‘America Beyond the Color Line” is the title of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s thought-provoking new PBS series, a kind of video essay based on the scholar’s attempt to traverse contemporary African-American life.
But the companion book is called “America Behind the Color Line.”
There must be a story in this two-letter distinction, any discerning interviewer would suspect. There is.
“It was a total glitch from the production company,” Gates says.
The film was made with an English company and for air there, they insisted on “Beyond.”
“I always wanted it to be ‘Behind’ here,” says the Harvard professor, who called frequently to make sure it got changed. Lo and behold, the DVD crew shows up at his Boston-area apartment to tape his commentary track, and he discovers the video half of his project, back in his home country, is still called “America Beyond the Color Line.”
Gates can see the humor in it now, from the comfort of a Chicago hotel room while he’s touring to promote the 4-hour PBS series, which airs in two parts, Tuesday and Wed-nesday at 9 p.m. (WTTW-Ch. 11).
“I’d like, like a hundred years from now, if this survives, to see some PhD student write, ‘Why Gates Used “Behind . . . ” ‘ ” he says. Imagining this future scholar overanalyzing a simple mix-up, he delivers a fanciful burst of academic writing:
” ‘The fissure of the African-American consciousness could only be represented through the metaphor “behind” . . . ‘ “
By whatever title, it is a potent and iconoclastic work. It’s part travelogue, part hand-wringing, part call to action to try to bridge what Gates sees as a potentially crippling divide between the African-American middle class and underclass.
What’s most striking is the degree to which the film’s four parts — looking at the newest New South, poverty-stricken neighborhoods in Chicago, successful black Americans from Russell Simmons to Colin Powell, and African-American Hollywood — push the idea of personal responsibility as the best solution to the black community’s problems, which is perhaps not something you expect to hear from a man who identifies himself as politically “center-left.”
But perhaps it’s best to just step aside and, with some editing for continuity and the caveat that no 30-minute interview can represent the fullness of a 4-hour program or of a person’s views, let the man speak.
“The two biggest ironies facing the black community since 1968 are the following: The first is that we have two classes within black America, the biggest middle class in history and the percentage of black children living at or beneath the poverty line is almost exactly the same as it was the day Dr. King was killed. That’s bizarre when you think about it. And the second is that for the first time in 100 years almost, more black people are moving back to the South in all black neighborhoods than are moving to the North.
“In 1900 W.E.B. Du Bois, the most famous black intellectual of all time, predicted famously that the problem of the 20th Century would be the problem of the color line. So at the beginning of the 21st Century, I wanted to ask members of the African-American community, ‘What’s the problem of the 21st Century for our people?’ But unlike the lordly Du Bois, who just sat down at his desk at Harvard and decided what it was, I wanted to travel the country, through the various economic classes and geographical locales of members of the African-American community. So I went from Harvard to Harlem, Wall Street to the West Coast, from Atlanta to the South Side of Chicago, asking people, Where are we as a people since that terrible day in 1968 when Dr. King was so brutally assassinated, and who’s responsible for the good things . . . and the bad things that have happened?
“Du Bois used the metaphor of the veil that separates black America from white America for all the obvious reasons, and I wanted to raise that veil, to create an effect of overhearing black people having conversations. I wanted, in effect, behind closed doors, black person to black person, I wanted to ask black people who’s responsible for this. When a white person asks, what you say is, `You are responsible, your granddaddy.’ But one thing I’ve noticed: In a barbershop or beauty parlor, black people are much more nuanced than when they think they’re talking to white people.
“The biggest surprise to me, other than something that happened in the Hollywood sequence, was how [among] members of the impoverished aspect of the black community, nobody talked about historical forces of white racism that were the cause of their poverty. Everybody I asked, `Why are you living like this?’ `Because I made bad choices,’ they said. That’s extraordinary to me. We sit in the academy, first thing we’ll say is, `Well, you know they brought our people here in chains.’
“Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to sound like Clarence Thomas or some right-wing person with a simple-minded bootstrap mentality, but unless there is a moral revolution and a revolution in attitude among our people, unless you decide to stay in school, learn the ABCs, not to get pregnant when you’re 16, not to have a baby, not to run drugs, not to sell drugs, not to use drugs for Christ’s sake, unless we do all those things, our people are doomed. We’re doomed to have a relatively small black middle class and a huge black underclass and never the twain shall meet. So the book and the series are meant to be a wake-up call to America, but more especially to the black community, saying, `Are we crazy? What are we doing here?’ Flip Wilson used to have a routine: `the Devil made me do it.’ We can’t just keep [saying], `the white man made me do it.’
“Look, if George Wallace and Orville Faubus had sat down and concocted a plot to further enslave black people after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of ’64 and the Voting Rights Act, they couldn’t have done it better. This thing is white: getting straight A’s in school, speaking standard English. This is the result of a poll in Washington. What are you talking about, man? The only way that we can succeed in society is mastering the ABCs, staying in school, working, deferred gratification. What’s happened to those values? These are black values. This is not some romantic image here. This is what we spent hundreds of years working for. It’s been thrown out the window.
“Frederick Douglass said we had to steal a little learning from the white man. They didn’t want us to learn. Getting an A in the ’50s, excelling, was another victory in the battle against white racism. You know? We had, as a community, an enormous amount of admiration for Jackie Robinson, of course, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, but nobody in the ’50s, confused in a hierarchy of values, the achievements of Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King with what these basketball guys were doing in short pants on a Sunday. You didn’t even think about ’em in the same way. Now it’s different. My father always says, and it’s true, if we studied calculus like we studied basketball we’d be running MIT. It’s true and there’s no excuse.
“I think of myself as a center-left person. We have to recuperate from the right the theme of personal responsibility. That’s why I thought it was so important that Jesse [Jackson] and Colin Powell say the same thing [in the film]. They could have been reading from the same script. Where the right makes a mistake — willfully, I think — is they say there are no historical forces of racism, that it’s a level playing field. Well that’s rubbish. Where the left makes a mistake is they romanticize the bad choices that individuals make. You can’t romanticize gang violence. You can’t romanticize teenage pregnancy. You can’t romanticize functional illiteracy. That’s wrong.
“What I’m trying to do is recuperate both positions from the left and right because it’s only common sense, and the reason I know it’s the right position is because that’s what black people in barbershops have been telling me for the past 10 years at least. Black people in normal situations do not romanticize bad behavior in the inner city. They don’t because they’re the victims of it. It’s black-on-black violence. These gangs aren’t coming up here to the Gold Coast, holding up white people. They’re killing each other on the South Side. Well . . . that’s unacceptable to me. And I’m not running for office. I got tenure. I can say whatever I want.”
