Culture
By ROBERT S. BOYNTON
October 13, 2011, 11:00 am
A culture of complexity Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B.
Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard
University, photographed in New York City on Sept. 2, 2011.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is having lunch at New York's Union Square Cafe,
hoping Danny Meyer's chicken soup will soothe his allergies. He has
just returned from Newark, where he interviewed Mayor Cory Booker for
his new PBS series, "Finding Your Roots." After lunch he's catching a
flight to Martha's Vineyard for Bill Clinton's birthday party. Author
of 14 books, editor in chief of the online publication The Root,
documentary producer and presenter, Gates, 61, is a one-man multimedia
industry.
"I have no plans to slow down," he says cheerfully.
A clear line runs through Gates's myriad projects. "I want to get into
the educational DNA of American culture," he says. "I want 10 percent
of the common culture, more or less, to be black." Gates's love of
technology has been a boon in this regard. He is always thinking about
new ways to circulate his ideas. "The Norton Anthology of African-
American Literature" (1996) included a CD of oral literature with
recordings of poets like Langston Hughes reading their work. He
followed up "Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African American
Experience" (1999) with Microsoft's Encarta Africana on CD-ROM. The
success of The Huffington Post inspired him to start The Root, The
Washington Post's online African-American publication. "I'm a tech
geek. Whenever I read about something new, I think to myself, How can
I take this and make it black?"
Gates has always wanted to reach a wider audience than scholarship
alone could attract. In 1995, he and his family rode 3,000 miles
through Africa for the BBC documentary "Great Railway Journeys." His
genealogy series on PBS — "Faces of America" and "African American
Lives" — drew 25 million viewers. This latest installment, the first
to run in prime time, might beat that. "It would take a thousand years
for my book 'The Signifying Monkey' to get to that many people," he
says.
Which isn't to say that he has abandoned print. In November, Knopf
will publish "Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African-American
History, 1513-2008." Accessibly written and lavishly illustrated, it's
aimed at readers who may have shied away from his earlier,
encyclopedic compendiums. It is also quirkier. Alongside requisite
sections on the Emancipation Proclamation and the civil rights
movement, it includes entries on the television show "Soul Train" and
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Gates's slant on African-American history has been influenced by the
research he did for his most recent book and television series, "Black
in Latin America." In a move sure to raise eyebrows, he opens this
latest volume with Juan Garrido, a free black conquistador who
accompanied Ponce de León on his 1513 expedition to Florida. The year
1619 is when most historians date the presence of African slaves in
the colonies, so why does Gates start 106 years earlier, and with an
"oppressor" rather than with the oppressed?
"The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more
complex than anything you could make up," he says. "One principle I've
been fighting for that doesn't endear me to a lot of people is that
black people can be just as complicated and screwed up as white
people. Our motives can be just as base and violent. Suffering does
not necessarily ennoble you."
Gates's belief in the complexity of American culture has only been
reinforced by the genetic research that has informed his recent books
and television programs. In them, Gates explores the lineage of
Americans like Chris Rock, Meryl Streep, Yo-Yo Ma and Tina Turner.
Using genealogical and historical resources, he traces their family
stories as far back as he can. When the paper trail runs out, he
resorts to DNA tests.
Gates is a member of the Personal Genome Project at Harvard Medical
School, and he and his late father (who died at age 97 on Christmas
Eve, 2010) were the first African-Americans to have their entire
genomes sequenced. The tests showed that Gates Jr. has 50 percent
European ancestry and descends from John Redman, a free African-
American who fought in the Revolutionary War. In 2006, Gates was
inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution. "When I do a black
person's DNA, there are never any people who are 100 percent black, no
matter how dark they are," he says.
Gates also learned that he is related to a fourth-century Irish king.
It is a distinction he shares with James Crowley, the police sergeant
who arrested Gates for disorderly conduct in July 2009. Responding to
a report of a break-in, Crowley ordered the professor to step out of
the house. He refused and was arrested. The incident became national
news, with President Obama saying the police had "acted stupidly." A
few weeks after, he convened a White House "beer summit" with Gates,
Crowley and the vice president.
Gates cites Obama's intervention as an example of his talent for
navigating America's vexed racial legacy. "I began receiving hate mail
and death threats after the arrest, and that all stopped after the
summit," he says. It pains Gates that the president doesn't seem able
to bring people together as effectively as he once did. Why is this?
He puts on his literary scholar's hat.
Gates recalls the excitement of Obama's inauguration, which he
attended. "Obama is searching for a narrative. He had an election
narrative but hasn't found the vocabulary for governing." Gates
wonders how more combative politicians, like Lyndon Johnson, would
have responded to the slights Obama has received from Congress. ("He
would have grabbed these people by the balls and said, 'I am the
president of the goddamned United States!' ")
But that isn't Obama's, or Gates's own, style, he says: "What people
forget is that the most radical thing about Obama is that he was the
first black man in history to imagine that he could become president,
who was able to make other Americans believe it as well. Other than
that, he is a centrist, just like I try to be. He's been bridging
divisions his whole life."
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