A "Race Man" Argues for a Broader Curriculum

By BREENA CLARKE and SUSAN TIFFT/DURHAM 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.