CROSS: I was thinking again about the group at Howard University and how they strategized the Board decision, And the thought that somehow good intentions and the idea of white people exposed to black folks-- got to know us up close and personal -- that their racism would disappear.

GATES: Well, again, Du Bois had this idea. Du Bois thought that he would be a sociologist because that was being a scientist, and that through a scientific method, he could compile data and show them that they were wrong about us. He said this over and over again. "If only they knew the real negro and not the stereotypes."

But you see that is to presuppose that racist behavior is the result of matters of the heart rather than deeper, socioeconomic causes. For instance, we need a cheap labor force so we can justify in enslaving these people or treating them like neoslaves if we diminish their humanity. So we will diminish their humanity by saying they are stupid, they smell bad, they are evil, they are ugly, benighted, we are doing them a favor by dragging them out of Africa, etc, etc. A whole industry built up over two centuries reinforcing the idea that black people were subhuman, that they were not like us, Europeans, that they were a different order of things. You can't counter racist behavior in every instance simply by presenting them those facts.

I mean Du Bois did these studies in Atlanta -- these famous Atlanta conferences every year for a decade or more. What did he do, mail it to all of the white racists or to the Klan. You know we didn't go "oh, wow, I was wrong about the negro. We are not going to... you niggers anymore." That's ridiculous because it wasn't what it was about anyway. I mean often the people in the grip of the most heinous forms of racism weren't even aware of why they were in the grip of that kind of racism. They were the tail end of a chain reaction justifying the denigration of a people for economic purposes. The only way you change that is structurally, right. You begin to protect people's right to have a job, equal wages.

I found in my experience close contact with people on an equal economic basis changes your opinion about those people. That is more than any single cause, not meeting in a church, and we shall overcome civil right's groups, joining hands and singing at the end, hugging people in the middle of the service and saying, "I love you brother my nanny was black."

All that is fine and good, and change of heart is quite wonderful. But generally when people identify the other as being related to them economically, I think that their attitude about those people has changed more quickly and more profoundly than any other way, that you sense of commonality, your sense of community, your sense of neighborhood is being defined by work, by economic interests, by shared aspiration, then you can say, "they are just like us." They are not -- though they might like fried chicken, and I like boiled cabbage and corned beef, we are fundamentally related in how we go about working, our expectations in the workplace, the way we complete tasks on the job, what we watch on television at night, who we root for in the world series, those kinds of things. Whether we believe in God or forms of worship, it gives people a chance not to be threatened by each other, economic equality.

Without economic equality any of those differences that I just named can be blown up into a difference that suggests a completely different order of human being. You are outside of my community, and I'm not talking about my neighborhood--I mean my human community. You are a different kind of person. Eventually, you are a threat to me. I have to do everything I possibly can in order to protect my wife, my children, their children, their children's children, my mother, everything that I love to contain you because you go about the process of being a human being in a fundamentally different and threatening way to me. Of course, people don't. Of course, people do have different cultures, different forms of social behavior and customs. Those differences are then used to mask forms of economic exploitation, and that is the bottom line.

It is only by giving people jobs and preparing them for those jobs, meaningful jobs, that we can solve the problem of racism and classism in the United States. That's it. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure this out.

There is a culture that is perpetuated in an impoverished environment. How someone feels when they wake up and look in the mirror, what their horizon of possibilities is. What is considered legal behavior, illegal behavior. What is considered morally acceptable in terms of the use of one's body or the abuse of one's body. Forms of stimulation. Whether one can entertain hope and for how long. Whether the traditional value from the African-American community and other immigrant groups in America that we will live for our grandchildren. We will accrue as much as we can to give our children a bit more, and they will accrue to give their children more. Whether that will continue to be a value in the African-American community or will instant, spontaneous, immediate consumption with no thought of the future because we will be dead. We will be dead by 25. We will be dead by 30. There is no hope so wy be concerned about the future. Whether that will continue to be a value among the impoverished within our community.

Now, I am not trying to sit here on Mt. Olympus and say, "these people are morally wrong." But these are not forms of behavior that should be encouraged, and they are not forms of behavior that are going to lead to the overall progress of our people.

You see, the causes of poverty--as scholars ranging from William Julius Wilson to Cornell West and a lot of people have pointed out--are both structural and behavioral. The job problem,the disappearance of jobs as Bill Wilson says in The Disappearance of Work, the title of his new book, caused an enormous economic nightmare for members of the black community left behind in the inner city, but there are also behavioral problems. Deciding to get pregnant or not to have protected sex. Deciding to do drugs. Deciding not to study. Deciding, deciding, deciding. Like dominoes falling over. A chain reaction of negatives that leads to despair and hopelessness and the desire for a miracle.

I am writing a story for The New Yorker on the Chitlin Circuit, these plays, gospel plays. Plays like "Mama, I want to sing" and "My grandmother prayed for me," which happens to be my favorite. I went to Newark about a month ago. Sunday morning I jumped on a plane and flew to Newark and went to Newark Symphony Hall. Sixteen hundred black people paid $24.50 to see "Mama -- to see "My grandmother prayed for me." Packed. People came from church decked out. I mean sisters had hats on and veils and the netting, the lack stockings, those black dresses. They stood up and did the holy -- I mean when the spirit manifests itself. The sisters did it, and they clapped. Why? The play culminates with the crack, prostitute daughterhearing the voice of God changing just like that. The son being given a magical bible, which he puts in his breast pocket that keeps the bullet from penetrating his heart.

Each time one of the three miracles occurs, the crowd goes crazy. Everybody wants a miracle. These people don't want to be living in the situation in which they are living, and they want a miracle. We used to look to the White House and the Supreme Court for the miracle, and now they are looking for these miracle plays looking for heaven the God and the machine to manifest themselves.

The point is there is no miracle; there is only hard work. The hard work is addressing the structural problem structurally through a comprehensive jobs bill and an education program and insisting, secondly, within the African-American community, that each of our people assume moral responsibility for his or her behavior. We stop blaming the man for all the problems that afflict our community. If Jewish people had done that, they would all be dead. The Jewish people and other ethnic groups banded together in the way that the Haitians are doing it here in Boston and pulling each other up, and I really like that model. I don't want to be accused of giving the standard sermon about good minorities and good immigrant groups; it's not that. It's just thatthere are forms of behavior that we benefitted from in the African-American community in the 50s.

If any of us had acted like some of our brothers and sisters act today, we would have been slapped upside our heads. Being rude to older people, not believing in the future, not believing in education, not believing that we could do it, not believing that collectively attaintment in school was a good thing for our people was a political victory. Getting an A in school was a political victory. That mentality, that logic has been lost. Deferred gratification has been lost. Believing in the future, lost. We need to get those values back, and you can't get them back through some bulletin from the churches. You need to believe in them as a people in a way that we believe them as a people in the 1950s and 40s. Otherwise, we never would have made it through the civil rights era. Never. When we believed we had goals. We had a common purpose. Again, King's death, the passage of the Civil Rights act, because there was no agenda. Because there was a crisis in the leadership class within our community, no one knew what to believe. No one knew what belief to unite around that would liberate us. What would liberation consist of? Thurgood Marshall's notion that we would all end up in the middle class. Hardly. Thirty five million people are not all going to be in one economic class, and we need to begin to understand that.

But what we have to do is affect -- what I call the bell curve of class so that -- most of us are in the middle class, some of us are in the lower classes, some of us are in the upper classes. What we have now is a big middle class, not big enough, and a far too big underclass. Two nodes, two humps, two mountains. We have to merge those into a new working/middle class. We can only do that through a comprehensive jobs bill. We can only do that if every segment of American society understands that it is better for the future of American society to change the class structure somewhat, that is to share the goodies along a broader base particularly within the African-American community than it does oppress it.

CROSS: The first time we talked you asked me to find out definitively how black folks as an aggregate are -- worse off or better off than we were in 1965.

I will tell you what the answer is. In 1965 per capita income of black folks was 56 percent of the per capita income of white folks. In 1995 the per capita income of black folks is 57 percent of the per capita income of white folks. So now, what does that tell you?

GATES: Well, that tells us that we didn't take sufficient account of class in our analysis of the political things that have afflicted the African-American community. But more than that it tell us that all the things that are much better for black people today, and there are a lot. Right?

We have more individual freedom than we ever had today. We suffer from racism, legal racism much less than we ever have. I mean, there are a million ways that it is better being black in 1997 than being black in 1967. OK. But the level of despair in the African-American community among those who have not benefitted from the advantages of affirmative action is, I think, more penetrating, more deafening that it was even in the 1920s and then during the depression of the 1930s.

Again because of the schism within the black community. See, it's one thing to say, "we live like this because white racists have treat us this way." It's another thing when no white racist treats Michael Jordan that way. No white racist treats Vernon Jordan that way. No white racists treats tens of millions of black people who are doing quite well in this society. You can't blame white racism in the same way that you could before.

In a way we are nostalgic. Our leadership class is nostalgic for Bull Connors and Orville Faubus for the ghost of white racism. That's why we rally so energetically in a crisis. All of a sudden we have a crisis. A black man beaten by a policeman. So we all know what to do about that.

But how do you change the bell curve of class? The right would say bootstrap mentality, morality. "Just say no" Mrs. Reagan said. "Don't use those drugs, don't have unprotected sex, etc, etc." The left would say all too often, "just change the society, redistribute the wealth or make a structural change." What you need is to bring those two positions together and stress federal or state intervention, corporate intervention, to address the structural imbalances, moral, personal behavioral intervention to correct those aspects of unfortunate and aberrant behavior. Only that way I think we can achieve the end that we all want.