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CROSS: Does Skip Gates get up in the morning, look in the mirror and think about the 45%? On a regular basis?

GATES: I'm sure that there are some African-Americans who wake up every day and think about the socioeconomic evils affecting our community, when they first look in the mirror, but I'm not one of them. Generally, when I look in the mirror I think, thank God that I made it through the night and I think about what I have to do in the course of the day.

But, some part of my consciousness in the course of my day certainly is occupied by-- and I think is true for all black Americans,--one central question. What does it mean to be black in a society where being black has so many negative implications at the end of the great American century?

And that means that no matter how successful a Harvard professor is, or any of us in any aspect of American life, you are never too far removed from a black person in the most impoverished inner-city neighborhood in your community. The system would be better off, you might say, if that weren't true. Why should the people who oppress us want to see the successful people so concerned with the plight of the unsuccessful people? But that's the way it is, and as long as the system continues in the form in which it has manifested itself that situation will remain.

Frankly, from a moral point of view, I'll take what- ever cause keeps connecting the middle class with the lower class. But it so happens that I deep down believe that many people would escape, completely, if they could; that there is nothing natural about feeling compassion toward those people who look like you, but who have not been as successful as you.

That's one of the things that I think Cornell West is so brilliant about, recreating in people their sense of moral responsibility for each other: black upper-class and middle-class people for black underclass people. White people for black people. Black people for Jewish people. Males for females. Straight people for gay people. That is how you create a community. And I think that many of us are trying to move beyond identity politics that are based on mere images, that we can only feel compassion for those people who look like us. That takes a leap if you're black, I think, because you spend so much time being preoccupied with the class differentials, the structural differentials within the African-American community, but it's the future. I mean, it's what being a citizen of a republic should be all about.

There are many forms that political commitment can take. I remember hearing Vernon Jordan, one time, saying that Colin Powell is a brother, that you don't have to hang out on the street corner to be a brother. And certainly, all that he did to further affirmative action in the Army cannot be dismissed as anything but a major political commitment. Look at Vernon Jordan. He's on the boards of major American corporations, integrating them, intervening in policy decisions that have enormous effect on average, regular African-American working people. That's a political commitment.

And I think scholarship is a political commitment, in that order, too. You don't have to be teaching a crack victim the ABC's in order to be pursuing a policy that will have an impact upon that person. We can't all march in picket lines. We can't all work in the inner city. And, I don't even think that it is incumbent upon an African-American intellectual to be concerned in their work with problems of race and class. It's just one of the things, that we here at the DuBois Institute, are concerned about. When I see Andre Watts, I want him to be a virtuoso pianist. If he is concerned about social issues affecting the African-American community, all to the good. But first and foremost he has to be a master of his craft. Jesse Norman; I want that splendid voice to continue to resonate. If she is also concerned about social issues, wonderful.

Not everybody is going to be actively involved in an advocacy relation between the black community and the white community. And I think that we have to remember that. But, for those of us who are, I think that that's important and will continue to be important for a long, long time.

CROSS: Do you think you have guilt about it?

GATES: No, I don't feel guilty about my success. I feel I was raised to be successful. I accepted the ideology of the black community, which was to study hard, work hard, and pray for a miracle. And the miracle for me was my mother, first of all, who created a tremendous sense of self-confidence and positive self-esteem within my brother and me. But, secondly, affirmative action. Now, without affirmative action I would have certainly have gone to college, I probably would have gone to Howard, or to Morehouse. And there is nothing wrong with that, but I certainly would not have gone to Yale. Yale has taken black people for a long time, but four or five, one or two. The class of 1966, had six black people. My class, which entered in 1969, and graduated in 1973, had 96 black people.

What--they found 90 smart black people miraculously? No, they made a policy change. They got rid of a racist quota and substituted a goal, and I was swept up into the Ivy League with all those other young Afro coifed 18-year olds, because the Ivy League decided that it wanted, and it was self-conscious about this, that it wanted to educate the leadership class across the entire spectrum of ethnicities in the United States, and not just white males, anymore. As a matter of fact, women entered Yale in 1969, at the same time a significant number of black people did.

So that was the miracle in my case. But I think that this kind of good fortune, and certainly the subsequent good fortune that I've been able to enjoy, brings with it a sense of responsibility. I don't try to punish people who don't share that sense of responsibility. I'm certainly not a manipulator of guilt, but I would like for all African-Americans to know something about their history, because the fact of racism, sooner or later, will hit you upside your nappy head, and if you don't know where it came from it's very hard to recover from it.

And, secondly, because far too often it's been an accident that has led to the good fortune of an individual African-American, and another kind of accident, a perverse kind of accident, and a miracle in reverse that has led to misfortune of someone just as talented. I mean, I don't for a minute think that the black people who come to Harvard are more talented than black people who go to other schools. For various reasons they were positioned to get in and they are very intelligent people. But there are a lot of other very intelligent people in the African-American community.

I don't think the guilt is a useful emotion by and large, but I think that a positive sense of responsibility is a much more useful emotion. And that's what we try to encourage. I think that those people try to manipulate the guilt of young black students, for example, and this happens at a lot of schools. I mean, black professors. I think that they are more frightened of diversity within the community, and think that they can only replenish the ranks through order, discipline, guilt, control. And I think the ideal way to replenish the ranks, is willingly through a sense of shared responsibility the people come to of their own volition, and not because they get a command from the Commandant of Blackness. And that's what they have to do. I mean, that's the surest way to kill a movement, without a doubt.

CROSS: How have we arrived at a situation where it is authentically black to rebel against everything--that our parents told us was the way to succeed. What's happened?

GATES: Well, certainly one of the ironies of the success of affirmative action is that the middle class within the black community no longer lives within "black community" by and large. And, this is Bill Wilson's thesis, that the black successful individuals, professionals, have moved out of that community. So that the kind of role models that we all had when we were growing up, when under segregation, the lawyer, the undertaker, the teacher, the doctor, lived not too far away. Sometimes, next door to the janitor, the hairdresser, the secretary, the worker in the factory, and the domestic, the street sweeper, the garbage person. So, we had this complicated set of role models and images swirl all around us.

Also, there was a sense of concern and feeling, out of necessity for each other, so that if you were being bad some adult would say, "What's your name? I'm going to tell your daddy. I know your daddy. I'm going to tell your daddy, and he's going to beat your butt if I don't catch you first." All that's gone. So, that the black people who were doing well, by and large, moved to middle class neighborhoods. And then the presence of crack/ cocaine, as many people have pointed out, drastically changed the desperation factor in the African-American community. That, and the fact that the traditional pattern of moving from no class through working class, from working class to the middle class, that is through factories located in the cities, that, by and large, has disappeared. Those jobs have gone, have headed south.

So that if you add all those factors up, you had a politically disenfranchised, economically disenfranchised group of people left in the inner city, predominantly black. Black people doing well, able to take advantage of affirmative action, living in middle class neighborhoods and never the twain shall meet. Black people in the suburbs were successful, feeling guilty. Valorizing or claiming respect for this putatively authentic black culture, which is based on their idea, a romanticization of inner city culture. People in the inner city feeling estranged, being manipulated by their leaders saying, Well, black people who have escaped are no longer black. It's a nightmare. It's a nightmare.

We have more fissures now in the black community than we ever had. Again, we've always had class differentials, but they didn't play themselves out in these way. Nor was the level of despair this high. We were all under segregation, equal to some extent, despite our class differentials within the community. We were all potential victims in similar ways, in exactly the same way to a law that says, You black person cannot sip out of this water fountain. You cannot sit down in this restaurant, and you certainly cannot live in this neighborhood. That, by and large, has disappeared. Though if you try to get buzzed into a fancy jewelry shop, as Patricia Williams wrote a brilliant essay about this, pointed out. Or, if you're stopped in a car by a racist cop, like Mark Furman, if you're traveling with someone white, you could end up dead. That could happen to any black person. So, again, you have more individual freedom within the black community than we've ever had. But we still have the threat of racist oppression, no matter how much money you have, no matter how successful that you've been.

And, on the other hand, if you're an inner city black person, an unemployed black person, we have more despair than we've ever had. And that, I don't think our leadership and our scholars have fully accounted for. Again, no model predicted this. No one foresaw this. It's quite remarkable, actually. So you get strange forms of behavior. One form of behavior that's strange is this -- that we deny that we're doing well. We think that we are all suffering from racism in exactly the same way.

How can you be, let's say, a professor at Princeton and think that the forms of discrimination that you suffer are exactly the same as a household in the inner city with a 16 year old mother, and a 32 year old grandmother, and a 48 year old great-grandmother?

And, of course, I exaggerate. But there are households that exist that conform to that image. Just like there are households like the Huxtables, with the black lawyer and a black doctor married to each other, and their kids going to wherever they want to go to school. But again, no one predicted the three generation, maternal household on the one hand, and Cliff and Claire Huxtable on the other, existing simultaneously. And then calling these two representatives of the black community, a family, a unit, a people. Where does being a people start and stop?