The Future of the Race

Acclaim for HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR., and

CORNEL WEST’S

The Future of the Race

Consistently thoughtful and often poignant…. Gates writes intimately and affectionately…. West masterfully interweaves … history with developments in literature and the arts…. Each shows us that human progress will not be denied.

—Boston Sunday Globe

Gates is engagingly witty and journalistic…. West grasps for prophecy … performing something of an intellectual tour de force.

—The New York Times Book Review

An important volume … thoughtful and deeply felt… a useful introduction to … the question that has plagued African American intellectuals for over 200 years.

—Kirkus Reviews

A striking departure … stunning.

—Washington Times

A refreshing way to think about race in the United States today.

—Christian Science Monitor

Raises important and stimulating questions…. Learned, brilliant and provocative … Henry Louis Gates and Cornel West consort atop the apex of American intellectual life.

—Portland Oregonian

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

CORNEL WEST

The Future of the Race

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was born and raised in Mineral County, West Virginia. He graduated phi beta kappa and summa cum laude from Yale College with a degree in history and was a London correspondent for Time magazine before receiving his Ph.D. in English from Cambridge University. He writes frequently for such publications as The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and The New Republic; his books include Colored People (which won several national awards), Figures in Black, The Signifying Monkey (for which he received an American Book Award), and Loose Canons. He is now W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities and chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University.

Cornel West was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and grew up in Sacramento, California. He graduated magna cum laude in three years from Harvard College and received his Ph.D. from Princeton University, where he was Professor of Religion and Director of Afro-American Studies. He is now Professor of Afro-American Studies and of the Philosophy of Religion at Harvard University, and has been a guest lecturer at many campuses. His eleven books include Race Matters, Keeping Faith, Prophetic Fragments, The American Evasion of Philosophy, and, with bell hooks, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life.

Also by HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

Colored People

Loose Canons

Figures in Black

The Signifying Monkey

General Editor,

The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century

Black Women Writers

(in 30 volumes)

Also by CORNEL WEST

Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin

(with Michael Lerner)

Race Matters

Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America

Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism

(in two volumes)

Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life

(with bell hooks)

Prophetic Reflections Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times

The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought

The American Evasion of Philosophy:

A Genealogy of Pragmatism

Prophetic Fragments Post-Analytic Philosophy

(with John Rajchman)

Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-America

Revolutionary Christianity

CONTENTS

PREFACE Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cornel West

PARABLE OF THE TALENTS Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

BLACK STRIVINGS IN A TWILIGHT CIVILIZATION Cornel West

APPENDIX

W. E. B. Du Bois and The Talented Tenth Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The Talented Tenth, W. E. B. Du Bois, 1903

The Talented Tenth Memorial Address, W. E. B. Du Bois, 1948

NOTES

PREFACE

THIS BOOK resulted from a series of conversations in which we have been engaged over the past two years, at the offices of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University, where we are both professors charged with the task of building a premier research and teaching program in African-American Studies. In the corridor of the department sits a bronze bust of W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois was a member of the Harvard College Class of 1890, and then he earned a Ph.D. in history at Harvard in 1895. In 1903, he published an essay entitled The Talented Tenth, which sought to define the commitment to service that the black college graduate owes to the rest of the black community.

We and our colleagues regularly engage in discussions about the nature and function of our department—as well as its responsibilities (ours, as professors, and those of our students) to the larger African-American community, past, present, and future. A central part of our mission as teachers is to analyze, and reinterpret for our generation, the great writings of the black past, showing how they continue to speak to us today. Just as the English literary critic F. R. Leavis regularly undertook what he called revaluations of canonical works in the pages of his journal, Scrutiny, so too do we think it incumbent upon our generation of scholars to ground our understanding of the present in the germinal thought of our collective past.

One such effort has produced this book, in which we, two grandchildren of the group of intellectuals Du Bois dubbed the Talented Tenth, have sought to think through—and critique—Du Bois’s challenge of commitment to service that, we deeply believe, the formally educated owe to all those who have not benefited from the expanded opportunities afforded by the gains in civil rights and its concomitant, the programmatic attempt to fulfill America’s commitment to equal opportunity, popularly known as affirmative action.

This is not intended to be a book that makes policy recommendations, although we both have strong feelings about the need for both governmental and private forms of intervention to reverse the delimitation of life choices that all too many African Americans face. Rather, this is a book of reflection, consisting of two essays that map our separate responses to Du Bois’s provocative thesis.

For Gates, this response takes the form of an autobiographical account of the triumph and tragedies of the generation of young blacks who attended historically white institutions, such as Yale University, where he was an undergraduate in the late sixties and early seventies. Within this frame, he explores today’s paradox of the largest black middle class in American history coexisting with one of the largest black under-classes.

West’s essay investigates the nature of Du Bois’s life and thought and the tensions inherent between them. West analyzes Du Bois as a thinker, focusing particularly on his political and philosophical ideas. He explicates Du Bois’s thought by situating him in the context of his times and within the limitations imposed by his social, political, and intellectual milieu. Using this framework, he then meditates upon black strivings (as Du Bois put it) as we face the end of the American century.

In The Future of the Race, we explore a pivotal aspect of Du Bois’s intellectual legacy, and so have included the essay to which we are responding, as well as Du Bois’s own critique of it (first published in 1948, and reprinted here in its entirety for the first time). For those readers who are unfamiliar with either text, we have also provided a historical overview of Du Bois’s life and works, to serve as an introduction to his two essays found in our Appendix.

Twenty-five years ago, historically white male institutions of higher learning—such as Yale and Harvard—opened their doors to blacks and women in unprecedented numbers, a direct result of so-called affirmative action lobbying for the diversification of America’s middle classes. Harvard and Yale, where we were undergraduates, were both quite self-conscious about their new admissions policies. At Yale, for example, Kingman Brewster, addressing the entering class in September of 1969 in a speech crafted more for the benefit of the old Blue alumni and the press than of those students seated in Woolsey Hall, welcomed each as one of that year’s 1,000 male leaders. Pointing rather awkwardly to the 250 women sitting in the audience, he promised that, despite their presence, Yale would never abandon its commitment to what at the turn of the century Du Bois had called America’s exceptional men.

If Yale went coed in 1969, never before had it seen more color in its classes: of the Class of 1973, ninety-six students, or 7.9 percent, were black, compared with eighteen students, or 1.8 percent, of the Class of 1968. Often first-generation Ivy, and sometimes first-generation college, these students congregated in the pre-med and pre-law curricula, in search of security in the soon-to-be-integrated professional circles, especially the law, medicine, journalism, and business. But while they sought to enter the traditional professions—the academy, curiously enough, was not a popular option—a remarkably large percentage sought knowledge about their cultural and their ethnic heritages in the newly established programs in Afro-American Studies.

It is one of the dramatic—and, we believe, defining—facts of our generation that the birth of Afro-American Studies and the influx of a critical number of black students coincided on the campuses of America’s historically white research colleges and universities. The agitation of black students, of course, had led to the creation of African-American Studies as an academic field in 1969, both at Harvard and Yale and throughout the country. Many of us took at least one Afro-American Studies course per term, as much to bolster the enrollment of these fledgling programs as to help retrace an invisible scaffolding that we felt under-girded us as citizens and as intellectuals. We were seeking to read and understand the canonical texts of the black tradition, which, we hoped, would enable us to tap into a vast black cultural unconscious.

No less than three times that year—the year that culminated in strikes all across America’s college campuses, called to protest the Viet Nam War—Gates was a student in classes assigned to read Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual and Du Bois’s The Talented Tenth. These were the two signal works in the black tradition meant to help us find our way through the abyss of integration.

The Talented Tenth was held up as a model for the social, political, and ethical role of the members of what we might call a crossover generation, those of us who, as a result of the great civil rights movement, were able to integrate historically white educational and professional institutions. Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in other words, were trained at Harvard and Yale, respectively, only as a result of the pressure of affirmative action to end these schools’ racist quotas, which had barely been disturbed for over a century. (Harvard graduated its first black American only in 1870, 234 years after it was founded.) Had it not been for affirmative action, we, like so many of our ancestors, familial and fraternal, would have met at one of the superb historically black colleges or universities, such as Spelman or Talladega, Howard or Morehouse, Fisk or Lincoln, and not in the Ivy League. It is no accident that 25 years later, we are colleagues on the faculty of one of these very institutions.

More than a quarter of a century later, since that dreadful day in 1968 when Dr. King was so brutally murdered, the size of the black middle class—again, primarily because of affirmative action—has quadrupled, doubling in the 1980s alone. Simultaneously—and paradoxically—the size of the black underclass has grown disproportionately as well: in 1995, 45 Percent of all black children are born at, or beneath, the poverty line. Economists have shown that fully one-third of the members of the African-American community are worse off economically today than they were the day that King was killed. If it is the best of times for the black middle class—the heirs of Du Bois’s Talented Tenth—it is the worst of times for an equally large segment of our community.

That American society has failed to protect the basic, ostensibly inalienable rights of its people—equal access to education, adequate housing, affordable medical care, and equal economic opportunity—equal access, indeed, to hope itself—and that the leadership of the African-American community has a special responsibility to attend to these rights, to analyze the peculiar compounding effect of race, gender, and class, and to design, promote, lobby, and agitate for bold and imaginative remedies to conditions of inequality and injustice—these are the underlying premises of this book. We decided to begin to address these complex issues by rereading the essay that sought to define the ethical content of our ethnic identities, as Cornel West has put it—the moral responsibilities of black leadership.

Precisely now, so near to the turn of the century, when the right wing of the Republican Party and a slim majority of the Supreme Court would seem to be hell-bent on dismantling the very legal principles that led to the integration of women and people of color into the larger American middle class to an unprecedented degree—programs that indirectly result in the presence of a black person such as Mr. Justice Clarence Thomas on that very Court, for example—and when pseudoscientific arguments such as those put forth in Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve seek to use the sanction of scientific or objective inquiry to justify the dissolution of compensatory education and entitlement programs, we both feel that it is urgent to make this argument now, to generate even deeper reflection on the nature of the society in which we live, the sort of country that we want to inhabit, and want our children’s children to inhabit, in the century to come. And we would like to contribute in our small way to the creation of innovative policies that we hope will emerge from discussions such as these.

Race differences and class differentials have been ground together in this country in a crucible of misery and squalor, in such a way that few of us know where one stops and the other begins. But we do know that the causes of poverty within the black community are both structural and behavioral, as the sociological studies of William J. Wilson have amply demonstrated, and we would be foolish to deny this. A household in which its occupants cannot sustain themselves economically cannot possibly harbor hope or optimism, or stimulate eager participation in the full prerogatives of citizenship. One of our tasks, it seems to us, is to lobby for those social programs that have made a demonstrable difference in the lives of those sufficiently motivated to seize these expanded opportunities, and to reinforce those programs that reignite motivation in the face of despair.

More important, however, we have to demand a structural change in this country, the equivalent of a Marshall Plan for our cities, as the National Urban League has called for repeatedly. We have to take people off welfare, train them for occupations relevant to the highly technological economy of the twenty-first century, and put them to work. Joblessness, as Wilson has shown, is the central cause of our country’s so-called racial crisis. The figure in the carpet of America’s racial crisis, we are arguing, is economic scarcity and unequal opportunity.

And while we favor a wide array of economic incentives to generate new investment in inner cities, youth apprenticeships with corporations, expanded tax credits for earned income, and tenant ownership of inner-city property, we believe that we must face the reality that economic prosperity and corporate investment will not come easily to our inner cities and we should most probably begin to think about moving black inner-city workers to sites where new jobs are being created, rather than merely holding our breath waiting for new factories or industries to crop up miraculously in the inner city.

That said, we strongly support Urban League President Hugh Price’s proposals to develop the economic health of black neighborhoods in America’s cities:

Promoting economic development means that all of our children must understand and become comfortable with entrepreneurship. Too many of them have an unrealistic sense of the way things work or just don’t know what their possibilities are. We must help them understand that they can earn a decent and honorable living through operating very small businesses….

Many cities are experiencing economic revivals. They are doing so by emphasizing what I call quality of life industries. They are building stadiums, museums and aquariums downtown. They are restoring downtown restaurant, entertainment and residential districts. Some are even building unsubsidized single-family housing within walking distance of downtown. Our entrepreneurs should be in the middle of all that action. We need investment banks to assure access to capital for these enterprises. That is why the idea of an investment trust that the Leadership Summit is developing is intriguing.¹

It is only by confronting the twin realities of white racism, on the one hand, and our own failures to seize initiative and break