“Skip” Gates is at it
again: warning us about the dangerous, self-destructive choices
being made by the United States’ poorest black citizens. I am
referring to Dr. Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, who describes himself
as “center left” and holds three prestigious academic titles,
all at Harvard: W.E.B. DuBois Professor of Humanities, Chair
of the Afro-American Studies Department, and Director of the
W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research.
Henry
Louis “Skip” Gates: “Class
Over Race”
Last
February, Gates marked Black History Month by narrating an
ambitious, four-part,
and British-directed Public Broadcasting System television series
titled “America Beyond the Color Line.” “America Beyond” is meant
to provide a provocative new take on race, class, and black experience
in the contemporary United States. Some viewers, however, may
have recognized Gates’ core thesis in this documentary from an
earlier Gates-PBS series broadcast in February 1998. As in that
earlier video essay, Gates focuses in “America Beyond” on class
differences within the American black community of “the post-Civil
Rights era.” In both productions, Gates is struck by “an irony” first
brought to his attention by the renowned African-American sociologist
William Julius Wilson, a fellow “center-left” colleague at Harvard. “Since
1968,” Gates told the Chicago Tribune as “America Beyond” aired, “we
have two classes within black America, the biggest middle-class
in history and the percentage of black children living at or
beneath the poverty level is almost exactly the same as it was
the day Dr. [Martin Luther] King [Jr.] was killed. That’s bizarre
when you think about it.” (Steve Johnson, “Behind
Gates: How the Harvard Scholar is Using His ‘Color-Line’ PBS
as a Wake-Up Call,” Chicago Tribune, February 3, 2004,
section 5, page 1.)
Blacks
in the aftermath of the civil rights movement are experiencing
both “the best
of times and the worst of times,” Gates thinks. The “best” times
are reserved for the black middle and upper classes, whose sizes,
wealth, and power are currently unprecedented in their scale. The “worst” times
belong to the large number of impoverished or near-impoverished
African-Americans who have been unable to walk through the doors
of racial opportunity that were opened by the great civil rights
victories. Failing to cash in on the advantages afforded by
the end of legal segregation and the enactment of affirmative
action (among other changes), many of these unfortunate blacks
have been left behind in jobless, crime-ridden ghettoes that
have been fled by the more successful elements of the black populace. Like
Wilson some years ago, Gates thinks that class has replaced race
as the main problem for black America. The civil rights revolution,
he appears to think, largely resolved the great American dilemma
of race, but left unresolved the deeper, more intractable problem
of class.
Manning Marable: Class And Race
But
what exactly does Gates mean by “class?” How does he explain the fracturing of
black America into “two nations?” And how true is it that race
has faded relative to class in explaining the special difficulties
faced by the nation’s poorest African-Americans? For serious
black scholars of unqualified left persuasion like Manning Marable,
class is part of a bold and radical interpretive and political
framework that identifies multiple, interrelated structures of
inequality and calls for the democratic re-structuring of dominant
American institutions. According to Marable, “the racialized
inequality that African-Americans have brutally experienced and
deeply feel is only one important dimension of the larger problem
of inequality that is structured across the entire American social
order” (Marable, The
Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American
Life [NY, 2002], p. 7). It is part of what Marable calls “interlocking
systems of prejudice, power, and white heterosexual male privilege
in which the vast majority of the population has been defined
outside the acceptable boundaries of the mainstream.” Among
these multiple “interlocking systems,” Marable includes “the
hierarchy of class: the unequal distribution of the bulk of all
private property, productive resources, factories, banks, and
financial institutions into the hands of a small minority of
the population, with the great majority forced to live and exist
only by its labor power; the development of an ideology of class
privilege that masquerades by calling itself ‘merit’; and, increasingly
the monopolization and exploitation of global resources and transnational
corporations to manufacture and preserve the privileges of class” (Marable,
p. 11).
As Marable knows, consistent
with a record of black scholarship and thought reaching back
to T. Thomas Fortune, W.E.B. DuBois, Claude McKay, and Oliver
Cox and up to Angela Davis and Adolph Reed (among many others),
class inequality has provided no small part of the context for
the construction of racial inequality and racism in America and
the world. “Those who control or dominate hierarchies, whether
by ownership of the means of production or by domination of the
state,” Marable notes, “have a vested interest in manufacturing
and reproducing categories of difference,” including race among
other such groupings. Marable is a democratic socialist opponent
of class inequality who thinks “we will never dismantle” racism
in America “unless we are also willing to address the transformation
of the American social structure and the full democratization
of our political and economic institutions” (Marable, pp. 11-12).
Like
DuBois, Martable’s
broad left contextualization of racism does not lead him to the
conclusion that class/classism has transcended or displaced race/racism
as the basic issue for African-Americans. Marable is rightly
critical of many fellow leftists past and present for underestimating
the autonomous social, psychological, cultural, and political
force of white supremacy. He chides left class-reductionists
for too-readily assuming that progressive social-democratic institutional
change towards the resolution of class inequality will quickly
or easily yield the overcoming of white racism (Marable, pp.
52-55). At the same time, he argues that blacks face an imposing
inter-connected array of special, racially specific obstacles
that have interacted with class and other inequalities to create
a virulent and living legacy and system of “structural racism” that
has provided a foundational barrier to America’s democratic pretensions
since the beginning of the republic. This “structural racism” inflicts
its harshest pain on Gates’ “underclass,” but it also and still
harms more affluent African-Americans, who possess much less
wealth and power than their white counterparts and make up a
considerably smaller portion of their own race group than do
affluent whites. In a society understood accurately, on Marable’s
terms, to be fragmented at one and the same time by interlocking
and mutually reciprocal divisions of race and class, there is
nothing “bizarre” or “ironic” about the accelerated class fracturing
of black America in the wake of a strictly qualified civil rights
revolution that extended a certain measure of “whiteness” to
a small section of the African-American populace.
“No Excuse” for
Blacks Not “Running MIT”
This is not how
Gates uses “class” to understand the situation of America’s millions
of persistently impoverished and marginalized African-Americans
in “America Beyond.” Accepting the dominant privilege-friendly
and Euro-bourgeois notion that success, empowerment, and freedom
are essentially available to all who exhibit proper individual
initiative and “personal responsibility,” he thinks that African-Americans
at the bottom of the steep US socioeconomic pyramid are largely
to blame for their own misery. “Class” for Gates means that that
lower-class blacks simply need to work harder and smarter to
acquire the skills, education, habits and values possessed in
greater degree by their black class superiors, including the
imperialist figurehead Colin Powell, featured as an example of
what blacks can accomplish when they work hard, study, save and
behave decently.
The
main “class problem” that
Gates portrays in “America Beyond” is that poor blacks just don’t
have any…well, class. “Unless there is a moral revolution and
a revolution in attitude among our people, unless [poor blacks]
decide to stay in school, learn the ABCs, not to get pregnant
when you’re 16, not to run drugs, not to sell drugs…we’re doomed
to have a relatively small black middle class and huge underclass
and never the twain shall meet. The only way we can succeed
in society,” Gates told the Tribune, “is mastering the
ABCs, staying in school, working hard, deferred gratification. What’s
happened to these values?,” asks Gates. “My father always said,
and it’s true, if we studied calculus like we studied basketball,
we’d be running MIT. It’s true and there’s no excuse” (Johnson, “Beyond
Gates”). This was the key theme in “Two Nations,” where Gates
proclaimed that black poverty was pretty much about poor decisions: “deciding
to get pregnant or not to have protected sex. Deciding to do
drugs. Deciding not to study. Deciding, deciding, deciding…”
“A Wake-Up Call …Especially
to Black America”
Gates is not stupid. He
knows quite well that larger, interrelated forces of capitalism
and racism play a role in the creation of deep and disproportionate
black poverty. He says “the right makes a mistake when it says
there are no [living] historical forces of racism.” Like Wilson,
he insists - non-controversially - that everyone’s position in
America reflects a combination of inherited structure and personal
agency: a truism. But “mistake” is far too kind a word to describe
the right-wing’s vicious victim-blaming insistence that we are
all personally responsible for our own wealth and status - a
claim meant to provide ideological cover for a regressive and
racist policy agenda that heaps benefits on the affluent and
whites.
At
the end of the day, moreover, Gates decides to emphasize internal
and behavioral
factors rather than external structural forces to explain America’s
savage racial disparities and black poverty. Thus, Gates tells
the Tribune that “America Beyond” is “meant to be a wake-up
call to America, but more especially to black America, saying ‘are
we crazy? What are we doing here? We can’t just keep saying,’” Gates
argues, “‘the white man made me do it.’” For his part, the Tribune reporter
finds “America Beyond’s” “most striking” aspect to be “the degree
to which it pushes the idea of personal responsibility as the
best solution to the black community’s problems,” which, the
reporter says, “is perhaps not something you expect to hear from
a man who identifies himself as politically ‘center-left.’” When
it’s all said and done, Gates prefers to skip past structural-racism
and get to the meat of the matter: the personal responsibility
of poor blacks.
It’s a comforting message,
no doubt, for much of white America, most of which has embraced
the convenient notion that racism (structural or otherwise) no
longer poses serious problems for blacks and that the real barriers
to black success and equality are located in the African-American
community itself. “As white America sees it,” note Leonard Steinhorn
and Barbara Diggs-Brown in their excellent study By
The Color of Their Skin: the Illusion of Integration
and the Reality of Race, (2000), “every effort has been to
welcome blacks into the American mainstream and now they’re on
their own.” Predominant white attitudes at the turn of the millennium
are well summarized by the comments of a white respondent to
a survey conducted by Essence magazine. “No place that
I’m aware of,” wrote the respondent, “makes [black] people ride
on the back of the bus or use a different restroom in this day
and age. We got the message; we made the corrections - get on
with it.”
Racial Snitching
Presented
through the quintessentially Caucasian venue of the PBS documentary,
parts
of “America Beyond” seem like racially treasonous snitching.
In one scene from Chicago’s predominantly black South Side, Gates
looks incredulous as a young woman can offer him no rational
reason for having a large number of children out of wedlock during
her late teens and 20s. Another South Side scene has Gates talking
to a group of young black women who are enrolled in a program
designed to help them escape ghetto life. Gates asks one young
lady who or what she blames for the desperate situation of so
many of the city’s African-Americans. “Is it the system, the
man, racism,” Gates asks her, “is it capitalism?” Failing to
cite Marx or DuBois or Wilson’s latest research on the racial
impact of de-industrialization, the woman earns Gates’ approval
by emphasizing the poor choices made by ghetto residents she
knows.
During one telling
sequence in “America Beyond,” Gates sits across from a black
inmate at a notorious and giant racist holding pen - the Cook
County Jail. After telling the inmate how much he himself loved
attending school as a youth, Gates looks disturbed as his interview
subject recalls alienation from the inadequate public school
to which he was assigned by virtue of his boyhood address in
a dangerous, poverty-ridden Chicago neighborhood. As the dialogue
between the Harvard professor and the jail inmate concludes,
both agree on the basic wisdom of an uncontroversial conclusion:
America’s nearly one million black prison and jail inmates would
be better off if they’d hit the books and not joined gangs during
their youth.
The
point is shared by U.S. Secretary of State Powell, who tells
Gates that young
blacks need to…make better choices in life. Gates does not ask
Powell to elaborate on the moral character of the Secretary’s
choice to support the bloody, illegal, unjust, and thoroughly
unnecessary invasion of Iraq by collaborating in the manufacture
of spectacular high-state deceptions regarding the threat posed
by the feeble regime of Saddam Hussein. There is no discussion
of a younger Powell’s role in the Pentagon’s early attempts to
cover-up the 1968 My Lai massacres.
It’s hard to know exactly
how Gates thinks these images and stories will go over with PBS’ predominantly
white and middle-class audience. Some viewers, perhaps, will
be moved to examine the terrible stew of structure, agency, racism
and class that produces the modern ghetto. The majority, however,
probably feel validated in their tendency to hold the self-satisfied
belief that deeply impoverished, hyper-segregated inner-city
blacks no longer have anyone or anything but themselves to blame
for their “worst of times” existence in (supposedly) “best of
times” America, where “all the [racial] corrections” have supposedly
been “made.”
Skipped Over
Two
summers ago, a British woman from London called me to ask a
series of questions about
race and poverty in Chicago. She represented a British television
production crew that was planning an ambitious documentary investigation
of American “race relations” and would be coming through Chicago – with
Henry Louis “Skip” Gates. I was told to expect a follow-up call.
The call never came.
If
Gates and his crew had included a visit to my venerable South
Side “race relations” research
office, I would have handed him a number of studies showing how
class/classism and race/racism still interact in powerful, toxic
and mutually reinforcing ways to create disproportionate poverty,
misery, alienation, segregation, inequality, and powerlessness
for the black community within and beyond Chicago. I would have
discussed how the absence of meaningful economic
opportunity tends to select behaviors that make disproportionate
black crime,
teen pregnancy, welfare usage, and the like in ways that are
entirely predictable. I would have handed him a Chicago Sun
Times story (Curtis Lawrence, “Race Pay Gap Persists At All
Pay Levels," January 4, 2004) showing that a white male
with a masters degree makes 27 percent more money than a black
male with a masters and that a white male with a high school
degree makes 24 percent more than his black educational counterpart – one
of many pieces that could be cited to question what Mike Davis
calls the traditional American tendency “to accord education
quasi-omnipotence in determining individual and group futures” (Davis, Magical
Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City [New York, NY:
Verso, 2001], p. 131).
Given
Gates’ special
emphasis on crime and drug usage in a presentation dedicated
to the fading of racism as a barrier to black progress in America,
I would have asked what he made of remarkable racial disparities
in the so-called “War on Drugs” (WOD) in Chicago, Illinois, and
the nation. In 2000, the respected international human rights
organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported, blacks constituted an
astonishing 89 percent of all drug offenders admitted to
prison in Illinois. And while blacks make up just 15 percent
of illicit drug users in the U.S., they account for 37 percent
of those arrested for drug offenses and 62 percent of those in
state prisons for drug crimes. “Do you really think,” I would
have asked the professor, “that 90 percent of the people who
use illegal drugs in my state are African-American? Why do some
peoples’ choices seem to get them in so much more trouble than
do other peoples’ choices?” It’s time, I would have told Gates,
for some good documentary white self-snitching on the free pass
that so many whites get in this land of savage racial
double standards.
Absurd Expectations
Then
I would have handed Gates some instructive thoughts from a
successful and “center-left” African-American
colleague of mine, reflecting (via e-mail) on a commentary in
which liberal New York Times columnist Bob Herbert argued
that inner-city blacks’ material poverty reflected their own
poor values and behavior. “There is a need for” a “values
discussion” among “the poorest African-Americans,” my correspondent
acknowledges. “But,” he added: