The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader

by Henry Louis Jr. Gates

  So whose responsibility was it? Well, I don’t know that Black America and a lot of traditional media outlets were willing to listen to that story. But after September 11th, we had no choice. President Bush had no choice but to become a war president. He didn’t go to Washington to be a war president. He wanted to redefine in many ways what it meant to be a Republican. When he said compassionate conservatism, he meant caring about education of all children, particularly minority children, and that’s why No Child Left Behind was so important to him. He wanted to reform immigration policy. He wanted to think about how we could deal with entitlements in a way that didn’t disadvantage the poor, but made them affordable. And September 11th and a war presidency drowned a lot of that out.

  Gates: So then whose fault? Is there anything that could have been done?

  Rice: I think it’s mostly circumstances, but it’s possible that everybody including the White House could have been more attuned to how those messages were being heard. There wasn’t enough effort to go and speak to people. I remember during and shortly after Katrina was unfolding, I talked to the president and said, ‘Mr. President, we have a race problem.’ And we reached out to Bruce Gordon, who was president of the NAACP at the time. You know, the White House can be sometimes an isolated place and you have to be constantly sure to be reaching out beyond the boundaries of the people who would normally be a part of your constituency and pull them in. The thing President Bush was really proud of was that he had taken twenty-eight percent of the Black vote in Texas. So those who got to know him best believed in this man as someone who cared about all Americans and I’m sorry it didn’t get better communicated.

  Gates: I heard him on Leno a couple of weeks ago. And he said the worst moment in his presidency was Kanye West effectively calling him a racist, saying he didn’t care about Black people. Help us to understand that. Was that true?

  Rice: It was true. I remember he was so hurt—it was a shock to him that anybody would think that he would somehow let people suffer because they were Black. There was nothing worse you could say about him or about the president of the United States than that. And that says something, too, about how he viewed himself.

  Gates: It does. I was shocked. I was lying in bed watching and was thinking ‘Wow, this may be worse than 9/11.’

  Rice: Maybe over time this will get straightened out. But Bush was really, really saddened and angered by it.

  Gates: So did you and Colin Powell make Barack Obama president? Did you prepare the way? Were you the John the Baptist for the Jesus?

  Rice: [laughter] Oh, I see. Well, I don’t know about that analogy. But I do think that slowly but surely Americans saw Black Americans, African Americans, in positions that they would never have dreamed of ten years before . . .

  Gates: In a million years.

  Rice: First, the highest ranking military officer is Black. OK. Now the chief diplomat and the national security advisor at the same time are Black. And then you have another Black secretary of state and OK, well maybe this is all right. And then now you have a Black president. Yes, I think there has been a progression that’s been hopeful.

  Gates: I think that’s absolutely the case. If America is an idea, as you have said numerous times—the idea of a land of freedom and opportunity for all—can you talk a little bit about how we as a country have navigated different parties’ conceptions of that idea? We seem to be getting more and more polarized, particularly since President Obama was elected. So it’s not always clear to me that that idea means the same thing to all sides in our country anymore. And that’s different than when we were growing up.

  Rice: I think the American idea still has powerful resonance with almost all Americans. And that idea is that we are a free people who are protected both by and from our government and we are a free people who can have the opportunity to fully express ourselves and fully reach our potential through life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And that is our birthright as Americans. I think most Americans still believe that that is the American idea. Where we’re breaking down is in the confidence that it is really true. And we had great confidence—even in segregated Alabama, where you could not go into a restaurant—that the American idea was still for us. Because all we had to do was to get the United States to be what it said it was. We didn’t have to make the United States be something different. It just had to be what it said it was. And now, if you are in east Oakland or south-central LA or the poorest parts of Boston, do you really still believe that? When I can look at your zip code and I can tell whether or not you’re going to get a good education, is the American idea really alive and well? And that, I think, is what is causing the tension and the friction.

  By the way, it’s not just poor Americans. Families that always believed that their kids would be better off than they were are now not so sure. And the house that was the great pride of every American family, is now worth half its value. And I think our anxiety and our anger and our desire to want to shake Washington and say ‘Listen to me’ is driven not by the unraveling of the idea, but the unraveling of the belief that the idea is more than just a myth. It’s real. And that’s a great danger to us as a country because we are not held together by blood or religion or nationality. We are African Americans and Mexican Americans and Indian Americans and Korean Americans and German Americans and we are Muslims, Jews, Protestants, and Catholics and we’re nothing at all, some of us. So if we are not held together by religion or by blood, we are only held together by that idea. And if that idea isn’t true, then we will come apart as a society and as a country.

  Gates: You are talking about economic scarcity and the class divide in this country. Is it going to get better? Or unfortunately worse?

  Rice: We have lost time and we’ve lost ground to deal with the implications of globalization. The implication of globalization is that the $18-an-hour unskilled job is gone forever. That job, by the way, isn’t even in China anymore. It’s gone someplace else even for the Chinese. And our skills and our education as a people don’t match up well with the jobs that are available. Now ask anybody on Route 128 or in the Silicon Valley, ‘Can you find enough engineers?’ They will tell you no. Go to some places and ask if they can find enough people who can write well, forget math and science. And they’ll tell you no. So somehow we have this divorce between the education and training of our people and the jobs that are available. And the impact of globalization is getting faster and wider and our ability to match up with it is diminishing and we are losing time. So that, I think, is the real economic challenge.

  Gates: Can we get our mojo back? I’m talking about all Americans now. Do we have leaders who can energize us? Do we have a community that will work to carry out our leaders’ vision?

  Rice: Oh, sure. We have to do some really hard things, you know. We’ve got to get our education policies right immediately. We’ve got to do something about immigration. Immigrants are not the enemy. Immigrants are the life’s blood of the United States. We have to get the economy going again. You know, the private sector has to lead that growth. But I’m a real optimist about America because so many times we have made the impossible seem inevitable. And we are not a people that are given over to wringing our hands. I am an optimist about our ability to deal with the current challenges.

  Gates: Thank you, Dr. Rice, for a marvelous interview.

  Rice: Thank you.

  SOURCE: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “A Conversation with Condoleezza Rice: On Leadership,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, First View Article (March 2011): 1–16. Copyright © 2011 W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press.

  A CONVERSATION WITH WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON ON THE ELECTION OF BARACK OBAMA

  WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON is Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor and Director of the Joblessness and Urban Poverty Research Program at the Malcolm Weiner Center for Social Policy at the John F. Kennedy Schoo
l of Government at Harvard University. He is the leading figure in the field of urban sociology and is the author of numerous publications, including three field-defining books, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (1978), The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (1987), and When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (1996). He has served as an adviser to both President Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama.

  Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Thank you so much, Bill, for doing this interview for the Du Bois Review. When did you decide that Barack Obama was a serious, viable candidate for the presidency, and what sealed it for you about him?

  William Julius Wilson: What sealed it for me was when he won the Iowa caucuses. After hearing his victory speech afterward, I said to myself, This guy is on his way. He is really a serious candidate. Prior to that time, Skip, I was somewhat skeptical. In fact, I had given some consideration to working for Hillary Clinton in the fall because I didn’t think Barack was a viable candidate. My view changed following the victory in Iowa.

  Gates: I was out at Stanford, and I fell asleep before the election results. And I woke up with CNN on, and it was 2 AM, and it was that speech that was going on. And I jumped out of bed. It was the first time that he had really moved me since the convention speech.

  Wilson: Right.

  Gates: But I felt like I felt when I used to hear Bobby Kennedy speak. And then I sent Oprah an e-mail immediately, you know: [laughter] This guy is here, you know. I’m serious.

  Wilson: Absolutely, absolutely.

  Gates: What was the lowest moment during the primary season for you?

  Wilson: The public’s reaction to that video clip of Reverend Wright’s incendiary comments. I thought that Obama might not be able to recover from the political fallout. I was very, very worried until he gave that brilliant race speech in response to the uproar over Reverend Wright, which got him back on track.

  Gates: What was brilliant about that speech?

  Wilson: Well, there are several things that were brilliant about it. First of all, as I point out in my new book, More Than Just Race, that speech is a model for what I consider to be effective political framing. Because in appealing to the goodwill of the American people, he emphasized points that I’m sure resonated with them, including points that highlighted the importance of helping people to help themselves. You see, Americans tend to support programs that attempt to develop a level playing field, including programs that enable people to help themselves. For example, as the research of [Lawrence] Bobo [W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard University] and his colleagues so clearly demonstrates, although a significant majority of Whites don’t support quotas and numerical guidelines, they will support programs that provide scholarships for Black students who get good grades in school. And they support training and education programs to help Black workers improve their chances for employment, programs to help people to help themselves. Obama’s speech on race appealed to that kind of sentiment. But even more important, from my point of view, was the comprehensive vision of the factors that contribute to racial inequality in this society, a vision that not only highlighted structural impediments, such as the legacy of slavery and discrimination and the lack of economic opportunities for low-skilled Black males, but also the cultural responses to these structural inequities—responses that actually perpetuate poverty and social disadvantages. So, he integrated both structural and cultural factors, and that’s what impressed me a great deal. He did not uncouple the cultural factors from the structural ones like Bill Cosby did. He displayed in this speech a comprehensive understanding of the impact of race in America, and after listening to that speech, I said to myself, This guy is really sophisticated.

  Gates: Were you surprised at the continuing Black nationalist critiques that he’s not Black enough?

  Wilson: Yeah, I think those critiques are ridiculous, quite frankly. I mean here is a man who is addressing issues that are central to the Black community. I have listened with some irritation to critiques by Black intellectuals that his stimulus package does not address issues that affect the poor, including poor Blacks. Such critiques show how ill informed these critics are. For example, included in the stimulus package is a “making work pay” credit that even low-income families who don’t make enough to pay income tax can claim, an extended period for the receipt of unemployment benefits, health insurance for the jobless whose insurance was covered by previous employers, a temporary increase in the earned-income tax credit, a lowering of the income threshold for the receipt of the child tax credit, and so on. All of these provisions would help poor workers, including poor Black workers. But even more important, President Obama also has focused on what I consider to be some very important race-specific programs. For example, he is going to create what he calls twenty promised neighborhoods patterned after the Harlem Children’s Zone, which is an excellent model. Geoffrey Canada’s mission, when he created the Harlem Children’s Zone, was to flood a number of blocks in Harlem with educational, social, and medical services to create a comprehensive safety net for the children in that area. However, during the campaign, when I was co-chair of Obama’s urban policy committee, I was somewhat concerned that he was placing so much emphasis on the Harlem Children’s Zone because that program had not been rigorously evaluated.

  Gates: Hadn’t been scaled up.

  Wilson: Well, it hadn’t been evaluated more importantly. It had been sort of scaled up in Harlem because it went from twenty-four blocks to one hundred blocks, and the program is now reaching about 4000 parents and 7500 kids, okay. So Canada has scaled up the program in Harlem. Canada was able to get corporate leaders to support him, and he now has an annual budget of roughly $58 million. But the program had not been rigorously evaluated when I was working on the campaign in the primaries, and I was just fearful that a rigorous evaluation could possibly yield trivial results. I no longer have that concern. Roland Fryer, our brilliant young economist here at Harvard, has evaluated this program using a rigorous random assignment design, which includes a control group of students who are not in the program and an experimental, or a treatment, group. And Skip, the preliminary results of this evaluation are absolutely spectacular. They are unbelievable. You see, the Harlem Children’s Zone includes two public charter schools that differ from the regular public schools in the sense that the teachers were selected on the basis of their ability to teach students and on their dedication, not on whether they had a degree from a school of education. Moreover, the students are in school 60% longer than those in the regular public schools, including a very short summer vacation. Skip, the results of this evaluation are spectacular. Here we have kids from some of the most impoverished backgrounds, mostly from poor single-parent families, whose scores on the cognitive test far exceed those of kids in the public schools of New York. The math scores are especially dramatic and compare favorably with those of kids who live in upper-middle-class White suburbia. The charter school was one of the last major components of the program, and it was opened in 2004. Of the kids in the third grade, who benefited from entering the program when they were in kindergarten, 100% scored at or above grade level in math in 2007 in one of the charter schools, and 97% in the other school. Moreover, 87% of the kids in the eighth grade scored at or above grade level in math, even though they did not have the benefit of early exposure to the charter school. To repeat, here are kids from some of the most impoverished backgrounds performing as well in math as those kids in upper-middle-class suburbia.

  And not only the math scores, but even the verbal scores are quite impressive. As I point out in my book More Than Just Race, living in poor segregated neighborhoods for long periods of time has an adverse effect on verbal ability, as measured by the cognitive tests. And these effects linger on even after these kids leave these neighborhoods. So it takes time to overcome the effects of living in chronic economically poor segregated neighborhoods on verbal skills.
Nonetheless, even the verbal scores have improved dramatically, especially for the kids who are younger. And now they’re talking about selecting these kids for this program from a lottery at the time they’re born, when they come out of the womb. And so as this program continues, the scores are going to be even more spectacular.

  I am so pleased that Roland Fryer is evaluating this program. You know Roland is not like a typical economist relying solely on mathematical models. He recognizes that in order to come up with a comprehensive explanation of the success of this program, he needs the help of sociologists and others who understand social behavior and group interaction, and that’s what he’s doing. He’s examining both the quantitative data and the qualitative data collected for the evaluation, and I understand that he’s going to be asked by Arne Duncan, the new secretary of education, if he hasn’t already been asked, to help design the twenty promised neighborhoods for the Obama administration, which as I indicated will be patterned after the Harlem Children’s Zone.