'Rough magic of the
cultural mix' is nation’s best hope
BY KATHLEEN O'TOOLE
On this October morning in
the intimate parlor of the Humanities Center Annex, while
a newly minted Nobel laureate in physics holds a press
conference across campus, a man introduced as the
"most visible and influential present-day American
humanist" addresses a campus audience.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., the
W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of Humanities at Harvard,
appears as a tweedy English professor in person and in an
archeologist's khaki shorts and T-shirt on screen as he
leads a group of 40 mostly Stanford graduate students
down the Niger River to Tombouctou, a "nearly
destitute" late-20th-century town of about 20,000 on
the edge of the Sahara.
The videotape recording of
the arduous trip to what the Oxford English Dictionary
calls "the most distant place imaginable" shows
the tour group inside a private Tombouctou residence,
where the host allows Gates to touch and tape close-ups
of flaking, brownish books on astronomy, accounting,
geometry and the going price for slaves.
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Information:
"When I grew up, the
schoolbooks said Africans couldn't read and write,"
the videotaped Gates says cheerily to his turbaned
African host.
Around the time of Lewis
and Clark, a French explorer was the first humanist to
land in Tombouctou, but the town already had fallen on
hard times, and he left unimpressed. His gloomy written
reports of Tombouctou filtered into the American school
curriculum of the '50s and clashed with the tall tales
told about "Timbuktu" by old men sitting in the
barbershop of Gates' hometown in Appalachia.
This contradiction led
Gates back to Tombouctou where, he says, there are still
manuscripts by the thousands that date to the 16th
century, when the town was home to a profitable salt
trade and a mosque-based educational system complete with
a university that awarded turbans instead of sheepskins
to West African students, who took about 10 years of
advanced study to earn the equivalent of today's Ph.D.
This university, complete
with books written in African languages, was founded
about the same time as the universities of Paris and
Bologna and "311 years before my beloved
Harvard," Gates tells his
Stanford audience.
* * *
In the intimate parlor of the
Humanities Center Annex Oct. 13, the tweedy English professor takes over the
podium from the explorer. When he worries about the
legacy of his generation of African American scholars,
Gates says, it is not about the survival of today's 216
university-based African and African American studies
programs but "whether there will be 10 or even five
centers in 2050" with databases such as the one once
lost in Tombouctou for four centuries. "The jury is
still out," he says, which is why he confesses to
being "a kind of P. T. Barnum" making
videotapes, speeches and private pleas for African and
African American studies. "My strategy in the short
term is glory; in the long term it's
institutionalization," he says.
When Gates stops talking,
a graduate student from Hawaii thanks him for his speech
the night before in Kresge Auditorium and for his tour
this morning, but says she wants him to address more
specifically what he has hinted at and what is pressing
on her mind as she considers the archeological and
archival work Hawaiian scholars will have to do if they
wish to recover their precolonial history: "How will
that information you have gathered affect your people's
collective identity?"
Gates, rarely at a loss
for words, pauses. "Difficult question to
answer," he says. "Are intellectual heroes like
athletes? Absolutely not. . . . You are still a scholar
working in a library with students and books. You change.
You have more in common with white people that you don't
even like when you go back to your 25th reunion." He
fumbles for another comparison. "Marx wrote Das
Kapital in the mid-19th century and the Bolshevik
Revolution occurred in 1917, so it takes a long
time."
* * *
The first speaker in this
year's Presidential Lectures and Symposia in the
Humanities and Arts, Gates was introduced Oct. 12 to a
large Kresge Auditorium audience by English Professor
Terry Castle as "the most visible and influential
present-day American humanist," the 1998 equivalent
of Lionel Trilling. She noted that he is a historian of
three centuries, a "founder and shaper of the
discipline" of black literary criticism, and author
of many popular periodical articles. She said she even
spied one of his academic books on the bookshelf of a
sophisticated Manhattan apartment pictured in a decorator
magazine.
Gates, also known in
academic circles for building an African American studies
dynasty at Harvard that rivals the Yankees in baseball,
responded by suggesting the East Coast was in her future.
He proceeded in the course of an hour to deliver two
lectures, the first for humanists interested in his ideas
on how to reconcile liberal humanism with
multiculturalism, and the second for the "talented
tenth," W. E. B. Du Bois' controversial term for the
most highly educated African Americans.
Thanks to the civil rights
movement and affirmative action, he said to "the
tenth," the black middle class has quadrupled since
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, but a
larger proportion of black children now live below the
poverty line. He urged the tenth to "stop feeling
guilty about our own success" and instead "feel
a commitment of service to those left behind."
Referring to African
Americans as "a nation within a nation" with a
population larger than that of Canada, he said, "We
can't pretend any longer that 35 million people will ever
possibly be exactly members of the same economic class.
"The best we can
strive for is that class differentials within the African
American community what I call the bell curve of class
cease their lopsided ratios because of the pernicious
nature of racial inequality." Black intellectuals
who want to lead must confront "the twin realities
of white racism on the one hand and our own failures to
take the initiative and break the cycle of poverty on the
other."
Leaders are merely
"ethnic cheerleaders," he said, when they
"continue to repeat the same old stale formulas, to
blame 'the Man' for oppressing us all in exactly the same
ways, to scapegoat Koreans, Jews or even in my beloved
Boston Haitians as many black Americans do for our own
failure to seize local entrepreneurial
opportunities."
Leading one's community,
he said, involves "daring to risk estrangement and
alienation sometimes from the community in the short run
in order to break a cycle of poverty, despair and
hopelessness that our people are in over the long
run." He called for a "comprehensive jobs bill,
the equivalent of the Marshall Plan for cities," and
for the institutionalization of summer internships for
college and high school students in community development
projects as well as for the continuation of affirmative
action, "the same affirmative action that got me
into Yale and virtually every job that I've had since I
graduated."
His message to humanists
cut a similar swath midway between two ideological poles.
He urged Americans of all colors, religions, races and
sexual orientations to remain aware of the dangers of
collective-identity politics in a postCold War world
that has had 48 examples of serious ethnic conflicts, but
also to accept collective identities as "an ages-old
phenomenon." He chastised "relativists for
recusing themselves from other people's problems,"
such as the conflicts among religious groups, genital
mutilation in Africa and human rights abuses in China,
but he also criticized cultural puritans for trying to
erect boundaries around their idea of culture and failing
to admit America's pluralistic past and present.
"Deference to the
autonomy of other beliefs, other values, other cultures
has become an all too easy alibi for moral
isolation," he said in reference to the relativists.
"When we need action, we get hand wringing; when we
need forthrightness, we get equivocation."
A rigorous
multiculturalism, he told both cultural purists and
relativists, needs to reject both "the tale of
pilgrim triumphalism" and "the elevation of
difference over commonality." It should challenge
the "proliferation of a vulgar identity
politics" by providing an "honest account of
ethnic dynamism [that] gives full weight to the forces of
assimilation and convergence on the one side as well as
those of differentiation and divergence on the other
side." It needs to recognize, he said, that
individuals come from places in society and that
"white boyism" is a politics of identity too.
Americans must "learn
to live without the age-old deleterious dream of purity,
whether purity of blood lines or purity of cultural
inheritance." Learning to find comfort, solace and
fulfillment in "the rough magic of the cultural
mix" may be an imperfect solution, he said, like
democracy, but the best available alternative. SR
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