http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/academic-hit-man-henry-louis-gates-and-reparations

I believe that if W. E. B. Dubois had the position and power of Henry Louis Gates Jr., he would do far more for African people than merely act as the Oprah Winfrey of academia. He would use his esteemed scholarly think tank to publish some missives to resolve some of the madness that plagues us into the millennium. I would love to see Gates and his revered Harvard peers pursue projects on Proposition 209, distance learning, the biological warfare of AIDS, the CIA’s cracksales, the whitewashing of national media, the corporate sharecropper mentality of BET executives etc.....

I have increasingly mixed emotions about Gates. There is so much about him that I loathe. He is so proudly elitist and eurocentric. He is fanatically celebrated and financially rewarded as the appointed safe spokesman for Black America. He has fashioned the W. E. B. Dubois Institute at Harvard University. A scholar I adore named Cornel West is one of many revered Africans on his staff. I am amazed at how Gates can attract such supremely intelligent peers, and simultaneously and routinely spew such shocking ignorance himself. I deeply resent that all his vexing views are regarded as indelible truths by those who have chosen to designate him as a Black leader.

Gates has become the pied piper of historical revision via intellectual masturbation. “Humane capitalism” is an oxymoron. The bell curve of capitalism is always bottom heavy with a permanent African underclass. America was built upon the free labor of African slaves upon stolen Native-American land. Genocide is the hardest labor that America’s founding fathers can accurately claim. I loathe elitist fools who deny this truth as they tout the selective virtues of capitalism. Gates does so routinely and renownly. He is proof that power corrupts. And, that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Despite my intense contempt for Gates and his celebrity neocon ilk, his PBS documentary “Wonders of the African World” is the first work I have ever enjoyed by him. Admittedly, it is not without severe flaws. Yet, it vicariously satiated my hunger for images of my motherland. I have never regarded Gates as my brother. But after viewing this documentary, I can at least view him as an embarassing cousin. And, even distant cousins are family too...

Indeed, Gates deserves to be applauded for what he has accomplished at Harvard. And, he is one of the very few scholars who speaks openly about being a reformed homophobe. He also admirably refuses to appease misogynists who embrace torture as tradition regarding female genital mutilation. But, Harvard is an elite academic bastion. Harvard is a unique and small world. I respect Gates as king of Harvard. I reject Gates as king of the real world. However, I always give praise where it is due. And, despite some glaring flaws, Gates deserves to be praised overall for his latest work. “Wonders of the African World” is an excellent documentary.

This work does expose the ancient greatness of Africa. It also reveals the global mentacide of white supremacy. It examines the devastating and ongoing emotional and financial fallout of the horrors of the African slave trade. It also daringly exposes the collusions of a few elite Africans and Europeans in the enslavement of millions of African people. The documentary is also beautifully filmed. I truly enjoyed viewing it. I am educated about Africa. So, I watched it critically. I fear how many uneducated/white supremacist viewers uncritically viewed this work as absolute truth.

Gates seems sincerely fascinated by the ancient greatness of Africa. However, he also seems shockingly disrespectful as he flippantly questions some African customs. There are moments when he seems like the average obnoxious white American on vacation. At other times he seems like an aimless scholar, showing off his vast array of Harvard tees, as if they somehow mask his black skin with an ivy league green hue. His interviews seem topically sporadic. His questions often seem posed to deliberately offend.

For example, he regularly reminds deluded, colorist, dark-skinned Persians that they would never be viewed as white in America. He chants like a mantra, “In America, you would be just black, like me...” It is ironic that Gates is not cognizant of this same fact when he compares himself to poor, uneducated Black Americans. In spite of his Harvard post, he is also, still, just black like the rest of us. Yet, when he is on American soil, his brazen elitism and eurocentrism evincechronic amnesia. Gates uses his academic status, capitalist toys, and offensive interviews to constantly remind America that he is a good house nigger. He proclaims his lack of love for radical field niggers at every opportunity.

Gates’ obsessive classism evokes a special kind of hatred within me. Perhaps it is because I was born into an elite afrocentric family that I was never deluded about the ability of education and wealth to erase racism. Unlike Gates, I have never feared or fantasized about white people. And, I have always lived in diverse racial and economic worlds. I have always been keenly aware of the fact that the trappings of success never erase the realities of America’s failures. Even when my white peers embrace me as an equal, I do not allow that to fester into a repulsive denial and delusion about those Africans who are less educated or wealthy. I do not dismiss themasses of black persons who will never attend or be employed by Harvard, as Gates does. Unlike Gates, I am aware that ivory towers, even when filled with black dwellers, are built upon the backs of a permanent black underclass.

I revere many black scholars who are not elitist. Derrick Bell, Cornel West, Geneva Smitherman-Donaldson, bell hooks, Angela Davis, and many other academic celebrities, manage to share wisdom without denying the realities of those who are not socioeconomic peers or neocon political clones. These are all persons who are compelled to do much more than please white superiors by mimicking or legitimizing their denial of realities that extend far beyond campus parameters. These are scholars who seek more than tenure and fame. They are activists and social reformers.  They seek revolution and Black unity across all barriers.

Gates claims to be a fan of W. E. B. Dubois. Yet, he seems to forget that Dubois did not die a patriotic elitist. Dubois died in a self-imposed exile in Ghana. He died aware that “The Talented Tenth” could not conquer racism while ignoring the starkly different realities of the other nine tenths of their race. Gates seems to be paying perpetual homage to an arrested bastardization of the real Dubois.

In 1950, Dubois opposed the Korean war. He felt that America should help Black people at home before it hypocritically fought to help others. This anti-war activity grew out of a vision of African-American liberation that expanded far beyond his former elitist fantasies. Before his death, Dubois grew intellectually, spiritually and politically, until he finally gave up on the racist America that Gates adores so blindly.

Gates may also grow beyond his offensiveness someday. For now, the disrespect that he routinely displays for anyone who is not elitist, capitalist and eurocentric is intolerable to me. It evidences itself in everything he states or pens. It is even evident in his superior documentary. See this series. Read any of his books. Peruse any of his numerous printed interviews. Often, Gates claims to revere his mom. Typically, he does so just before he brags about his exclusive and life long love for white females. Like most of his eurocentric black peers, Gates is also married to a white woman. He also frequently speaks of his beloved bi-racial daughters. I am always mystified by eurocentric black men who express their reverence for their black moms by marrying white women. I am equally perplexed when they  father women who are visibly black like the women they reject. I sincerely question how any man can truly love his children when he so clearly does not love himself or his people.

In 1906, Dubois wrote, “... the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line”. That  prophecy is being undeniably fulfilled. Gates seems to have restricted his own color line to one elite white bastion of academia. Such limited lines will never save the souls of black folk. Thus, I refuse to accept Gates as the scholarly savior that the white media depict.

No real Black savior would ever utter such foolishness as Gates:

[From www.bostonmagazine.com/highlights/gates.shtml; From an interview by Cheryl Bentsen of Boston Magazine]

It is a testament to his power that most of Gates’ critics speak either off the record or anonymously.

“{Black Muslims} were just about the scariest people I’d ever seen...while I sat cowering in our living room, I happened to glance over at my mother...as she listened to Malcolm X naming the white man The Devil...”Amen”, she said...All this time, and I hadn’t known just how deeply my mother despised white people. It was like watching The Wicked Witch of the West emerge out of the transforming features of Dorothy...”

“{In the 1960’s} I get to {Africa} and everybody still lived in huts...It’s worse than I imagined...The main thing I learned was how American I am...If America is Babylon, then call me a Babylonian...”

The Black Panthers-"fashion plates of black insurrection" he called them-made him nervous.

“{Gates} is always the wide-eyed kid at the candy store...that lunch with Jodie {Foster} is still a huge, huge thing for him.”

“It is one thing for some kid in a working class neighborhood to see you driving by and call you nigger; it’s another thing when PHD’s act like that. The effect was devastating.”

[From www.booknotes.org/transcripts/50064.htm; From an interview by Brian Lamb of C-SPAN]

“You might think of MTV as primitive and postmodernism..It’s so black, and sometimes I think it’s even borderline racist...”

“{Gates loves and collects “Amos & Andy” videos.} Amos & Andy had several different class types. There were black lawyers and black doctors and black judges and black undertakers. There are so many hilariously funny routines and those actors were brilliant to create those parts...The Kingfish and Andy were very intelligent, very articulate individuals.”

[From prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/gates/jsinterv.html ; From an interview by June Slaughter, Progressive Magazine, Vol. 62, January 1998:]

“{In 1965}, We just couldn’t touch white girls...which drove me crazy because I was a vibrant little guy. So there old Eddie was being Sidney Poitier...and I said “Wow! Check this out!”

“There’s not going to be a socialist revolution...How do you humanize capitalism? How do you direct it?”

“My friends do not want to lose their middle class status through white racism...Under a capitalist system there is going to be rich people and there should be a big middle class/working class bridge and there should be a small group of poor people.”

“When I was 19, I went to live in Tanzania because I wanted to see socialism. It was called Ujaama. It means unity in Swahili. I lived in an Ujamaa village. It was boring to me...”

“You work hard. That’s what this country was built upon and I think it’s good...”

“Audre Lorde and I were friends. She said,“You can’t dismantle the master’s house using master’s tools.” I believe you can only  dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools. Essentially, I like the shape of the house, I just think it needs some more rooms in it, maybe a couple more wings. You don’t hate me for being a capitalist do you?...”  

In this classic essay that Gates slanders, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House” (Sister Outsider), Audre Lorde also states:

“Survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures, in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change...Racism and homophobia are real conditions in our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”

I urge you to see “The Wonders of the African World”. See the motherland unmasked. See the self-proclaimed Babylonian Gates tour African soil. See him touch that deep terror and loathing of his ancient African self. Share this cathartic journey with him vicariously. See whose faces we collectively and wondrously wear.

1999

ELOQUENT FURY

ALICIA BANKS

http://www.amazon.com/Harriet-Tubman-Imagining-Beverly-Lowry/dp/0385721773/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1286769179&sr=1-9

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkR4-n4b7gg&p=C3086F46E3A33D35&playnext=1&index=15

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUf6nSLl0a0

http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/first-black-presidency-has-driven-many-african-americans-insane

http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/13-obama-cuts-domestic-spending-and-increases-military-corporate-welfare/

http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/1-global-plans-to-replace-the-dollar/

http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/3-internet-privacy-and-personal-access-at-risk/

http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/9-human-rights-abuses-continue-in-palestine/

http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/14-increased-tensions-with-unresolved-911-issues/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpUcRxHZmpI

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,725590,00.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfAYqTxD_m8&feature=related