Salon.com > Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

White voters and Obama’s slide in the polls

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:30:00 +0000

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.

Jan 20: Barack Obama is inaugurated as president.

The Gates-Crowley public sitcom

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 10:14:00 +0000

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.

"I read an article where they called my father, 'sexy cop.' It was embarrassing," [Crowley's] daughter said as we sat down for cookies and Coke. 'Yeah,' I replied. 'He's pretty cute.' We laughed as Crowley's wife rubbed her daughter's back and reminded her son to mind the gift they had brought for the president."

The lad gave Obama a Red Sox jersey, a suitable gift for any occasion. In other news, Ms. Gates, mind-reading like so many since this public sitcom began, scrutinized Crowley's brood and opined, "This wasn't a family raised on hate." Professor Gates himself announced, "When he's not arresting you, Sgt. Crowley is a really likable guy."

The White House and beer diplomacy

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:29:00 +0000

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."

It's not the first time that the most formal home in America has been the backdrop for a casual meeting of the minds. Here's a quick trip through a list of our favorites:

Black men, white cops and media mind readers

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 10:20:00 +0000

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.

Also, be a regular Joe. They don't know how many awards you've won, and, frankly, they don't care. Silly misunderstandings are their favorite kind of domestic call. So just answer their questions and they'll go away. Furthermore, people get arrested in their homes every day. It's usually the easiest place to find them. If you've no experience of the law enforcement world, watch a few episodes of "COPS." (Programming note: It's not on PBS.)

Alas, the average professor can be awfully hard to bring down off his high horse. Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was just back from a trip to China. So he probably hadn't heard a story that moved on the wires that morning about five Jersey City cops gunned down by a perp who'd hidden a shotgun under his bathrobe. One died, along with the shooter and his girlfriend.

Right-wing racism on the rise

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:30:00 +0000

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.

Sen. Lindsey Graham tried to kick off a new GOP flirtation with decency when he announced his vote to confirm Sotomayor last week. (Yet Graham wound up the only Republican on the Judiciary Committee to support her, with even supposed judicial moderates like Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch voting against her.) Then, after Birther madness reached a new high, a few mid-level GOP names -- Mike Huckabee, Michael Steele and even fact-averse propagandists Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly -- began distancing themselves from their party's anti-Obama fringe. “Chairman Steele believes that this is an unnecessary distraction and believes that the president is a U.S. citizen," a spokeswoman for Steele told the Plum Line's Greg Sargent. Better late than never.

Who was Hannah Crafts?

Wed, 24 Apr 2002 16:19:00 +0000

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.

After having hip-replacement surgery in early 2001, Gates, the W.E.B. Du Bois professor of the humanities and chair of Afro-American studies at Harvard University, was suddenly faced with an abundance of time on his hands. On sabbatical, he spent most of his days reading. Gates had begun receiving catalogs from New York's Swann Galleries, one of the foremost auction houses for African-Americana. One day, while perusing their catalog, he noticed a handwritten manuscript for sale, one purported to be an authentic "fictionalized biography," thought to date from the 1850s, signed by an escaped slave calling herself Hannah Crafts. Its history could be traced back to the 1940s, when it was owned by Dorothy Porter, the African-American scholar.

Big babies at Harvard

Sat, 05 Jan 2002 21:40:00 +0000

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.)

The university professor is so "insulted" that the president would question his academic performance that he threatens to pack his bags and go to another prestigious university, which is also bidding for his services. Then the piqued professor's department head gets involved. He takes umbrage at the president's "insult" to his underling, and strongly hints that the president's suggestion that the professor live up to his professional billing and improve his teaching performance is really a sneak attack on the school's affirmative action program. Both professors, as well as a third colleague, make it known they are considering other offers from other Ivy League universities.

Blue Glow

Mon, 25 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Fall Premiere

Jennifer Love Hewitt gets her very own "Party of Five" spinoff, Time of Your Life (8 p.m., Fox), in which her character, Sarah Merrin, moves to New York to search for her biological father (and have a few single gal in the big city adventures along the way). Head Trip (9:30 p.m., MTV) is a part live-action, part animated sketch comedy series that takes aim at pop music.

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Series

Ally McBeal (9 p.m., Fox) starts its new season with a bang -- literally. On the way to work one morning, Ally succumbs to temptation and has sex in a car wash with a handsome stranger (guest Jason Gedrick). Everybody Loves Raymond (9 p.m., CBS) introduces us to Debra's sister Jennifer (guest Ashley Crow), a "bohemian" who has undergone a surprising lifestyle change. On Family Law (10 p.m., CBS), an aging actor (guest Alan King) sues for libel when a newspaper column erroneously reports his death, and a woman fights for custody of her granddaughter after the girl's parents' death.

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No light in his attic

Mon, 11 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

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.

In spite of this -- even because of it -- West is a star of an academic world that is progressively left and politically correct. In addition to his professorships in theology and African American studies at Harvard, he has been on the faculties of Yale, Princeton and the University of Paris. His income is in the six-figure range, and his books are required texts in college curricula across the nation.

Only 46 years old, West has been called -- if only by his publisher -- "the pre-eminent African American intellectual of his generation." His work has elicited White House invitations and more requests as a speaker, blurb writer and distinguished guest than any individual could possibly fill. In a market in which it is increasingly difficult for genuine scholars to get an academic monograph in print, West has written or edited 20 books published by commercial publishers -- 16 in the last 10 years alone.

Letters to the Editor

Thu, 24 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Johnny get your pills

BY ROB WATERS
(06/17/99)

A disturbing but interesting article. I am an attorney in a small town in
Ohio and a lot of my practice involves domestic custody cases and juvenile
court cases. In the juvenile court cases, at least a third of the kids I
deal with are medicated, and I don't think I can remember even one kid who has
been medicated that isn't taking a least two different medications. The
worst I've seen is a kid who at one point was on incredibly high doses of
eight meds. The kids usually see the prescribing doctor once every three or four
months; they are usually poor, and their parents are always overwhelmed by
the kids and their problems.

What is going on is a fear of these kids and, in most of the cases, a refusal to deal with their
real problems with more expensive talk theories. We give them some dope and stick them away.

The bull in the black-intelligentsia china shop

Tue, 19 Jan 1999 10:03:00 +0000

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.