America Behind the Color Line

by Henry Louis Gates

  Harlem is changing big-time. In 1991, the year the Raging Rooks won a National Championship, violence and divisiveness were at their height in Harlem, and David Dinkins was still mayor of New York. I was interviewed on CBS News This Morning after the team’s victory. They asked me what I thought about Harlem, and I said, I think the success of these kids symbolizes a new Harlem Renaissance. Afterward I thought about what I said. I had asserted that the championship represented a fundamental change in the community. Well, the face of Harlem has changed in the eleven years since I made that remark. I could suggest that chess had a big part in it. But I think the deeper reality is that my success in working with the kids, along with my personal success, helped reveal to others the potential of the community. It helped make people start to think, what if these kids really did have a chance? What if they had a better school environment, a better teacher, a better education? What if we made enough change in the community that these kids could make a difference? If they didn’t have to worry about violence on the streets, and if they didn’t have to worry about drug dealers, what would happen? We showed that amazing things happen. Kids win national championships in chess after just two years of hard work.

  I want the kids I teach to understand that no matter where you’re from, you can succeed. I’m a living example. Many of us are living examples. We shouldn’t have to deal with obstacles of poverty and inferior education, of violence and drugs in our communities. Sure we should work for parity. Your life can’t go according to plan if you have no plan. Every star chess player knows it’s the endgame where the competition is won. When somebody asks, how fast can you beat him, I say, it’s not how fast, it’s when. I know it’s going to happen; it’s just going to take time.

  In 1999 I founded the Harlem Chess Center at HEAF, the Harlem Educational Activities Fund. “Where young minds come first” was my slogan. Without the tremendous support and direction that HEAF has been providing since 1992, thousands of inner-city kids who have gone on to college as a result of HEAF programs would have fallen through the cracks.

  The kids come to the Harlem Chess Center every day after school, and on Saturdays they have tournaments. They sit and memorize and study so that when they get into actual competition they’ll be ready. There’s some explosive energy in that room. You can’t mess with those guys. They’re assassins.

  The great thing about chess is that it’s practical. It’s not, I’m learning algebra and wondering what the heck I’m going to do with it. Not that algebra isn’t meaningful, but we don’t help our kids enough with translating what they learn in school to the real world. We try to convince kids that they should learn for the sake of learning. Now, that makes sense to adults, and maybe even to kids in affluent communities. It’s much harder for inner-city kids to understand why they should learn something that seems to have no meaning for their future life. But in chess, I’ll show kids a move and five minutes later they can use it against their friend. In another five or ten minutes, they’ll win the game and come back to me and say, show me something else, ’cause I just won that game and I wanna win again. It’s self-reinforcing.

  Thankfully, the transformation that takes place in a kid’s life through chess is not immediate. What happens is gradual. The kid who hasn’t been doing that great in school, who doesn’t have that focus and that concentration, suddenly sees a chessboard and is fascinated by the pieces, by the shapes, by the energy of it, and wants to learn. The board focuses the energy into sixty-four squares, and kids look at the board and start to think, because they can’t help but think.

  There’s another very powerful aspect of chess, and that is that you learn when you lose. I don’t love losing, but I love the lessons I get from losing. Losing hurts. Then I go home, sift through the feelings, and start to wonder, what is it that made me lose? I think about it very carefully, and then suddenly I see it. And I go, oh, I have to work on that. But I wouldn’t have known what to work on to improve my game if I hadn’t lost. I learn where my weaknesses are and I come back more powerful. I don’t have to have a big ego. I just have to keep on learning.

  Life is not about reality. It’s about how other people perceive the world. When you can look at somebody and believe you intuit who they are because of their skin color or occupation, you’re living in the land of perception. That world has meaning; it has impact. But it’s not reality. By making chess as black, ideally, as basketball, I’m redefining the way other people perceive things.

  Today you can be a member of the hip-hop culture and a member of the chess team and there’s no contradiction. Smooth guys like Will Smith, Wynton Marsalis, Wu Tang Clan, Jamie Foxx, Jim Brown, all play chess. Black kids who play chess are no longer seen as wanting to be white. Their peers, both black and white, are more likely to think they’re cool. Kids who play chess play basketball; they watch all the “in” TV shows; they participate in the popular culture. Chess has suffered from the same degree of stereotype in the broader culture that we as a people suffer from. And you have chess kids now who are much broader than the stereotype.

  I hope that in another fifty years we will have arrived at a tipping point, or be fast approaching one. I have a funny dream that perhaps the NBA will be dominated by white players and the World Chess Federation will be dominated by black people. It could happen, with all the European players who are coming into the NBA and all the black people who are playing chess. How funny would that be?

  DANROSE

  Black and White Logic

  Dan Rose insists: It’s about teaching logic.

  Chess is seen by the middle-class Caucasian world as something that requires excellence, something that takes brilliance. In the minority world, playing chess is not considered “acting white,” because many uneducated people, many people in other worlds, whether it’s in prison or on the streets, play it. It is considered a game—a competitive game. We think chess is an ideal vehicle for bringing inner-city children into the world of cerebration, of planning, of sequential reasoning.

  When in interschool chess competitions our kids come in number one in New York City, number one in New York State, and then number one in the nation, they know they’re good. Their family and friends know they’re good. Their schoolmates and the people they beat know they’re good. When we send our kids out to Ypsilanti, Michigan or Sarasota, Florida or wherever the national contests are, if our kids come in number one or three or whatever, the impact is great for everybody—black, white, middle-class, working-class. If someone who’s racist, even without meaning to be or without knowing it— someone, for example, who wonders about how intelligent black people are— sees in the New York Times that the Mott Hall Dark Knights from Harlem have won a national championship, I love that.

  The Harlem Educational Activities Fund—HEAF—helps kids succeed in school and in life, from junior high school through college. At the junior high level, where our kids learn chess, our goal is not to turn out good chess players; our goal is to turn out good people. We tell our kids, if you can be number one in chess, you can be number one in anything. We tell them that chess is a metaphor for life. In chess, if you don’t get your pieces out on the board quickly, you’re not in the game. In the real world, if you don’t have a solid elementary and high school education, you’re not in the game of life.

  The midgame, in chess or in life, is where you set yourself up for the win. In chess, you plan your attack strategy; the equivalent in the real world is your undergraduate and graduate college experience. You’re setting up your life strategy. Finally, chess games are won or lost in what’s called the endgame. We tell our kids the endgame in life is not a job; it’s a career. It’s not making a living; it’s leading a life that is satisfying and productive and fulfilling.

  So our theory, which we implement through HEAF, is a whole-life strategy. Our earliest consultant, twelve years ago, was Fred Hechinger, who died in 1995. Fred was really the country’s leading voice in education journalism. The Hechinger Institute on Educa
tion and the Media was established in his memory. Fred’s point—and it’s one that we follow religiously—is that we’re teaching and training the whole child. Don’t fall into the trap, he said, of just teaching a kid to count. Don’t just teach him to cram, to pass a test—you’re teaching the whole child.

  At seventy-three, I am getting on in years. I now understand what Archimedes meant when he said, “Give me somewhere to stand and I will move the earth.” Speaking on BBC radio during World War II, in a 1941 broadcast aimed at President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill said, “Put your confidence in us . . . Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.” You give me a place to stand and the tools to do the job—I’m mixing Archimedes and Churchill— and I’ll move the world. We will bring the inner-city minority world into the mainstream of American life. It can be done.

  I think that if the school boards were smart, they would open themselves to this idea. But we don’t fight with anybody. We want only friends. We regard everybody else in the field as colleagues.

  I’ve been involved in a great many endeavors and projects over the years. Yet in my mind, the challenge of bringing inner-city disadvantaged children into the mainstream of American life is without question the most pressing, most important social challenge in American life. It is the challenge. Anyone who doesn’t see it or who doesn’t address it is not living in the real world.

  There are people who don’t care, who cut back these social programs. At the same time, these programs have varying levels of efficacy. In some cases, it’s like the fellow who refused to bail out of the leaky rowboat because the leak was not under his seat. We’re bailing out of the rowboat. I tell our donors, if a smart inner-city kid goes bad and goes to prison, it will cost the city, the public, $60,000 a year, and could cost him the rest of his life. Our goal is to turn these kids into professionals who make a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year and who pay $60,000 in taxes. I tell my archconservative friends that our goal is to take a $60,000-a-year tax eater and turn him into a $60,000-a-year taxpayer. I think that’s a good investment.

  People are frustrated because they have lost confidence in the public system. They’ve lost confidence in the ability of the public school system to educate kids. They’ve lost confidence in the ability of the government to affect their lives positively. We’ve had a Great Society. We’ve had a War on Poverty. We’ve had endless governmental programs, and there’s little to show for them. The service providers have become middle class, but the service recipients are exactly where they were thirty years ago.

  The American public has not turned mean-spirited. It hasn’t turned angry. The same public that voted for the War on Poverty, that voted for model cities, that voted for civil rights legislation, is still there, but it has lost confidence.

  I believe it is important to shout from the rooftops that we can make progress! Environment is not destiny. All children can learn, and HEAF is demonstrating that. We can take any child in Harlem, regardless of the educational level of the parents and whether or not the parents can speak English, and we can help him or her succeed. You don’t have to be a Nobel Prize winner to read at grade level in New York. If a child can read at the seventh-grade level, if the child is highly motivated and wants to come to the HEAF program afternoons and weekends, we can help that child. The child has to want to be helped, and if the parents are receptive, that’s all to the good. Ideally, we want parents to be supportive, but at a minimum they cannot be hostile. Give us a kid who can read. Give us a kid who is highly motivated and who has parents who approve of what we’re doing. And ten years later, we will give you a graduate of Columbia, Yale, Bryn Mawr, Cornell, Haverford, and Swarthmore, among others. This year, we got four students into Amherst alone.

  The important thing is to convince the public that this is doable. And you do that by demonstrating what works. The history of social welfare has been to announce a new program with great fanfare and hoopla. You go back three years later and there’s nothing to show for it. You go back five years later and it doesn’t exist. That’s what comes from looking for cheap, quick fixes. Nobody looks at what does work. Again, Fred Hechinger said it: Work with the whole child. Motivate him. Have him understand why he has to learn. Convince him that there are good role models. Convince him that you are there to help. Convince him that you are a loving, caring adult who is there to help him to move on.

  And good things will follow!

  (HEAF’s Web site is www.heaf.org.)

  THE IRVINS

  Breaking Through

  “There are times when I feel like I’m under a microscope at the golf club and organizations I belong to,” Milton Irvin told me. “Is it taxing? Yes. That’s why I came up with the term ‘black tax’ . . . If you believe in what our struggle has been, it’s part of what you have to bring so that it becomes easier on the generations behind us. We really have to think very long-term.” Melody Irvin works with “the low-income population in the nonprofit world . . . In some of these communities, people have the Lexus and the Mercedes in the backyard, but they don’t own a house . . . The changes have to take place both on Wall Street and on Main Street.” Viola Irvin, soon to enter college, told me, “If you’re a rich black person, it’s just as bad because you’ve got the same racial profile. Our brother has been pulled over because he’s a nice black kid driving a nice car. It’s weird . . . I hope I never have to play the race card.”

  Milton Irvin

  Summit is a town of about 21,000 people. Probably 5 percent of the population is African American, and 17 or 18 percent would be classified as minority. Of the total number of African Americans in town, probably only 10 to 15 percent are upper middle class.

  I grew up in East Orange. When you think about it, Summit is only twenty minutes from East Orange, but the communities are so different. You go Route 78 to Garden State Parkway North and take exit 145, and it really begins to change. When I moved to Summit in 1985, there were not a lot of middle-class African Americans, and to a certain extent it was lonely being here. Before we purchased our home, we would drive around town, and every time we came through, we’d see African Americans walking around downtown and we said, yeah, this is it. Ultimately, we learned that 10 to 15 percent of the African Americans who live in Summit reside in two subsidized housing complexes, and that what we were looking for in terms of a peer group wasn’t really here. Frequently, I’d meet somebody African American who was looking to purchase a home and I’d say, hey, why don’t you move to Summit? South Orange and Montclair are traditionally more integrated communities; those were the towns that a lot of African Americans would gravitate to. But something inside of me said, you know what, someone has to put a stake in the ground in a community like this, and show that we can be woven into this fabric. We can become part of this community and act as citizens here. And my wife and I have done this. So that piece is gratifying.

  It’s part of what I call the black tax. I think that as African Americans who have caught some of the breaks, we naturally do more than what maybe our white peers would do in similar circumstances. It’s important to let everyone know, when I’m a little different from them, that I’m really not that different. The color of my skin may be different, but in terms of what I want for myself, and what I want for my family, it’s really no different than what you want. We have a similar class orientation. That was the whole notion behind my joining the Baltusrol Golf Club and the Beacon Hill Club. I did it because this is part of the American dream, and I wanted to experience everything that was out there. I’m just as qualified as the next person in that regard. I integrated both of those clubs.

  Integrating the golf club, to me, was a step in our process as a people. Certainly, the risk I was taking was not the same type of risk that the Civil Rights Movement leaders took. It was the risk of alienating my African-American peers, who might say, who do you think you are? Some of them said, now you’re trying to separate yourself from us even more. Or, why don’t we get together and form
an African-American golf club? Why do you have to join this high-society institution?

  I responded by saying, well, there had to be the first African American who went to Harvard, and there had to be the first African American who went to Wharton. And quite frankly, there’s going to have to be the first African American to join the Baltusrol Golf Club. And it might as well be me. And if and when we want to pool our resources and have the greatest African-American club in the country, I’m ready. Actually, I tried it a couple of times with a few of my colleagues. There was a golf course we were going to try to buy, and have it as not an African-American club, but certainly African-American ownership and something that we could be proud of. But I couldn’t wait for all of that to develop. Nothing says you can only be a member of one club, so if and when it’s feasible, I stand ready to move ahead with that plan.

  When I’ve joined these clubs, I’ve never approached it with the attitude that I’ve got to make white people feel comfortable around a black person. It’s more like I’ve felt they had to figure out, over time, that you’re not scary and you’re really not different from them. I always say, hello, how are you doing? I speak to everyone. I consciously try to be a full participant in the activities of these clubs. This done, it begins to give the others a sense and feeling of comfort. Golf is my passion. When I joined the Baltusrol Golf Club, all the staff treated me very well. The head pro went out of his way to make me feel at home. What was particularly gratifying was the caddies. There are a lot of black caddies at the club, and you wonder how they’re going to react. They were just so proud; it was almost like they were joining the club themselves. They could have said, carry your own bag; I ain’t going to carry it. But they took the exact opposite approach, and that was meaningful. I got letters from people saying, it’s about time we did this and I’m glad you’re a member of the club. I’m sure there was some negative reaction, but it never came to me.