A Challenging Analysis of Black America
Washington Post

By Courtland Milloy
Sunday, March 21, 2004; Page C01


Harvard scholar Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. has taken
a long, hard look at black America, and he isn't
altogether pleased.



"I remember a poll where black kids were asked to list
the things they considered 'acting white,' " Gates
said during a recent book signing at the Aspen
Institute in Washington. "The top three things were:
making straight A's, speaking standard English and
going to the Smithsonian. Now, if anybody had said
anything like that when we were growing up in the
'50s, first, your mother would smack you upside the
head and second, they'd check you into a mental
institution."

Gates, 53, is chair of Harvard's African and African
American Studies Department. He was discussing the
findings in his latest book, "America Behind the Color
Line: Dialogues With African Americans," in which he
tries to answer the question: How have black people
fared in the 35 years since the assassination of
Martin Luther King Jr.?

There was good news, such as the quadrupling of the
black middle class. But Gates was in no mood to
celebrate. The percentage of black children in poverty
had remained about 40 percent since 1968, and the
devaluation of black traditions -- such as the quest
for literacy -- seemed likely to hamper progress for
generations to come.

In Chicago, for instance, where Gates did much of his
research on poverty, 45 percent of black men ages 20
to 24 are out of school -- most without a diploma of
any kind -- and out of work. Even among high school
graduates, he noted, "a huge percentage are
functionally illiterate, meaning they can't read the
front page of the local newspaper and pass an exam
about it."

One in five black men in their twenties in the Windy
City is in prison, on probation or on parole, and
single women head 69 percent of all black households.
The average life span for black men in Chicago is 59
years, and during any given week there, only 45
percent of black people 18 and older are gainfully
employed.

Part of the problem is structural, Gates said. He
argued that it is ridiculous to expect 35 years of
affirmative action to cure hundreds of years of
slavery and Jim Crow segregation. He called for a
federal jobs program, saying, "If America can rebuild
Iraq, which I guess remains to be seen, we can rebuild
the economy of our inner cities."

Getting such a jobs program up and running actually
sounded easy when compared with what Gates said had to
come first: a behavioral change among black people,
which includes a renewed interest in education and
less of an interest in the misogyny, homophobia and
violence that are the hallmarks of rap and hip-hop
culture.

"Here's something that's curious about hip-hop to me,"
Gates said. "Seventy percent of hip-hop culture is
consumed by suburban whites. What's the difference
between white kids and black kids?

"The popularity of hip-hop trades off of voyeurism,
right? So you're watching something illicit in a
keyhole. The white kids watch illicit sexual activity
in the keyhole, and they go back to their rooms and do
their algebra and go to Harvard. The black kids,
somehow, are trying to crawl through the keyhole. What
I'm trying to figure out is why our kids,
metaphorically, want to crawl through that keyhole and
embrace those modes of behavior as authentically
black. It is killing our people. And it makes me
sick."

To combat the problems, Gates has called for a new
civil rights movement within the black community. For
that to succeed, the "talented tenth" -- meaning
college educated blacks -- must address and correct
self-defeating behavior, in themselves and others.

"Our leaders are geniuses at jumping on white racism
when it manifests itself. And believe me, I don't want
anybody to be confused -- when anti-black racism by
anybody manifests itself, I'll be right there pouncing
on it, too. But unless we do the second, necessary,
act of leadership, which is to critique pathological
forms of behavior with any African American community,
our people will be doomed, doomed to perpetuate the
class divide . . . which has arisen since that
terrible day in 1968."


  rodneyc..

  If we are to combat the insanity of our world, we need to explore love,
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