Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

White voters and Obama's slide in the polls

Gabriel Winant — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 03:30:00 PDT

Barack Obama made his name by telling us that there aren't two separate Americas, black and white, but just one United States. Still, knowing the color of a voter's skin offers a fair amount of information about how that voter feels about the president. Among white voters, it's been dropping since this spring. Joan Walsh discusses some of the likely reasons, and some of the possible inflection points, in her blog; here, we're simply going to look at the numbers, and then look at what was happening in the political world while those numbers were being collected. Using Gallup polling data, the following charts show how President Obama's approval rating broke down among white, nonwhite, black and Hispanic poll respondents, and how those figures changed as specific key events occurred.

The Gates-Crowley public sitcom

Gene Lyons — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 03:14:00 PDT

Only in America: Now that the dust and feathers have settled from the nation's latest interracial pecking party, professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s daughter reveals that she thinks the wicked racist cop Sgt. James Crowley is, like, really hot. Writing in the Daily Beast, Elizabeth Gates, her distinguished father's confidante and amanuensis during the recent unpleasantries, confides that when they met at the White House "Beer Summit," the Cambridge cop's 13-year-old daughter said she'd found aspects of her father's sudden celebrity unsettling.

The White House and beer diplomacy

Vincent Rossmeier — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 06:29:00 PDT

Today, President Obama is scheduled to engage in a little beer diplomacy. Cambridge, Massachusetts police Sgt. James Crowley and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. will join the President at the White House for a beer in order to extinguish the firestorm of controversy that has engulfed all three men since Crowley arrested Gates in front of his own home -- and Obama commented that the police "acted stupidly."

Black men, white cops and media mind readers

Gene Lyons — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 03:20:00 PDT

So a Harvard professor who reportedly played the "you don't know who you're messing with" card to a cop got an unscheduled ride downtown. Boo hoo hoo. Maybe he learned something. Or would. If he'd get over himself, which appears unlikely. Anyway, when the police come to your door, always step outside. It puts everybody more at ease.

Right-wing racism on the rise

Joan Walsh — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 09:30:00 PDT

First, credit where it's due: A few lonely Republican leaders are belatedly trying to clean up the party's mess of crazy, from the racially tinged character attacks on Sonia Sotomayor to the unhinged rhetoric of the Birthers to the overall vicious and fact-free spew of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. It's not working yet -- Beck's claiming Obama "has a deep-seated hatred for white people" on Tuesday might be a new low -- but at least someone's trying.

Who was Hannah Crafts?

Timothy Davis — Wed, 24 Apr 2002 09:19:00 PDT

If Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. is correct, his recent literary find, a manuscript called "The Bondwoman's Narrative," recently published by Warner Books, isn't just the only known novel written by a fugitive slave; it's also the first novel ever penned by an African-American woman. Much is unknown about the book, including where and when it was written. However, the biggest mystery is the author herself.

Big babies at Harvard

Earl Ofari Hutchinson — Sat, 05 Jan 2002 13:40:00 PST

Here's one for the books. A privileged black professor at a prestigious Ivy League university spends much of his time writing pop intellectual books, cutting rap CDs, and globetrotting around the country bagging stratospheric speaking fees to pontificate on the state of black America. The president of the university in question, frustrated at these antics, has the temerity to suggest that the professor do what he's paid to do, namely teach, read and grade student papers, be a mentor to students, and not simply ladle out A's for merely showing up for class -- a problem, it should be noted, that's rampant at this prestigious university, not confined to this august professor. (They euphemistically call it "grade inflation"; in the old days we'd have called it professor-assisted cheating.)

Blue Glow

Joyce Millman — Mon, 25 Oct 1999 09:00:00 PDT

Fall Premiere

No light in his attic

David Horowitz — Mon, 11 Oct 1999 09:00:00 PDT

There are many African American scholars -- Thomas Sowell, Henry Louis Gates, Randall Kennedy, Orlando Patterson, Stephen Carter, William Julius Wilson and Glenn Loury to name a few -- who are making major contributions in their fields. Cornel West of Harvard is not one of them.

Letters to the Editor

Letters to the Editor — Thu, 24 Jun 1999 09:00:00 PDT

Johnny get your pills
BY ROB WATERS
(06/17/99)

The bull in the black-intelligentsia china shop

Amy Alexander — Tue, 19 Jan 1999 02:03:00 PST

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- On a chilly April night in 1996, two years before she high-tailed it to the West Coast and the synergistic frontier, Tina Brown invited several hundred of her closest friends to a party at Harvard University. The occasion was publication of a special New Yorker issue, "Black in America," edited by New Yorker staff writer and African-American studies impresario Henry Louis Gates Jr. The issue's lineup of guest writers, artists and critics represented a Who's Who of black glitterati: actress and director Anna Deavere Smith on black women inmates; award-winning novelist John Edgar Wideman on Chicago Bulls bad boy Dennis Rodman; Columbia University law professor Patricia Williams on female Harvard Law School graduates, and Gates on Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan.