I had the wonderful occasion this past weekend to attend once again the Congressional Black Caucus Black Tie Dinner. President Obama delivered the keynote address and I was able to take get some excellent pictures. Enjoy

ABC News has apologized to President Barack Obama for posting on twitter his off-the-recond comment in which referred to rapper Kanye West as a “jackass” after he hijacked  country star Taylor Swift’s acceptence speech at the Video Music Awards show.  The President knows full well that every word he utters makes news, and must have realized that his comments would be seized upon. He only said what almost the entire country believes already, that Kanye was extremely out-of-pocket and has probably expedited the end of his career. The boy was, as we used to say, drunk as a skunk, and clearly needs some kind of help. His behavior has become increasingly bizarre over the years since the passing of his mother, and its clear that at this point he’s completely out of control.  TMZ got a copy of the President’s remakes.

I was recently castigated (thank God not castrated) for trying to honestly examine the reasons why some successful Black men are not marrying successful Black women. In this post I should like to continue that discussion, realizing full well that the subject is quite raw with an extraordinary amount of pain in our community. Let me state up front that it is not my intention to exacerbate that pain or to launch any kind of attack against Black women. My purpose is only to open up a frank dialogue between both genders in a sincere attempt to bring about healing and understanding.

In short, Black men who have something to lose –  meaning they have successful careers and are responsible people, free of the criminal justice system, produce children within wedlock, and free of  substance abuse - are deathly afraid of marriage if not the Black woman herself! This fear is not based on any s0-called “stereotype”, but on the real and profound pain that many successful Black men have endured at the hands of Black women, especially the professional, “independent-minded” types. 

Singer Jazmine Sullivan’s latest video release (above), entitled I’m in Love With Another Man, re-creates perfectly the ways in which solid, marriageable Black men are being destroyed by a kind of selfishness and materialistic world-view now taking hold of so many young Black women, espeically those say 35 or younger. This appalling musical composition - a perfect effrontery to the values that make for strong Black families –  happens to be one of the most popular and oft imitated tunes on youtube. These young women (or not so young in fact) have fallen deliriously in love with this song and the pernicious message it celebrates? But what is it about Sullivan’s offering that so many women find irresistible? Is it her vocal styling and simple, catchy melody? I’m sure that’s some of it. But I believe it is mostly this; that we see a fine, responsible, loving, caring, romantic, considerate, sensitive, warm, handsome young man essentially being emotionally broken; with his poor heart ripped out and torn to shreds; by the shallow, narcissistic woman he’s in love with! That’s what is being  celebrated here, the destruction of Black chivalry! After being dismissed by the woman he believed his soul mate, this young man will never love a women the same way again, nor even think about marriage for many years, if ever at all. That’s because these type of quality men love hard and invest mightedly in the the happiness of other people, especially their wives. They love their women passionately and are prepared to die in defense of her honor. When she’s sad he’s sad, and when she is happy everything is all right with the world.

 But I can hear the vocal defenders of this video screaming, “wait a minute, doesn’t this woman has a “right to be happy”? “Doesn’t she have a “right” to get what she wants”?  Yet these very same women will be the first to scream ”all men (meaning Black men) are dogs!” once the new man with the flashy car and “perfect body”, uses up the girl and kicks her to the curb!

It is heartless and foolish behavior like this, more than anything else today, that is driving many Black men into the permanent fold of bachelorhood. For this group of men anyway, the stakes for marrying Black women are simply too high. And I won’t even mention the insanely unjust domestic abuse and child-support laws leveled against us!

Well the autopsy results are in and we now know that Michael Jackson died of  a lethal drug cocktail potent enough to kill an elephant! Jackson’s slimy “doctor” Conrad Murray, “administered” high doses of valium, lorazepam, and midazolam, all before delivering the coup de grace, the anesthesia called propofol.  

Last week the creepy doctor death released a youtube message thanking his supporters while invoking the name of God in his plea of innocence. Watch the above clip and decide for yourself wheather his plea is credible (hilarious spoof).

Has this Negro lost his damn mind! What is a Black man doing at a health care reform rally, conducted by the first Black President of the United States, with a LOADED AK-15 semi-automatic assault rifle strapped over his shoulder? I’m for the Second Amendment myself but this is insane! For a black man to be sending this kind of message, in a country full of racists determined to kill the President, is nothing short of contemptible! This fool is probably one of those lunatic “Birthers” who say that Obama isn’t really a citizen. This guy is a moron!

I found an interesting and sobering article which tends to verify what many of us have already known; a frightfully high percentage of well educated and accomplished Black women will never marry or have children. There are to be sure many reasons for this sad fact, a number of which are spelled out in the piece. But from what I have discovered living in a city like Washington, DC, high achieving, well educated, professional Black women tend to be too independently minded, controlling, materialistic, and just plain bossy. They also have oppressive notions of perfection when meeting eligible men and tend to be too judgemental; a serious turn off to be sure. Oftentimes, you will find these women engaging in unnecessary power struggles with their men; a kind of madness that most successful brothers just don’t want to deal with.

I perfectly realize that my views only constitute a subjective opinion, but I think there’s something to it, I really do. However, being reported on the extremely liberal MSNBC website, the article of course leaves out one of the biggest complaints of successful Black women; the high number of gay Black men.

Anyway, I’d like to get some feedback on this. Am I off base?

 

 

 

 

MSNBC.com

Marriage eludes high-achieving black women

Many remain single and childless, according to new research

By Brian Alexander

msnbc.com contributor

updated 8:31 a.m. ET, Thurs., Aug 13, 2009

 

Michelle Obama may have become an archetypal African-American female success story — law career, strong marriage, happy children — but the reality is often very different for other highly educated black women.

They face a series of challenges in navigating education, career, marriage and child-bearing, dilemmas that often leave them single and childless even when they’d prefer marriage and family, according to a research study recently presented at the American Sociological Society’s annual meeting in San Francisco.

Yale researchers Natalie Nitsche and Hannah Brueckner argued that “marriage chances for highly educated black women have declined over time relative to white women.” Women of both races with postgraduate educations “face particularly hard choices between career and motherhood,” they said, “but especially in the absence of a reliable partner.”

And there’s the rub. As noted in a recent Sexploration column, contrary to old media reports, most educated, professional women who want to marry can and do marry. But the picture is less bright for high-achieving black women because “marriage markets” for them have deteriorated to the point that many remain unmarried, the researchers found. Since these women also feel pressured not to become single mothers, they often go childless as well, the researchers found.

In the study, Nitsche and Brueckner used data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey of 50,000 households dating back to the 1970s to tease out data points on race, gender, education, marriage and fertility.

Among black women with postgraduate educations born between 1956 and 1960, the median age at which they gave birth for the first time was 34 years old. This was about the same as it was for white women in the same demographic. But once white women reached their 30s, many more of them did give birth, often more than once. Many black women did not. The rate of childlessness among this group of black women rose from 30 percent for those born between 1950 and 1955, to 45 percent for those born between 1956 and 1960.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Convicted Dog Fighter Michael Vick

 Yes, I agree like most Black people, that the campaign to make Michael Vick a social pariah for operating a Pit Bull fighting ring has gone too far. The people leading this charge are motivated by a perverse belief that there are no real differences between a human being and a canine. It is this sick and perverse belief that has these people calling their dogs their “children”. They speak of these dogs as being “adopted” and living in “foster homes” for crying out loud! If you can believe it, they’ve even got something called “animal acupuncture”. A sampling of this kind of anthropomorphism of dogs can be found in this article on the miserable creatures ”rescued” at Vick’s estate.

Having said all of that, for Jesse Jackson and Black sports writer William Rhoden to argue –  as they both tried to do this weekend –  that Michael Vick is somehow being treated in a way simular to baseball legend Jackie Robinson because no NFL owner will sign him,  is not only ridiculous but also a complete insult to the legacy of Mr. Robinson.

Robinson’s only “offense” for which he was denied a contract to a big league baseball team was that he was an African American”. Michael Vick was already signed to an NFL team to the tune of 100 million dollars, but because of his ignorance and cruelty he blew it all and is now looking for a second chance. He doesn’t have a God-given right to a second chance at making the kind of money unimaginable to most human beings! It is this sense of entitlement that got his ass in trouble in the first time.

Jermaine Jackson appeared on Larry King Live this week…again, leading curious minds to ask; is Jermaine becoming the face of the Jackson family and heir to the legacy? I must honestly admit, I thought the guy was washed up a long time ago, and had major problems with his having babies by Randy’s ex girlfriend (making both men’s children siblings and cousins AT THE SAME TIME).

However, since watching this deeply moving rendition of the song Smile at his brother’s memorial , as well the very dignified way he’s gone about representing Michael’s life and work in recent interviews, I’m beginning to acquire a new found respect for the man. Clearly Jermaine Jackson still has talent, and was perhaps never able to get out from under his brother’s enormous shadow. This single performance put him back in the spotlight, and could possibly revive his singing career to become heir to the Jackson musical legacy. Time will tell. Good luck anyway to you Jermaine.

I received a call late last night that Brother Khalil Islam, formally known as Thomas 15X Johnson, the man wrongly convicted in 1966 of murdering brother Malcolm X, passed away on Tues. Aug. 4th. He was 74. His funeral was scheduled to be held today, Aug 6th at the 96 th Street Masjid in New York.

I got to know Khalil many years after his release from prison, and he impressed me as a man committed to his religion and loyal to his leader, Imam W.D. Mohammed. Deeply spiritual, he accepted his fate as the will of Allah, and would often tell me about his days in the Nation of Islam when he sometimes acted as Malcolm’s driver. I last spoke to him in May of this year, when we were attempting to get him booked on a local NY television show (which never materialized for reason’s that are still unclear to me). From the time he left prison in 1986 he worked to get his conviction officially overturned and his name cleared. I would listen to him sympathetically but never had the heart to tell him that that was never going to happen. As far as the New York criminal justice system is concerned, the Malcolm X murder case was closed a long time ago.

Khalil Islam never shied away from his past, and was always quite frank in recounting his unsavory role as an N.O.I. enforcer. In Oct. of 2007 the New York Magazine wrote an extensive and fascinating article about his life authored by his friend Marc Jacobson, who also wrote American Gangster.   

In 1977  Talmadge Hayer, the only one of the five assassins captured at the Audubon Ballroom on Feb. 21, 1965,  filed two sworn affidavits with the famed civil rights attorney William Kunstler, detailing the entire murder plot and revealing the names and addresses of the actual killers. In fact, Hayer confessed his guilt during the trial and absolved Thomas Johnson (Khalil Islam) and Norman 3X Butler (the other man wrongly convicted) of any role in the murder. However, due to a legal manoeuvre in which the three men were tried as a group, Hayer’s confession essentially doomed the other two men to spend nearly a quarter of a century in prison. It also didn’t help that a distraught Betty Shabazz, who with her four daughters was present the afternoon her husband was gunned down, left the courtroom crying “they killed my husband“. Khalil Islam was convicted of firing the sawed off shotgun that all experts agree was the “kill shot” that silenced the voice of Malcolm X.  

Our condolences go out to his family. To Allah we belong and to Him is our return.

Coming Soon: Biographical sketches of all five assassins of Malcolm X. 

Parties to the Beer Summit

Where does one begin to make sense of this Henry Louis Gates arrest? My own thoughts about it are somewhat conflicted, for I do feel that all things being equal, an elitist white A*#hole professor of Harvard would not have been arrested for behaving the way Gates did. On the other hand, for Skip Gates to scream racism where there initially was none was ridiculous and embarrassing. President Obama, being the President of the entire nation and not just Black folks, should of stayed out of it until he had all the facts. The so-called “Beer Summit” was just plain stupid and condescending. So much for the “teachable moment”.

Anyway, Gates (and to some extent the President) appeared to stab their angry black supporters in the back by first appearing to condemn racial profiling, only to turn around and chum it up over beers at the White House with the white arresting officer James Crowley.

Add to that, we also learned (as many observers suspected) that Henry Louis Gates Jr. suffers miserably from a Tragic Mulatto Syndrome, and in the aftermath of the incident bizarrely babbled on about being “half white” and for 25 years having had a white wife! Huh?! Just listen to this madness.

What most people may not know however is that many Black scholars don’t like or respect Skip Gates, and criticize him (never to his face of course) for any number of things, least of which for being a second or third rate “scholar” who made his name by signing on to the   homosexual/ feminist agenda and by attacking or undermining other more accomplished Black scholars. Esteemed writer and professor Ishmael Reed (whose pen you never want pointed at you) has decided to dress down professor Gates and reveal to the public some of the Black academic world’s dirty laundry. Reed’s piece entitled Post-Race Scholar Yells Racism leaves some people asking the intriguing question; IS SKIP GATES DAMAGED GOODS? His completely nonsensical article on The Root leads me to believe that he at least thinks so. Man talk about “flipping the script”!  Will he continue to be the darling of the white liberal establishment after this embarrassing fiasco? Although it is somewhat lengthy, this is Ishmael Reed at his best. Enjoy.

July 27, 2009

How Henry Louis Gates Got Ordained as the Nation’s “Leading Black Intellectual”

Post-Race Scholar Yells Racism

By ISHMAEL REED

Now that Henry Louis Gates’ Jr. has gotten a tiny taste of what “the underclass” undergo each day, do you think that he will go easier on them? Lighten up on the tough love lectures? Even during his encounter with the police, he was given some slack. If a black man in an inner city neighborhood had hesitated to identify himself, or given the police some lip, the police would have called SWAT. When Oscar Grant, an apprentice butcher, talked back to a BART policeman in Oakland, he was shot!

Given the position that Gates has pronounced since the late eighties, if I had been the arresting officer and post-race spokesperson Gates accused me of racism, I would have given him a sample of his own medicine. I would have replied that “race is a social construct”–the line that he and his friends have been pushing over the last couple of decades.

After this experience, will Gates stop attributing the problems of those inner city dwellers to the behavior of “thirty five-year-old grandmothers living in the projects?” (Gates says that when he became a tough lover he was following the example of his mentor Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka as though his and Soyinka’s situations were the same. As a result of Soyinka’s criticisms of a Nigerian dictator, he was jailed and his life constantly threatened.)

Prior to the late eighties, Gates’ tough love exhortations were aimed at racism in the halls of academe, but then he signed on to downtown feminist reasoning that racism was a black male problem. Karen Durbin, who hired him to write for The Village Voice, takes credit for inventing him as a “public intellectual.” He was then assigned by Rebecca Penny Sinkler, former editor of The New York Times Book Review, to do a snuff job on black male writers. In an extraordinary review, he seemed to conclude that black women writers were good, not because of their merit, but because black male writers were bad. This was a response to an article by Mel Watkins, a former book review editor, who on his way out warned of a growing trend that was exciting the publisher’s cash registers. Books that I would describe as high Harlequin romances, melodramas in which saintly women were besieged by cruel black male oppressors, the kind of image of the brothers promoted by confederate novelists Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon.

Gates dismissed a number of black writers as misogynists, including me, whom he smeared throughout the United States and Europe, but when Bill Clinton was caught exploiting a young woman, sexually, he told the Times that he would “go to the wall for this president.” Feminists like Gloria Steinem defended the president as well, even though for years they’d been writing about women as victims of male chauvinists with power, the kind of guys who used to bankroll Ms. magazine.

Not to say that portraits of black men should be uniformly positive–I’ve certainly introduced some creeps in my own work–but most of the white screenwriters, directors and producers who film this material–and the professors and critics who promote it– are silent about the abuses against women belonging to their own ethnic groups. Moreover, Alice Walker, Tina Turner and bell hooks have complained that in the hands of white script writers, directors and producers, the black males become more sinister straw men than they appear in the original texts.

There are big bucks to be made in promoting this culture. Two studios are currently fighting over the rights to a movie called “Push” about a black father who impregnates his illiterate Harlem daughter. A representative of one, according to the Times, said that the movie would provide both with “a gold mine of opportunity.”

As an example of the double standard by which blacks and whites are treated in American society, at about the same time that the Gate’s article on black misogyny was printed, there appeared a piece about Jewish American writers. Very few women were mentioned.

Gates was also under pressure for making himself the head black feminist in the words of feminist Michele Wallace as a result of his profiting from black feminist studies sales because, as she put it in the Voice, he had unresolved issues with his late mother, who was, according to Gates, a black nationalist. The black feminists wanted in. As a result, Gates invited them to join his Norton anthology project. The result was the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. One of the editors was the late feminist scholar Dr. Barbara Christian. She complained to me almost to the day that she died that she and the late Nellie Y. McKay, another editor, did all of the work while Gates took the credit. This seems to be Gates’ pattern. Getting others to do his work. Mother Jones magazine accused him of exploiting those writers who helped to assemble his Encarta Africana, of running an academic sweat shop and even avoiding affirmative action goals by not hiring blacks. Julian Brookes of Mother Jones wrote:

“Henry Louis Gates Jr. has never been shy about speaking up for affirmative action. Indeed, the prominent Harvard professor insists that he wouldn’t be where he is today without it. Odd, then, that when it came to assembling a staff to compile an encyclopedia of black history, Gates hired a group that was almost exclusively white. Of the up to 40 full-time writers and editors who worked to produce Encarta Africanaonly three were black. What’s more, Gates and co-editor K. Anthony Appiah rejected several requests from white staffers to hire more black writers. Mother Jones turned to Gates for an explanation of this apparent inconsistency.

“Did the staff members who expressed concern that the Africana team was too white have a point?”

Gates responded:

“It’s a disgusting notion that white people can’t write on black history–some of the best scholars of Africa are white. People should feel free to criticize the quality of the encyclopedia, but I will not yield one millimeter[to people who criticize the makeup of the staff]. It’s wrongheaded. Would I have liked there to be more African Americans in the pool? Sure. But we did the best we could given the time limits and budget.”

While his alliance with feminists gave Gates’ career a powerful boost, it was his Op ed for the Times blaming continued anti-Semitism on African Americans that brought the public intellectual uptown. It was then that Gates was ordained as the pre-eminent African American scholar when, if one polled African-American scholars throughout the nation, Gates would not haverankedamong the top twenty five. It would have to be done by secret ballot given the power that Gates’ sponsors have given him to make or break academic careers. As Quincy Troupe, editor of Black Renaissance Noirewould say, Gates is among those leaders who were “given to us,” not only by the white mainstream but also by white progressives. Amy Goodman carries on about Gates and Cornel West like the old Bobby Soxers used to swoon over Sinatra. Last week Rachel Maddow called Gates “the nation’s leading black intellectual.” Who pray tell is the nation’s leading white intellectual, Rachel? How come we can only have one? Some would argue that Gates hasn’t written a first rate scholarly work since 1989.

CNN gave Gates’ accusation against blacks as anti-Semites a worldwide audience and so when I traveled to Israel for the first time in the year, 2000, Israeli intellectuals asked me why American blacks hated Jews so. In print, I challenged Gate’s libeling of blacks as a group in my book, Another Day at the Front, because at the time of his Op-ed, the Anti-Defamation League issued a report that showed the decline of anti-Semitism among black Americans. I cited this report to Gates. He said that the Timespromised that there would be a follow up Op-ed about racism among American Jews. It never appeared. Barry Glassner was correct when he wrote in his “The Culture of Fear” that the whole Gates-generated black Jewish feud was hyped.

Under Tina Brown’s editorship at The New Yorker, Gates was hired to do hatchet jobs on Minister Louis Farrakhan and the late playwright August Wilson.

The piece on Wilson appeared after a debate between Robert Brustein and Wilson about Wilson’s proposal for a black nationalist theater. Gates took Brustein’s side of the argument. Shortly afterward, Brustein and Gates were awarded a million dollar grant from the Ford Foundation for the purpose of holding theatrical Talented Tenthdinnerparties at Harvard at a time when regional black theater was heading toward extinction. Tina Brown, a one-time Gates sponsor, is a post-racer like Gates. Like Andrew Sullivan, a Charles Murray supporter, she gets away with the most fatuous comments as a result of Americans being enthralled by a London accent. On the Bill Maher show, she said that issues of race were passé because the country has elected a black president. This woman lives in a city from which blacks and Latinos have been ethnically cleansed as a result the policies of Mayor Giuliani, a man who gets his talking points from The Manhattan Institute. Thousands of black and Hispanic New Yorkers have been stopped and frisked without a peep from Gates and his Harvard circle of post-racers such as Orlando Patterson.

Even the Bush administration admitted to the existence of racial profiling, yet Gates says that only after his arrest did he understand the extent of racial profiling, a problem for over two hundred years. Why wasn’t “the nation’s leading black intellectual” aware of the problem? His exact words following his arrest were “What it made me realize was how vulnerable all black men are, how vulnerable are all poor people to capricious forces like a rogue policemen.” Amazing! Shouldn’t “the nation’s leading black intellectual” be aware of writer Charles Chesnutt who wrote about racial profiling in 1905!

The Village Voicerecently exposed the brutality meted out to black and Hispanic prisoners at New York’s Riker’s Island and medical experiments that have damaged black children living in the city. Yet Maureen Dowdagrees withTina Brown, her fellow New Yorker, that because the president and his attorney general are black–in terms of racism–it’s mission accomplished. Makes you understand how the German citizens of Munich could go about their business while people were being gassed a few miles away. You can almost forgiveMarieAntoinette. She was a young woman in her thirties with not a single face lift operation.

What is it with this post-race Harvard elite? I got to see Dick Gregory and Mort Sahl perform in San Francisco the other night, the last of the great sixties comedians. During his routine, Gregory said that he’s sending his grand kids to black historical colleges because even though he lives near Harvard and can afford to send them there, he wouldn’t “send his dog to Harvard.” Maybe he is on to something.

When Queer Power became the vogue, Gates latched on to that movement, too. In an introduction to an anthology of Gay writings, Gates argued that Gays face more discrimination than blacks, which is disputed even by Charles Blow, Times statistician, who like Harvard’s Patterson and Gates, makes tough love to blacks exclusively. Recently, he reported that the typical target of a hate crime is black, but failed to identify the typical perpetrator of a hate crime as a young white male.

Moreover, what’s the percentage of Gays on death row? The percentage of blacks? Which group is more likely to be redlined by banks, a practice that has cost blacks billions of dollars in equity? Would Cambridge police havegiven two white Gays the problems that they gaveGates? Why no discussion of charges of Gay racism made by Marlon Riggs, Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde? How many unarmed white Gays have been murdered by the police? How many blacks? Undoubtedly, there are pockets of homophobia among blacks but not as much as that among other ethnic communities that I could cite. The best thing for blacks would be for Gays to get married and blacks should help in this effort, otherwise all of the oxygen on the left will continue to be soaked up by this issue.

For white Gays and Lesbians to compare their struggle to that of the Civil Rights movement is like Gates comparing his situation with that of WoleSoyinka’s. Moreover, Barbara Smith says that when she tried to join the Gay Millennial March on Washington, the leaders told her to get lost. They said they were intent upon convincing white Heterosexual America that “We’re just like you.”

Will the pre-late-80s Gates be resurrected as a result of what MSNBC and CNN commentator Touré calls Gates’ wake up call? (This is the same Toure, a brilliant fiction writer, who just about wrote a post-race manifesto for The New York Times Book Review, during which he dismissed an older generation of black activists as a bunch of “Jesses”.)

Will Gates let up on what Kofi Natambu the young editor of the Panopticon Review calls his “opportunism.” Will he re-think remarks like the one he made after the election of his friend, the tough love president Barack Obama? Gates said that he doubted that the election would end black substance abuse and unmarried motherhood?

Is it possible that things are more complicated than tough love sound bites which are designed to solicit more patronage? Will he reconsider the post-race neocon line of his blog, TheRoot.com, bankrolled by The Washington Post? Will he invite writers Carl Dix and Askia Toure, who represent other African American constituencies, as much as he prints the views of far right Manhattan Institute spokesperson and racial profiling denier, John McWhorter.

Will he continue to advertise shoddy blame-the-victim and black pathology sideshows like CNN’s “Black In America,” and “The Wire?” (Predictably CNN’s Anderson Cooper turned Gates’ controversy into a carnival act. The story was followed by one about Michael Jackson’s doctors. CNN is making so much money and raising its ratings so rapidly from black pathology stories that it’s beginning to give Black Entertainment Network a run for its money, so to speak.)

Predictably, the segregated media–the spare all white jury dominating the conversation about race as usual–gave the Cambridge cop the benefit of the doubt and the police unions backed him up. The police unions always back up their fellow officers even when they shoot unarmed black suspects in the back or, in the case of Papa Charlie James, an elderly San Francisco black man, while he was laying in bed. They back each other up and “testilie” all of the time.

Will Gates listen to his critics from whom he has been protected by powerful moneyed forces, which have given him the ability to make or break academic careers, preside over the decision-making of patronage and grant-awarding institutions. Houston A. Baker Jr.’s Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned The Ideals Of The Civil Rights Era offers mild criticisms of Gates, West and other black public intellectuals, who, according to him, are “embraced by virtue of their race transcendent ideology.” His book went from the warehouse to the remainder shelves. The Village Voicepromised two installments of courageous muckraking pieces about Gates written by novelist, playwright and poet Thulani Davis; part two never appeared. Letters challenging Gates by one of Gates’ main critics at Harvard, Dr. Martin Kilson, have been censored. Kilson refers to Gates as “the master of the intellectual dodge.” And even when Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell at The Nation’s blogdefied the 24-hour news cycle that has depicted Gates, a black nationalist critic, as an overnight black nationalist– she calls him “apolitical”–she had to pull her punches. As an intellectual, she has more depththanall of the white mainstream and white progressive media’s selected “leaders of black intellection,” among whom are post-modernist preachers who can spew rhetoric faster than the speed of light.

It remains to be seen whether Gates, who calls himself an intellectual entrepreneur, will now use his “wake up call” to lead a movement that will challenge racial disparities in the criminal justice system. A system that is rotten to the core, where whites commit the overwhelming majority of the crimes, while blacks and Hispanics do the time. A prison system where torture and rape are regular occurrences and where in some states the conditions are worse than at Gitmo. California prisons hospitals are so bad that they have been declared unconstitutional and a form of torture, over the objections of Attorney General Jerry Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who leased his face to the rich and was on television the other day talking about how rough they have it. A man who is channeling his hero the late Kurt Waldheim’s attitudes toward the poor and disabled.

Gates can help lead the fight so that there will be mutual respect between law enforcement and minorities instead of their calling us niggers all the time and being Marvin Gaye’s “trigger happy” policemen. Not all of them but quite a few. Or Gates can coast along. Continue to maintain that black personal behavior, like not turning off the TV at night, is at the root of the barriers facing millions of black Americans. Will return to the intellectual rigor espoused by his hero W.E.B Dubois or will he continue to act as a sort of black intellectual Charles Van Doren? An entertainer. (An insider at PBS told me that the network is demanding that Gates back up his claims about the ancestry of celebrities with more solid proofs.)

Gates has discussed doing a documentary about racial profiling. I invite him to cover a meeting residents of my Oakland ghetto neighborhood have with the police each month. (Most of our problems incidentally are caused by the off-springs of two family households. Suburban gun dealers who arm gang leaders. The gang leader on our block isn’t black! An absentee landlord who owns a house where crack operations take place.) He can bring Bill Cosby with him. He’ll find that the problems of inner citizens are more complex than “thirty five year-old grandmothers living in the projects” and rappers not pulling up their pants and that racism remains in the words of the great novelist John A. Williams, “an inexorable force.”

Finally, in his 2002 Jefferson lecture, delivered at the Library of Congress, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., during remarks about the 18th-Century poet Phillis Wheatleyinwhich he excoriated the attitudes of her critics in the Black Arts movement, one more time, ended his lecture with: “We can finally say: Welcome home, Phillis; welcome home.”

If Gate’s ceases his role as just another tough lover and an “intellectual entrepreneur,” and takes a role in ending racial traffic and retail profiling, and police home invasions, issues that have lingered since even more Chesnutt’s time, we can say, “Welcome home, Skip; welcome home.”

Ishmael Reedis the publisher of Konch. His new book, “Mixing It Up, Taking On The Media Bullies” was published by De Capo.