Henry Louis Gates Jr. may be the most ambitious and successful person in academia: He has ; he is a friend of Oprah Winfrey and President Barack Obama; he founded and runs the top institute for African-American studies in the country; he writes for the New Yorker and the New York Times; he has been instrumental in admitting more African-American works into the literary canon; and he is one most highly paid professors in the country.
To the public at large, though, he is known mostly for The Incident. You know what I’m talking about, right?
, thinking he was an intruder. There was an altercation with a (white) policeman, Gates was led from his front porch in handcuffs. You remember the rest—accusations of institutional racism on one side and grandstanding on another, then the intervention of .
The Incident, however, refused to conform to a script: The officer turned out not to be, by all accounts, the arrogant cop of popular stereotype. And the faceoff between a working-class white man and two black men of superior education, power and wealth resulted, surprisingly, not in mutual recriminations but in an outcome of relative harmony and understanding.
There’s nothing about The Incident in “The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader” — maybe it was too close to home or maybe Gates is saving his response for the book-length account it deserves — but it informs our reading of this collection of op-eds, introductions, profiles, interviews and excerpts whose common theme is a nuanced, historically conscious and nimble read on the changing meaning of race in this country.
In a New York Times op-ed Gates playfully notes;
Even as large numbers of black children struggle with standard English, hip-hop has become the recreational lingua franca of white suburban youth. [James] Baldwin’s notion of using Black English to encode messages seems almost romantic now.
Is it possible, after all these year that white folk have come to speak ‘black’ far better than black speak ‘white;? Just axing.
In the masterful “‘Authenticity,’ or the Lesson of Little Tree,” Gates considers ‘the latest embarrassment to beset the literary ideologues of authenticity’, the revelation that “The Education of Little Tree,” a bestselling “autobiography” of a Cherokee man was actually a concoction of a white segregationist speechwriter for George Wallace. He examines the history of forged narratives and racial and ethnic impersonation in literature: slave narratives concocted by White Abolitionists, Black Power fiction by white writers, “Jewish” books by WASP writers and vice versa.
About slave narratives he notes that many were influenced by “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”:
By the same token, to recognize slave narrative as a genre is to recognize that, for example, Frederick Douglass’s mode of expression was informed by the conventions of antecedent narratives, some of which were… whole -cloth inventions.
So it is not just a matter of the outsider boning up while the genuine article just writes what he or she knows…The distasteful truth is that like it or not, all writers are “cultural impersonators.”
Impersonation is a theme of the fascinating essay “White Like Me,” which considers the curious life story of Anatole Broyard, a merciless and mandarin yet seductive New York Times book critic who “passed” for white. Gates penetratingly observes about Broyard’s evasive yet revealing essays:the thematic elements of passing-fragmentation, alienation, liminality, self-fashioning—echo the great themes of modernism. As a result , he could prepare the way for exposure without ever risking it…
He notes that hoping to escape the judgment of being considered black, Broyard found himself in another prison:
Broyard was a connoisseur of the liminal — of crossing over, and in the familiar phrase, getting over. But the ideologies of modernity have a kicker, which is that they permit no exit. …In a system where whiteness is the default, racelessness is never a possibility. You cannot opt out; you can only opt in.
These writings are distinguished by a cultural dynamism combined with a political conservatism — Gates wants to remake the canon and bring the tools of postmodernism to bear upon everyday life but is skeptical about reparations for slavery and cozies up to liberal bête noire Condoleezza Rice — but this is not that surprising. As Russell Jacoby has noted, the kind of multiculturalism that Gates has built his career on is a demand not for revolution but patronage, and few African-American figures have been as successful in this regard as the brilliant Professor Gates.
NONFICTION: COLLECTION
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader
by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Basic Civitas Books)
