black. But this creates great anxiety. We don't want people to escape. Look at the reaction of black politicians to the mixed race movement, the challenge to the census to add other categories of racial identification. Why does this create panic? Because it diminishes the number of black people --

CROSS: No, but we've also been there before.

GATES: No, but the real reason is because you want as many black people in the country to get your parcel, to get those things allocated by percentages Like voting districts. And you don't want this other category.But why should racist laws defining who is black and who is not, inherited from slavery have anything to do with the reality of our lives? They shouldn't.

But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example. Don't look black, choose to follow their white parents identity. Legally they can't do that.