The scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., discusses the roots of racism, the importance of affirmative action, and where the country’s race relations can go from here.
,” which he edited with Andrew S. Curran, comes out next month.
I’d like to start out by looking back at your family and West Virginia. You write about this beautifully in your memoir “Colored People.” Tell me a little about Piedmont, where you grew up. My parents came out in the kitchen, where I’d been cloistered, and they sat down and they said, “Skippy, you took that test a couple weeks ago. And it had five hundred questions, and you got four hundred and eighty-nine questions right.” That set the tone for the next twelve years of my life. They expected me to be the smartest kid in the class. The classroom was my playground. I was one of those kids, those little assholes, who hated summer vacation, man!.
Cambridge pioneered “practical criticism,” or a version of formalism in the analysis of literature. It was about learning to analyze a text not for its content, not for its themes—as we would in history class—but for its form. Form was content. At Cambridge, I was learning a whole method that I didn’t even know existed before. And I thought it was magical once I learned how to do it.
In the second decade of the twenty-first century—in the transition between Obama and Trump—what are the historical forces that have given us this present-day bifurcated America? But I knew that there would be pushback. There’s a lot of confusion, particularly now about debates about the Constitution in the wake of the 1619 Project. It was quite common to be anti-slaveryto be anti-Black. This discourse predates the founding of the Republic. You know, it goes back to thein the Enlightenment, even some of whom blessedly were anti-slavery, like Montesquieu and Voltaire. But they wrote really racist things on occasion about people of African descent.
The summer before last was the George Floyd moment and the trial that came after it. How does that figure into this narrative of recent history? Does it give you any hope that that there’s a way out? People aren’t born racist. I grew up among these people. There are seven women from Piedmont I’ve known since that first day of first grade in Piedmont. They visit me and my wife every summer on Martha’s Vineyard. They stay four days. Six of those women are white. They told me the summer before the general election that Donald Trump was going to win. And, implicitly, they were saying, “We’re going to vote for Donald Trump.
You speak of the economy. I was watching an interview with you which was conducted in West Virginia. And you were asked about your politics, and you said, “Look, I’m left of center on issues about race, social justice, and many more things. When it comes to economics, not so much—I’m much more conservative on that.” What did you mean?
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