Henry Luis Gates - Continued

By officially bestowing the "HNIC" title on the hapless Gates, the magazine has ignited a swirling controversy in the Boston area. In the process it has split the Tom community down the middle, with some saying that the magazine was right and others calling for a retraction and apology. The Rev. Eugene Rivers, a blustering publicity-seeking Boston preacher and so-called critic of Gates (according to the Boston Magazine article), has come out in defense of the magazine. The Rev. Charles Stith, a bow tie wearing preacher and ambassador designate to Tanzania, has emerged as a major supporter of Gates. Like Rivers, Stith heads an organization with a long name and less substance.

The press has carried photographs of both men squaring off in an unseemly shouting match for and against Gates. Gates himself, meanwhile, has maintained a strategically low profile, letting his surrogates do battle on his behalf. Among these is Professor Alvin Poussaint of Harvard University, a respected Black psychiatrist who ought to know better. Joining Poussaint was a Negro lady who recently edited an anti-Minister Farrakhan book for the Harvard Negro crowd. If anyone else was called an HNIC by the other folk I'd be upset, but I am not going to lose any sleep over what they call Skip Gates. They can call him anything but a son of God, as far as I am concerned.

First of all, he more or less calls himself an HNIC in the very same interview. He uses the "n" word ("nigger," in case you do not know what I am talking about) at least five times in the article. Some of these references are to himself. This is in addition to a couple "bullshits," one "shit" and one "big-dick motherfuckers." The poor lady interviewing him probably had to wash out her ears when she left his newly renovated twenty-five million dollar office. What do you do with a kneegrow who calls himself a nigger in an interview with a white magazine? Are you supposed to defend him when the other folks call him inside the name he gives himself? And then there is his wife (a white lady according to the interview). She resorts to the "f" word (yes, the one with four letters in it), in the same article, in a reference to "this f...ing little suburb" in which the Gates' were happily ensconced until some old lady called their daughter--yes, you guessed it--a nigger.

Boston Magazine probes Gates' career with relentless diligence. In high school he was snubbed by little white Linda Hoffman who he "desperately" wanted to make his girlfriend. With his "first real girlfriend" he became one of the first Negroes to come out of the closet into an interracial relationship in his neck of the West Virginia woods. He celebrated receipt of the MacArthur "genius" grant by buying a set of Amos and Andy videos. He takes colleague Anthony Appiah and his "English looking" steady boyfriend along from job to job (they have been together as students or professors at Cambridge, Yale, Cornell, Duke and Harvard Universities). At Harvard he was befriended by Professor Peter Gomes, "a black, openly gay conservative Republican and Anglophile" theologian.

Brer Gates is the most pristine example we have in the world today of a classic HNIC. He was invented by the other folk, as the article makes plain. "The New Yorker," says Boston Magazine, "effectively anointed Gates... premier black intellectual in the United States" as well as "chief interpreter of the black experience for white America." The man, they say, is "an unapologetic elitist" who fancies himself the heir to W.E.B.DuBois' legacy as chief honcho of the "talented tenth."

Whenever the other folks have wanted anybody to beat the rest of the race over the head with, Brer Gates has been on the scene, like an HNIC machine. They gave him an unprecedented full page op-ed in the New York Times to attack the Nation of Islam's Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. This op-ed was actually typeset in the shape of a Star of David. There is no evidence that Gates even read the book, but he pulled together some platitudes attacking it anyway. When Black folk in Toronto were arrested protesting the revival of the racist Broadway musical Showboat, they flew Gates up to take the Jewish line against the Black protesters. (In the original Broadway production Paul Robeson, who the press is crying crocodile tears over these days, sang "Niggers All Work on the Mississippi" in the show's hit song, "Ole Man River.")

In a Boston Globe interview, Boston Magazine's editor says he knows very well what HNIC means. The moral of this story is that selling out does not guarantee respect from those who purchase your dignity, however many Mercedes they let you drive, and however many $890,000.00 houses they let you live in. After they buy your self-respect they themselves will turn around and call you names. Wannabe HNIC's (I know there are lots of you all out there), don't say I didn't warn you. Don't come running back to the Black community when they hurt your feelings.