TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042291/0422510.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.9 KB | 189 lines

                                                                                INTERVIEW, Page 16

A "Race Man" Argues for a Broader Curriculum


HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. wants W.E.B. Dubois, Wole Soyinka and
Phillis Wheatley on the nation's reading lists, as well as Western
classics like Milton and Shakespeare

By BREENA CLARKE and SUSAN TIFFT/DURHAM and Henry Louis Gates Jr.


    Q. You advocate something you call a multicultural
curriculum in American education. What does that mean?

    A. What I advocate is a more truly diverse notion of
excellence. What we've done is exclude the best that's been
thought by everybody but this slender sliver of people who
happen in the main to be white males.

    Now, I wouldn't want to get rid of anything in that
tradition. I think the Western tradition has been a marvelous,
wonderful tradition. But it's not the only tradition full of
great ideas. And I'm not talking about any diminishment of
standards. Even by the most conservative notion of what is good
and bad, we will find excellence in other cultures, like the
great Indian cultures, the great Chinese cultures, the great
African cultures.

    But this notion of calling a regional Anglo-American
culture the world's only great culture was a mechanism of
social, economic and political control. We have to expose that,
critique it and move on, because it's a new world. We can either
be rooted in the 19th century or we can blast off to a whole new
millennium.


    Q. You describe yourself as a "race man." What is that?

    A. In the black tradition it's like being a Talmudic
scholar, a person of letters who writes about African-American
culture.


    Q. Do you advocate an Afrocentric curriculum?

    A. How I feel about Afrocentricity depends on what is
meant. If you mean, as some people do, that you have to be black
to teach black studies, or that no white person could ever be
a professor of African-American studies, I think that's
ridiculous. It's as ridiculous as if someone said I couldn't
appreciate Shakespeare because I'm not Anglo-Saxon. I think that
it's vulgar and racist no matter whether it comes out of a black
mouth or a white mouth.


    Q. Milwaukee announced that it intends to set up two
schools that will cater to the needs of black boys, in the hope
that it will help them succeed academically.

    A. I think that's ridiculous.


    Q. Is it the sex segregation or the race segregation that
bothers you?

    A. Both. I understand the impulse. But I don't think that
solves the problem. I think it will reinforce the problem. I
don't see why there should be a boys' or a girls' school in the
first place. I would never send my daughters to an all-girls
school or an all-black school, not if I could help it. This is
America. This is not Nigeria. It's made up of all these
different cultural strains, and I want them to know about that.


    Q. So what's the answer?

    A. The image of success is wrong. I read an article
recently that said that one of the things that was "acting
white" for black high school kids in Washington was going to the
Smithsonian. Fewer things have made me more depressed than that
about the state of black America. When I drive to my house and
go through the black neighborhood that's between two white
neighborhoods, I don't see black kids packing books at 5
o'clock. They have a basketball, and they're going down to the
courts. We have to change the erroneous assumption that you have
a better chance of being Magic Johnson than you do of being a
brain surgeon. There are more black lawyers than black
professional athletes.


    Q. Some music critics say 2 Live Crew is mediocre rap, yet
during their obscenity trial, you testified that their lyrics
were comparable to Shakespeare's.

    A. In no way did I compare 2 Live Crew to Shakespeare!
When I was asked if there were instances of lewd language in
Western literature, I cited a few obvious examples: Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Joyce. This observation shows that lewd language
isn't ipso facto proof of obscenity. But that's all it shows.


    Q. You also said their lyrics were an example of parody.

    A. My interpretation could be totally wrongheaded, but
it's what I honestly believe. And I have taken an incredible
amount of flak for it. Nothing I've ever done has attracted as
much hate mail as my testimony for 2 Live Crew.

    Much of the album is obscene and misogynistic. To me
Luther Campbell's performance made black macho seem silly, made
it seem unattractive. It's never an easy question to
distinguish between parody and the thing that's being parodied.
Like Archie Bunker. Did Archie Bunker critique racism or did he
reinforce racism? It's an open question.


    Q. Andrew Dice Clay, a white, is probably just as
offensive as 2 Live Crew, but he wasn't put on trial. Why is
that?

    A. I'm convinced that 2 Live Crew's album was seen as
peculiarly inflammatory because black people are seen as
peculiarly inflammable. The image is that young black men are
like dry tinder waiting for an idle spark to set them off. And
if they get that idle spark, they'll go wilding. I'm sure that
if the same lyrics had come out of virile-looking young white
boys, they would never have been prosecuted in the same way.


    Q. You have spent most of your adult life in the North and
moved South only a year ago. Now that you are about to return
North to teach at Harvard, do you have any observations about
the difference in race relations between the two regions?

    A. Relations are worse in the South because the
bottom-line historical experience was slavery. In the North it
was abolition. A black person is not at the same place
societally in the North and in the South for that very reason.

    Here I was the first black person to live in my immediate
neighborhood. I came home one day and a brick mason, who was
black, was redoing the walk. And I said hello. And he said, "Can
I help you?" with a bit of hostility in his voice. And I said,
"You are helping me. You're fixing my walk." And he looked
dumbfounded and said, "Is this your house?" And I said, "Yeah."
And he said, "Do the white people know that you bought this
house?" I said, "Of course!" And he said, "Of course. I bet they
know all about you." And we both busted out laughing, like I'd
been checked out. On the whole I'd rather live in the North than
in the South.


    Q. Only 3% of the nation's college faculty members are
black. What can be done to get more into the pipeline?

    A. A wonderful thing happens when you encounter images of
your cultural self in a book at an early age. That happened to
me at 14 when an Episcopal priest gave me James Baldwin's The
Fire Next Time. I felt like Baldwin was naming me in a way that
I didn't even know I needed to be named. It changed my life.
That's where I first got the inkling that I might want to be a
scholar, to serve my people through print. How could anybody
deny -- left, right or center -- the importance of that
experience in shaping a young intellect? What we have to do is
change the curriculum so that that experience of identification
can occur for people who are not Anglo-Saxon.


    Q. Everybody agrees that black kids today need healthy
role models. Who are your nominees?

    A. Among the people I like to think of as useful role
models are author-educator W.E.B. Dubois, civil rights activist
Mary Church Terrell, Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka, South
African leader Nelson Mandela, novelist Toni Morrison. And poet
Phillis Wheatley: she was a genius. She learned English when she
was about seven, and by the age of 15 she was publishing poems
as sophisticated as any American who was publishing in the 18th
century. We need to make that common knowledge, as common as the
fact that Michael Jordan can do the triple quadruple backward
dunk. And it's not.