Robert F. Kennedy, January 4, 1968
WHAT DO WE STAND FOR? THE LIBERATION OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT
Robert F. Kennedy
Presidential Nominee; United States Senator (D-NY); former U.S. Attorney General; Author, The Enemy Within: The McClellan Committee's Crusade Against Jimmy Hoffa and Corrupt Labor Unions
Mr. Chairman, I want to say that I'm doing my own individual best to make my state the largest state. Distinguished guests at the head table and ladies and gentlemen, I'm delighted to be here, I'm delighted to come and have an opportunity to visit with all of you. To many friends, as I look out in this audience, I think of the poll that a national business magazine took recently of a group of 400 businessmen of who their favorite political figure was in the United States and who they would like to see run for president, and I received one vote. I'm the only politician in the United States that can take all his supporters to lunch at one time. But I think, as I look at you, and I think of the Senate and how much I enjoy the Senate of the United States and all my colleagues there. I was ill a short time ago and they sent me a message through the majority leader. They said they hoped I would recover, and the vote was 43 to 41. But I'm pleased to be here. I'm out here to hold some hearings on Indian affairs and to ensure that there is no effort to and no success in the "Draft Kennedy" movement, taking place here in the state of California. I think my brother, Teddy, is much too young to run for president of the United States, but I'm pleased to be here. I'm pleased to be back to The Commonwealth Club.
Recently a young poet was jailed for inciting a demonstration against the verdict of a court, which had found another young agitator guilty of various disruptive activities. At his trial, the young poet declared that freedom of speech and of the press is freedom to criticize. Just as the rights of the Communist Party were protected by the United States Supreme Court, he contended, so his rights to demonstrate must also be protected. He's defied the court and he declared his intention to again organize demonstrations as soon as he was free. The defendant was not from Berkeley, or from San Francisco State. He was a young Russian named Vladimir Badovsky. The trial took place in Moscow and the record was smuggled to the West by Pavol Litinov, the grandson of one of the oldest heroes of the Bolshevik Revolution.
This is a remarkable series of events. One American court decision, one small aspect of the freedom that we take for granted here in this country, cut through all the suspicions and all of the lies, all of the propaganda of the Communist state, it inspired these young men to risk years of hard labor in Siberia and to help subvert the vast power of the once unquestionable domination of the Communist government. In another sense, however, it is not so remarkable at all. From the beginning, we have known, as George Washington said, that the preservation of liberty is finally staked on the American experiment. We would be, as Jefferson said, the best hope of all mankind. And so it has proven everywhere I have traveled around this globe, in great world capitals, but also in tiny villages. I have seen men looking to the principles, far up into the very words of our history, to find inspiration in their own struggles for freedom. Even Ho Chi Minh, who began the Vietnamese war against the French, he began by quoting not Marx, not Lenin, but the American Declaration of Independence.
Now we are in a year in which we elect a president of the United States; it is a year of debate and of argument, of political battles and personal clash. The most urgent problems of our own society, from the war in Vietnam to the smoldering discontent in our cities, will be weighed and analyzed, and solutions offered. Yet this is a year in which America must examine not only the candidates, but also the country - must ask not only who will lead us, but also where we wish to be led. We must look not only to immediate crises, but also to the nature and the direction of the civilization that we wish to build, that we wish to take part in. The great national debate must not become a contest of only particular programs. We need discussion, we need understanding of the most basic and far-reaching goals of American civilization. But we have been told by cabinet officers and commentators, by journalists and citizens, that America is deep in the malaise of spirit, and dividing Americans from one another by their age, their views, and the color of their skin. We have fought great wars, made unprecedented sacrifices at home and abroad, made prodigious efforts to achieve personal and national wealth. Yet we ourselves are uncertain of what we have achieved and whether we like what we have accomplished.
Now demonstrators shout down government officials and the government drafts protestors; anarchists threaten to burn the country down, and some have begun to try. While tanks have patrolled American cities and machine guns have been fired at American children, a poet proclaims that throat-cutting time is growing nigh and we're going to be ready while a National Guard general speaks calmly of plans to use heavy weapons in the city of New York. Our young people turn from the Peace Corps and public commitment of the early 1960s to lives of disengagement and sometimes despair, turned on with drugs and turning off from America. Truly, we seem to fulfill the vision of Yeats: "things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." Entangled abroad and embattled at home, America searches for answers, not just to specific programs, but to the great question, What do we stand for? Where do we want to go? Do we stand for our wealth? Is that what is important about America? Is that what is significant about the United States? Asked better perhaps, are we really so wealthy?
Half a million American children suffer from serious malnutrition, and I have seen of them, some of them, I have seen personally some of them starving in the state of Mississippi, their stomachs bloated, their bones and their bodies scarred, many of them retarded for life. Up to 80 percent of some Indian tribes are unemployed. And the suicide rate among the high school children is shockingly high, dozens of times the national average. For the black American of the urban ghetto, we really do not know what its unemployment rate is, because from one-fifth to one-third of these adult men in these areas have literally dropped out from sight, uncounted and unknown by all of the agencies of government, drifting about the cities, without hope and without family and without a future. By these standards, we are not so rich a country. Truly we have a great gross national product, almost 800 billion dollars, but can that be the criterion by which we judge this country? Is it enough? For the gross national product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for the people who break them. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife and television programs, which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. And the gross national product, the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither wit nor courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our duty to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America, except why we are proud to be Americans. Is it then that, is it then our wealth or is it our military power that we stand for in the United States?
Beyond our borders, we have become the greatest force in the world. Some have even spoken of us as the new imperial power. Even if we should desire such a role, it is no longer possible, as the history of the last 20 years has so unmistakably shown. The day has passed when a country can successfully rule distant lands by force. The issue for us is whether we will live as an island in the midst of a hostile world community or whether we will be joined with other independent nations in search of common goals. We must understand this, because so much depends on what is going to happen in the future as to whether this concept is clear to us. Other countries will associate themselves with us, not because they will be forced to, but because they find in our acts and in our policies a common interest and an understanding of their own ideals and their own aspirations; an understanding of the values that they can respect and admire; an understanding of the values that they can strive to emulate; thus consideration of our wealth and our power brings us full circle to the question with which we began: What do we stand for? Nor should we be surprised, for this is the most powerful and constant lesson of all of history.
The wars and the conquests, the politics and the intrigues of state are soon covered by the years. The triumph of Athens, the empire of Rome, the march of armies, the names of governors - all these did leave some imprint, but it is the ideas and the statutes, the plays of Sophocles and the philosophy of Plato that endure most vividly shaping and enriching our lives to this very day. The mastery of transient events, our accomplishments, our victories will ultimately matter far less than what we contribute - all of us - in this country to the liberation of the human spirit. That is what we have always stood for in the past, that it is what we must stand for at the moment. That is what has given us our unique position, our unprecedented strength. That is why, in fact, we are proud to be Americans.
For two hundred years, America has meant a vision of national independence and personal freedom and justice between men. But whether it will continue to mean this will depend on the answers to difficult and complex problems. It will depend on whether we sit content in our storehouses, dieting while others starve, buying eight million new cars a year while most of the world goes without shoes. It will depend on whether we act against crime and its causes and wipe the stain of violence from this land. It will depend on whether we can halt and can reverse the tide of ever greater centralization in Washington and return the power to the American people in their local communities. It will depend on whether we can turn the private genius of industry to the service of great public ends, using comprehensive tax incentives to help industry create the jobs, train the workers and build the housing, which all of the efforts of the federal government have, so far, failed to do. It will depend on whether we still hold, as the framers proclaimed, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, or whether we will act as if no other nations existed, flaunting our power and flaunting our wealth against the judgment and desires of neutrals and allies alike.
It will depend on whether men still believe, as de Gaulle said at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, that this great nation, the United States, does not act in small ways. But whether like Athens of old, we forfeit sympathy and support alike-and ultimately our own security-in the single-minded of pursuit of our own goals and our own purposes. These are the questions to debate in this election year. This is the true agenda, which faces not just the contenders for office but all of the American people. This is what we must really examine in this election year; to meet and master these challenges will take great vision and will take great persistence. But that seems to me to be the responsibility of the great political parties of this country. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln just 100 years ago, we must know where we are and whether we are going before determining how to get there.
In this, the most dangerous and yet the most challenging period in our history, this is what is so desperately needed. Vietnam, the crisis of our cities - these matters can and will be resolved. But the larger question of whether we have advanced our civilization and the cause of freedom will depend on our own morality and our philosophy and our commitment to our ideals and to our principles. These precepts must guide us again as the great debate begins or if we do have the will, the vision, and the courage to create and to hold fast, to be shaping ideals which men follow, not from the enslavement of their bodies, but from the compulsions of their own hearts. If we do this, then we know that men will stand with us at home and abroad among our friends and even in the camp of our adversaries. For it is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands matched to reason and principle that will determine our destiny. This is the pride, this is the pride and even the arrogance of America, but it's the experience and it is the truth. And, in any case, it is the only way that we can live. I thank you.
| Henry Louis Gates Jr. - January 28, 2004
AMERICA BEHIND THE COLOR LINE
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Chair, Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University; Author, America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans
W.E.B. Du Bois: the greatest black intellectual of all time. Our generation of black intellectuals and writers Cornel West, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Manning Marable and Claude Steele up at Stanford you could add us all up together, put us in a Cuisinart and pour us out, and we would not be worthy of tying W.E.B. Du Bois' shoelaces. W.E.B. Du Bois was the man. He woke up in 1900 and he predicted, famously, that the problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line. That turned out to be true.
At the beginning of the 21st century, I wanted to ask and attempt to answer the same question: What will the problem of the 21st century be? But unlike the lordly Du Bois, who sat at his desk up in Harlem and just pronounced the answer, I wanted to travel all throughout the United States, interviewing a cross section of the African-American community, and address the question the following way: Where are we, as a people, 35 years after the brutal assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King? Have we progressed? Have we gone far enough? How much further do we have to go? I interviewed dozens of people from the rich and powerful and famous to the homeless, the not-so-powerful, the impoverished, the infamous, the imprisoned. I interviewed Colin Powell, Vernon Jordan, Russell Simmons, Alicia Keys, Maya Angelou. I did a segment on black Hollywood; I interviewed Chris Tucker and Bernie Mac. I also interviewed single heads of households on the South Side of Chicago. I went to Cook County Jail and interviewed prisoners. I interviewed people who formerly were drug dealers, who were now reformed drug dealers and most probably will fall off the wagon and be drug dealers again. I wanted to ask black America in every possible shape and size and even color, Where are we as a people? I was lucky enough to have PBS and BBC give me a film crew and let me travel around the country, interviewing people, and the result's a four-hour film series called America Beyond the Color Line. Part one, "Ebony Towers," is about the new black middle class that's emerged since Dr. King was killed in 1968.
Part two is about the amazing phenomenon of black people from the North reverse-migrating to the South. You could look through all of the annals of African-American literature, and you'll find tens of thousands of references to black people in the South following the North Star or following the Drinking Gourd which was a metaphor for the Big Dipper, which involves the North Star but you will not find one that says, "Black man or black woman, find your freedom by heading back to Mississippi." But in the 1990s, far more black people from the North started migrating back to the South. When I was growing up in the '50s, the South was a litter of crosses and the corpses of black men. Why were these people upper-middle-class black people moving back to Atlanta, into all-black neighborhoods, million-dollar homes, all-black country clubs, all-black swimming pools? I wanted to ask them, "Is this what Dr. King died for? If Dr. King came back, would he like this? Or would he not like this?"
Part three is called "Black Hollywood." I shot this in the wake of Denzel Washington and Halle Berry getting Academy Awards and Sidney Poitier getting a lifetime achievement award from the Academy. I wanted to go to Hollywood and ask, "Has racism disappeared in Hollywood because we have so many black actors on the A-list?" And the answer to that question is: No, racism has not disappeared in Hollywood.
Finally, I wanted to go to the inner city. I chose the Robert Taylor Homes on the South Side of Chicago. The Robert Taylor Homes, set up in the early 1960s, symbolized all that was supposed to be good about public housing. My film crew was one of the last in the Robert Taylor Homes, because the problems had become so severe that the city of Chicago decided that they couldn't be fixed, that they had to tear them down. I wanted to record that history, that movement over a 40-year period from the time the Robert Taylor Homes represented optimism and hope, to the time that the Robert Taylor Homes became synonymous with poverty and the self-perpetuation of poverty by a significant segment of the African-American community.
Yale in 1969
I went to Yale University. I was one of 96 black men and women to go up in September of 1969. By contrast, the class of '66 at Yale had six black men to graduate. Was there a genetic blip in the race? All of a sudden there were 90 smart black men and women who existed in 1969 who hadn't existed in 1966? Of course not. We got in because of affirmative action. We were the affirmative action crossover generation. It doesn't mean that we weren't qualified to get into Yale; it's just that we couldn't have gotten into Yale before because there were strict race quotas on the number of black boys Yale didn't go co-ed till 1969 who were allowed to enter. I wouldn't have gotten into Yale, definitely, without affirmative action, no matter what my scores were. Why is that?
My dad for 37 years worked two jobs to put me and my brother through college. Daddy would go to work at 6:30 in the morning, and at 3:30 in the afternoon, the paper mill whistle would blow, and we would get out of school, because basically it was a company town. He'd come home and wash up. We'd have our evening meal at four, and at 4:30 he'd go to his second job as a janitor at the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company. He'd get home about 7:30 or 8:00. We'd do our homework, then we'd watch TV, and then we'd go to bed.
No matter how intelligent I may or may not be, I would not have had the class profile within the African-American community to be one of those six black boys who went to Yale. Look at the biographies of the fathers of those black boys one's father was a doctor; one was a lawyer; one was an undertaker; one worked at the postal office; and one was a numbers runner. That put you in the black upper class in the old days. I was stone working class, so it means I wouldn't have been allowed to make it through the filters within the race behind closed doors behind what Du Bois called "the veil." Affirmative action was a class escalator when it started, as well as a race integrator. For me, who's benefited so much from affirmative action, to stand at the gate it would be disingenuous for me to say I'm not a gate-keeper and keep out women or other people of color would be to be a hypocrite as big as Justice Clarence Thomas. I am not going to be that kind of person.
We all were affirmative action babies. Imagine what I looked like: I had a two-foot-high afro, a closet full of dashikis I looked like a ball of black cotton candy walking down the street. Cornel West's afro looked like a crew cut next to my afro. We were going to be the revolutionary vanguard for our people; to reclaim W.E.B. Du Bois' notion of the talented tenth, what he called "the college-bred negro." When Du Bois wrote that essay in 1900, it was probably the talented oneth, in terms of black people with a four-year college degree. In fact, our people only hit double digits with a four-year college degree in the 1990s, and today only 17 percent of us have a bachelor's degree. But we were going to be the vanguard. We were going to show Du Bois that he had been wrong, that you could produce a talented tenth that would be socially responsible. We were going to reach back in the ghetto and pull all the brothers and sisters whether kicking and screaming or not to drag them into historically white, elite institutions, symbolized by places like Mother Yale. We called it "the Yale plantation." And we were the nouveau black people, coming to change the shape of the plantation.
At the end of my first year at Yale, when we had all these black people there, we shut Yale down. Remember on May Day of 1970, the whole country went on strike? Nixon and Kissinger invaded Cambodia. After that was Kent State, then Jackson State. Two weeks before at Yale, we went on strike. The strike was led by Kurt Schmoke, black man used to be mayor of Baltimore a Rhodes Scholar, became my hero. We persuaded all of our colleagues to go on strike, because the Black Panther Party was being persecuted by the police. Bobby Seale was on trial in New Haven, and we persuaded Kingman Brewster, the president of Yale, to issue a statement saying that he was skeptical of the ability of a black revolutionary to get a fair trial in any court in the United States. Of course, it cost him his job, but it led to the strike at Yale. And so all these revolutionaries came to Yale, and their lawyers, like Charles Garry, who defended the Panthers, and William Kunstler; David Hilliard got out of jail, and he came. Huey Newton was in jail, Eldridge Cleaver was in exile, but everybody else was there. Imagine this: 5,000 people they were white and then the 96 black kids at Yale. We waited till they were seated, and we all walked in, march step. We were bad. Man, we had our dashikis, our 'fros were all teased out and the fists on your chests and all that stuff. Some of us had berets on, like the Panthers, some of us those long black leather jackets. We walked in, lock step, sat down. Jean Genet, the French playwright, revolutionary, had been flown over from Paris to address us. This was the revolution. It was happening, right before our very eyes! And he had this beautiful woman who was translating, because he spoke no English. Officially we were supposed to be learning Swahili and all that stuff, but I made a mental note, Learn French. Jean Genet gives this great stirring speech corporate capitalism was in its final days; Western capitalism was being brought down. Marx predicted it would collapse; it was collapsing. And the revolution was being led not only by the great American negro people, as he said at that time, but by the lumpenproletariat from the inner cities, the natural leaders of whom were the Black Panther Party who, for self defense, were being unjustly imprisoned, persecuted by that fascist J. Edgar Hoover, etc., etc., etc. We were jumping up and cheering. This was our moment. Then he said he wanted to make a final address, a direct comment to us, the new black students at Yale. He looked at us, and he said, If there was a revolution and he was convinced there was a revolution it would occur in spite of the fact that we had accepted admission into Yale University. And we all looked at each other and said, "That woman must have got that translation wrong."
We were nouveau race traitors. We were the new Uncle Toms. The system was smart enough to adapt just enough to save itself. And it was adapting through the creation of this new concept called affirmative action, and the 96 black people sitting there, in spite of their afros, their dashikis, their berets and their black leather jackets, were tools or pawns of the system, diffusing the genuine revolutionary fervor of the lumpenproletariat, represented by its true leaders, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. We were flabbergasted, man! Five thousand white people are looking at us, you know? And we'd been jumping up and down with our fists and stuff. Then he quoted Herbert Marcuse, the great Marxist philosopher. Genet cites an essay Herbert Marcuse had written in 1958, in which Marcuse predicted that the principal outcome of a successful civil rights movement would be the creation of a new black middle class, and that would be it. Things then would go back to normal. How cynical! We thought, What did this Frenchman know? Let him go back to Paris. We got up, tried to save the day and moved on with our business. But that thought haunted us.
Putney Swope
How many of you saw the film Putney Swope? Who were our heroes? Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner, Thurgood Marshall not so much Dr. King, to be honest. Dr. King had fallen out of favor with the young, with the revolutionary we were Stokely Carmichaelites. You know, Martin Luther King was old. His day had passed. No. We wanted the revolution. And Stokely was going to lead us. But Putney Swope? The first blacksploitation film. Robert Downey Sr., even a young Mel Brooks is in this film. It opens, the board of directors room at a Madison Avenue advertising firm. One token negro in a three-piece suit, sitting at the board meeting. Everybody else, of course, is white. Chairman of the board is giving this rallying speech about making money very, very greedy speech has a heart attack, falls face down. All the white guys jump up, pick his pockets, push his body out of the way and call for the election on the spot of a new CEO. You do it by secret ballot, of course. They count the votes, and the man says, "Um. We have to count the votes again." They count the votes again. Then he stands up and announces the vote had been nine to two, nine votes for Putney Swope. The camera pans in on one white guy, and he says, "I thought nobody would vote for him but me." Next scene: Putney comes in, first day at work, he got rid of his three-piece suit, has on military fatigues, looks like a Black Panther, has a little military hat on, fires all the white people in the advertising agency, changes the name to The Truth and Soul Advertising Agency, hires inner-city black people and revolutionizes the advertising industry by mounting new approaches to the marketing of products, such as Victrola Cola, Ethereal Cereal and my favorite Face Off Pimple Cream. Putney Swope amasses $156 million in the next six months. He becomes famous on the cover of all the magazines. He's descended on by all the black revolutionaries, four guys representing the four major streams of the black movement: there's a Black Panther figure; there's a cultural nationalist from Maulana Karenga and Amiri Baraka; there's a Stokely Carmichael figure for Black Power; and then there's a Whitney Young figure from the National Urban League. And they all have their stock slogans: the Panther guy says, "We need power for the people." The Stokely Carmichael guy says that "Black power is the only way." The guy from the cultural nationalists says, "Violence is a cleansing force." The hapless suited figure from the National Urban League, the Whitney Young figure, says, "Violence will not help our people; violence will get us nowhere; violence will not get us a job." One of the Panther figures looks at him and says, "Yeah, violence might not get us a job, but it will certainly eliminate the competition." They all then unite in one thing: they're only there to hustle Putney Swope. They want money, and Putney Swope throws them out, says they're all frauds and the real revolution will come by penetrating the system and transforming the system from the inside.
Putney Swope was our secret hero. What we wanted our self-styled revolutionary vanguard that integrated Yale in large numbers was to go in the system and transform it from the inside, eliminating racism and fundamentally changing the class structure of the African-American community. Thirty-five years later, where are we?
Since 1968 since that day Martin Luther King was killed the black middle class has almost quadrupled, which is a wonderful thing. But at the same time, the percentage of black children living at or beneath the poverty line is 40 percent. You know what the figure was the day Martin Luther King died? Forty percent.
Was Herbert Marcuse right? Was the principal outcome of the civil rights movement and affirmative action the production of a new black middle class or not? For the African-American community, in other words, it's the best of times, but it is the worst of times. In 1990, there were 2,280,000 black men in prison, on probation or on parole. How many black men got a college degree in that year? Twenty-three thousand. That's a ratio of 99 to one. Do you know what the ratio that year was for white males in prison, on probation and parole versus those who got college degrees? Six to one. In Chicago right now, 45 percent of all black males between the ages of 20 and 24 are both out of school and out of work, and most who are out of school didn't finish school, or if they finished school, they are essentially functionally illiterate. Sixty-nine percent of all of the black households in Chicago are headed by single mothers. The average lifespan for a black man in Chicago is 59. And in any given week in Chicago, only 45 percent of the members of the African-American community are gainfully employed.
Structural & Behavioral Causes
When I traveled the country, interviewing this cross section of the African-American community, we learned that the causes of our poverty are both structural and behavioral. Structural you cannot enslave a people for three centuries, followed by a century of de jure segregation and then cure it with 35 years of affirmative action and post-civil rights entitlement legislation. Institutional racism is a fundamental aspect of the American society, and our people have suffered disproportionately from that. In addition, the economic structure began to change in the 1960s; the traditional way of moving from the no class to the working class and the working class to the middle class was through factories in the cities that's why we went to the cities in the first place, and why all the white immigrants did it. What happened in the '60s and the '70s? Factories moved south, shut down in the cities. First they moved to the southern part of the United States, then they moved south of the border. Now they're dispersed wherever people can most efficiently exploit a large labor force. The traditional way of moving up the economic scale in America disappeared.
How do we address these structural problems? We need a federal jobs program that will create meaningful job opportunities for those most impoverished in this society, whether they're black, white, Hispanic or whatever. We need to give people hope in the system again; to make them feel that it's worthwhile for them to stay in school, to work hard, to take a job training program, because they're going to get a meaningful job in a 21st century, highly technological, global economy and not flipping burgers down at McDonald's. I interviewed an ex-drug dealer who was making $6,000 a day dealing drugs. He realized he was headed directly to Cook County Jail. He decided he didn't want to spend the rest of his life in jail, even for $6,000 a day. He just finished his first semester in college. When I interviewed him, he was working at Popeye's. His name is Lyndell. I said, "Lyndell, may I ask you how much money do you make a month working at Popeye's?" He said, "$600 a month." I said, "Do you ever think about that $6,000 a day that you used to make selling drugs?" He said, "Are you crazy? I think about it all day long while I'm flipping them burgers down at Popeye's." He is the exception. Who among us could resist the lure of $6,000 a day of ostensibly easy money, if you didn't feel that you had a stake in the system, if you didn't feel that you could be successful if you stayed in school?
We need school reform. I went to Boston English High School last Black History Month, an all-school assembly. I asked the teacher (I was in school, right?) if I could go to the bathroom, which I thought was the appropriate thing to do. She said, "Oh certainly, Dr. Gates. It will only take ten minutes." I said, "No Ma'am, you don't understand. I have to go to the bathroom." She said, "No. You don't understand. You cannot go to the bathroom without a police escort. And it will take ten minutes for the policeman to be here." Our schools have become nightmares. How could any of us have learned what we learned when we were growing up if we hadn't had order in our schools? We need to establish a safe learning environment for our children. We need to change the way taxes are distributed for our schools. The money spent per student should be exactly the same in the poorest, blackest, most-Hispanic neighborhood as allocated per student in the richest, whitest suburb. This is only fair.
The Department of Education needs to look at programs that are working in our public schools. I'll tell you briefly about three.
Many of my friends are Jewish, and they would tell me about how horrible Hebrew school was. I'd think, Horrible? Man, that Hebrew school sounds like a pretty good thing. How come we can't have Hebrew school? If Jewish people had to wait on the state, on the public school system, for the perpetuation of Jewish culture and the Hebrew language, there wouldn't be Jewish culture, and there wouldn't be Hebrew language. Why can't we use our churches and our mosques to start after-school programs that teach African-American history and culture? Why can't we go around the public school system? I got a $500,000 grant from the Markle Foundation, wired the Reverend Eugene Rivers' church in the inner city in Roxbury. We have an after-school program that teaches black history, African history; they learn about the black pharaohs of the Nile, and learn computer skills using Encarta Africana. It is a runaway success. How come our churches can't do that, like the Jewish people did through Hebrew school? Of course they can.
We need to transform our great black sororities and fraternities into self-esteem/black self-help factories. We need to begin to teach our people about entrepreneurial opportunities. We need to use these secular and sacred organizations to sponsor what you might think of as the new face of the civil rights movement, which will stress our traditional values of education. When I was growing up in the '50s, the blackest thing you could be was Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King. The blackest thing you could be was a doctor or a lawyer not a basketball player or a football player. What's happened to our people? Learning the ABCs, staying in school, getting straight As was firing a bullet straight into George Wallace's racist white heart that's what we were taught in school. My father must have told me a thousand times, "Get all the education you can, boy, because no white racist can take it away from you." Our people have lost that. I read the results of a poll from The Washington Post that interviewed inner-city black kids, and it said, "List things white." The three most prevalent answers: getting straight As in school, speaking standard English and visiting the Smithsonian. Had anybody said anything like this when we were growing up, they would have smacked you upside your head and checked you into an insane asylum. Far too many members of our community have internalized our own oppression.
The other reason our people are still impoverished I said that half of the reason was for structural causes is because we need a revolution in attitude and behavior within the African-American community itself. No white racist makes you get pregnant when you're 16 years old. We do not have time for this form of behavior anymore. It is killing our people. No white racist makes you drop out of school. No white racist makes you not do your homework. No white racist makes you equate academic or intellectual success with being white. If George Wallace and Bull Connor and Orval Faubus had sat down, in their wildest drunken bourbon fantasies in 1960 and said, "How can we continue to control them niggras?" as they would have said one of them would have said, "You know, we could persuade them to have babies in their teens, do crack cocaine, run drugs and equate education not with being Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, but with being white. Then we'll have them." Ladies and gentlemen, that's what's happened to our people. We have lost the blackest aspect of the black tradition. Frederick Douglass famously said, The slave had "to steal a little learning" from the white man. We've all been stealing a little learning. We have all been embracing education as if the collective life of the African-American people depended on it, until recently. And now, for far too many of our people, getting an education is something alien to our tradition. It's much easier to become a professional basketball player. I love the fact that so many black people have done well, but here's the reality: 1990 census 20,000 black lawyers, 14,000 black doctors, 5,600 black dentists. You know how many black professional athletes? (Remember, there are 35 million black Americans.) Twelve hundred black professional athletes in all sports. It's easier to be a black brain surgeon than to make it into the NBA, but somehow our people are like Jimmy the Greek they think we have an extra basketball gene. When I was a professor at Duke, my house was near a black neighborhood that had a basketball court that was lit. I go to bed at midnight, I pass it, it would be packed. I wake up, go to work at nine o'clock in the morning, it would be packed. I don't know if they played basketball all night long, because I would be asleep. My daddy said, "Ain't this a damn shame. If our people studied calculus like we study basketball, we would be running MIT."
We also have to stop scapegoating other people who we should be emulating. Homophobia is rampant in the African-American community. We have to stand up as leaders and fight homophobia in the black community; fight sexism and misogyny in the black community; fight anti-immigrant feeling in the black community. Do you know that 75 percent of my black students at Harvard are of West Indian descent? You know what that figure was when I was an undergrad at Yale? Ninety-nine percent of us had four African-American grandparents. Now, of the black kids at Harvard, only 25 percent have four African-American grandparents, 75 percent are second-generation West Indian, and that leads to a lot of scapegoating. We need to be more like black immigrants from the West Indies and stop scapegoating them.
Finally, we have to stop scapegoating the Jewish people. We need to emulate the best aspects of Jewish culture. Leaders have to stand up and say, "The Jews are not our problem. The Jews did not run the slave trade. Thirteen rabbis do not rule the world and sit there and decide that black people are going to be impoverished. This is rubbish." Why should we do this? We do this for the Jewish people? No, we have to do it for ourselves. You cannot get the solutions to your problems straight until you understand the nature of the problem itself. You have to understand what the target is, and the target is not Haitians, it's not West Indians, it's not gay people, and it's certainly not the members of the Jewish community.
Our goal, in sum, is to change the bell curve of class within the African-American community. We need the same percentage of black poor as white poor; the same percentage of black rich as white rich; the same percentage of black people in the middle class as white people and black people in the working class as white people. And we can only do this with a two-prong attack, addressing the structural causes of poverty on the one hand and the individual behavioral, attitudinal problems that we are causing for ourselves. We have internalized our own oppression. We are perpetuating our own poverty, and leaders whether it is Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Colin Powell, Louis Farrakhan, whoever have to have the courage to stand up, join together and lead a moral revolution within the African-American community. Because if we don't, the class divide within the African-American community is destined to be permanent. I, for one, will not be content until we do something about that, because Martin Luther King did not die so that some of us would make it and most of us would be left behind in the inner city of hopelessness and despair.
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