How Gates views America

Here is a three year old entry by me about Henry Louis Gates I had forgotten about until seeing it linked on the Web. I wrote in 2006 about Gates’s PBS series, “African-American Lives.” In this program, everything about America and whites is negative, everything about “African-Americans” is positive. African-Americans are portrayed as a separate people, having nothing to do with America, and none of the good things in their lives come from America. It is clear that Gates hates this country, he sees no value in it, he has no affection for it, he feels no connection with it. And this is the man who is constantly spoken of in the mainstream media with various honorfics and superlatives, such as “America’s most eminent black scholar.”

What scholarship? I wrote:

Though Gates is a Harvard professor and a department chairman, there was no scholarly element in this program at all. It was all about the cult of the self and the cult of the race, “How do I find my family roots, how do I figure out who I am, how does it feel to find this out about my ancestors.” Me me me. African-American African-American African-American. This is what the show is about.

When will whites stop tolerating and celebrating this intolerable behavior and begin to challenge and confront it instead? For example, when blacks start their white racism jive, whites should should zero tolerance for it, saying: “You resent and hate whites and America, and your accusations are an expression of that resentment and hatred. So there’s no reason for us listen to you or take any of your statements on race seriously.” Imagine that whites started to talk that way to the Gateses of the world. We’d be living in a different and far better country.

- end of initial entry -

July 26

Paul K. writes:

Of Gates’s PBS series, “African-American Lives,” you write, “everything about America and whites is negative, everything about “African-Americans” is positive.”

Apparently, not “everything.” Gates has been married twice, in both cases to a white woman.

Paul K. continues:

For what it’s worth, I can’t confirm that Gates remarried. His Wikipedia entry says he did but I have found no corroboration, including in a recent Boston Globe article that discusses his first marriage, which ended a few years ago. There are comments on black-oriented forums that claim that Gates is currently involved with another white woman. It’s interesting to see the tremendous hostility expressed in these forums by black women over the tendency of successful black men to marry outside their race.

Gates was married to a white woman, Sharon Lynn Adams, for over 20 years and has two adult daughters by her.

LA replies:

Weird. With all his black centrism and black racism, it doesn’t make sense he would want to marry a white woman.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 26, 2009 02:23 PM | Send