August 1, 2004Breaking the Silence
Why has it been so difficult for black leaders to say such things in public, without being pilloried for "blaming the victim"? Why the huge flap over Bill Cosby's insistence that black teenagers do their homework, stay in school, master standard English and stop having babies? Any black person who frequents a barbershop or beauty parlor in the inner city knows that Mr. Cosby was only echoing sentiments widely shared in the black community. "If our people studied calculus like we studied basketball," my father, age 91, once remarked as we drove past a packed inner-city basketball court at midnight, "we'd be running M.I.T." When my brother and I were growing up in the 50's, our parents convinced us that the "blackest" thing that we could be was a doctor or a lawyer. We admired Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, but our real heroes were people like Thurgood Marshall, Dr. Benjamin Mays and Mary McLeod Bethune. Yet in too many black neighborhoods today, academic achievement has actually come to be stigmatized. "We are just not the same people anymore," says the mayor of Memphis, Dr. Willie W. Herenton. "We are worse off than we were before Brown v. Board," says Dr. James Comer, a child psychiatrist at Yale. "And a large part of the reason for this is that we have abandoned our own black traditional core values, values that sustained us through slavery and Jim Crow segregation." Making it, as Mr. Obama told me, "requires diligent effort and deferred gratification. Everybody sitting around their kitchen table knows that." "Americans suffer from anti-intellectualism, starting in the White House," Mr. Obama went on. "Our people can least afford to be anti-intellectual." Too many of our children have come to believe that it's easier to become a black professional athlete than a doctor or lawyer. Reality check: according to the 2000 census, there were more than 31,000 black physicians and surgeons, 33,000 black lawyers and 5,000 black dentists. Guess how many black athletes are playing professional basketball, football and baseball combined. About 1,400. In fact, there are more board-certified black cardiologists than there are black professional basketball players. "We talk about leaving no child behind," says Dena Wallerson, a sociologist at Connecticut College. "The reality is that we are allowing our own children to be left behind." Nearly a third of black children are born into poverty. The question is: why? Scholars such as my Harvard colleague William Julius Wilson say that the causes of black poverty are both structural and behavioral. Think of structural causes as "the devil made me do it," and behavioral causes as "the devil is in me." Structural causes are faceless systemic forces, like the disappearance of jobs. Behavioral causes are self-destructive life choices and personal habits. To break the conspiracy of silence, we have to address both of these factors. "A lot of us," Mr. Obama argues, "hesitate to discuss these things in public because we think that if we do so it lets the larger society off the hook. We're stuck in an either/or mentality - that the problem is either societal or it's cultural." It's important to talk about life chances - about the constricted set of opportunities that poverty brings. But to treat black people as if they're helpless rag dolls swept up and buffeted by vast social trends - as if they had no say in the shaping of their lives - is a supreme act of condescension. Only 50 percent of all black children graduate from high school; an estimated 64 percent of black teenage girls will become pregnant. (Black children raised by female "householders" are five times as likely to live in poverty as those raised by married couples.) Are white racists forcing black teenagers to drop out of school or to have babies? Mr. Cosby got a lot of flak for complaining about children who couldn't speak standard English. Yet it isn't a derogation of the black vernacular - a marvelously rich and inventive tongue - to point out that there's a language of the marketplace, too, and learning to speak that language has generally been a precondition for economic success, whoever you are. When we let black youth become monolingual, we've limited their imaginative and economic possibilities. These issues can be ticklish, no question, but they're badly served by silence or squeamishness. Mr. Obama showed how to get the balance right. We've got to create as many opportunities as we can for the worst-off - and "make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life." But values matter, too. We can't talk about the choices people have without talking about the choices people make. Henry Louis Gates Jr. will be a guest columnist for the Op-Ed page this week. Thomas L. Friedman is on leave until October, writing a book. |
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Henry Louis Gates Jr.
enry Louis Gates Jr. is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, the chair of Afro-American Studies and the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University.
Professor Gates is co-editor with K. Anthony Appiah of the encyclopedia "Encarta Africana" published on CD-ROM by Microsoft (1999), and in book form by Basic Civitas Books under the title "Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience" (1999). He is the author of "Wonders of the African World" (1999), the book companion to the six-hour BBC/PBS television series of the same name.
Professor Gates is the author of several works of literary criticism, including "Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the 'Racial' Self" (Oxford University Press, 1987); "The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism" (Oxford, 1988), 1989 winner of the American Book Award; and "Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars" (Oxford, 1992). He has also authored "Colored People: A Memoir" (Knopf, 1994), which traces his childhood experiences in a small West Virginia town in the 1950's and 1960's; "The Future of the Race" (Knopf, 1996), co-authored with Cornel West; and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man" (Random House, 1997).
Professor Gates has edited several anthologies, including "The Norton Anthology of African American Literature" (W.W. Norton, 1996); and "The Oxford-Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers" (Oxford, 1991). In addition, Professor Gates is co-editor of Transition magazine. Professor Gates, an influential cultural critic, published a 1994 cover story for Time magazine on the new black Renaissance in art, as well as numerous articles for The New Yorker.
Professor Gates earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge. He received a B.A. summa cum laude from Yale University in 1973 in English Language and Literature. Before joining the faculty of Harvard in 1991, he taught at Yale, Cornell and Duke Universities. His honors and grants include a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" (1981), the George Polk Award for Social Commentary (1993), Chicago Tribune Heartland Award (1994), the Golden Plate Achievement Award (1995), Time magazine's "25 Most Influential Americans" list (1997), a National Humanities Medal (1998) and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1999).
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/opinion/henrylouisgatesjr-bio.html
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Eat you heart out Roy ...
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