Time March 2–9, 2020Henry Louis Gates Jr., Emmy-winning
historian and head of the Hutchins Center
for African & African American Research
at Harvard University, on the origins of
modern inequality, America’s missed
opportunities and where the fight goes next
So scholars like me spend a lot of time
in an endless effort to show that there
were black people of great intellectual
attainment even thousands of years ago.Is there a moment in American
history you think stands out as the
closest we’ve come to full racial
equality? We believed we were
closest the day Barack Obama was
elected President. Unbeknownst to
us, his victory bred a deep level of
resentment and anxiety that overlapped
with larger changes in the economic
prospects of members of the American
working class.Was there ever a point at which
full racial equality could have been
achieved? Oh yeah! If Thomas Jefferson
and the founders had actually believed
that all men were created equal, they
should have acted on it and abolished
slavery. The next great opportunity
was 1865. If, at the end of the Civil
War, black men—ideally people, but
it was only going to be men—were
given the right to vote, and if land
in the South was redistributed as
reparations for their contribution to
the economy and the horrible trau-
mas of slavery, we wouldn’t be hav-
ing this conversation.Are you hopeful this conversation
could ever be unnecessary? Yes,
inevitably. We used to talk about
race in binary terms: black people
and white people. Now we have a
multiplicity of ethnic groups, and
all of them are going to be fighting
for their economic rights, their social
rights and political rights. We need to
think about coalitions across the color
line, including coalitions between
white workers and black workers
whose economic interests are exactly
the same. —olivia b. waxmanQ+A
How do you see the state of equality today fitting into
the history of equality? One of the most dramatic shifts
to the structure of the African-American community
has been the doubling of the black middle class and
the quadrupling of the black upper middle class since
- When we look at the child- poverty rate, we would
have expected that would go down dramatically too.
But it didn’t. Usually when we’re talking about equality,
we’re talking about the black community vs. the white
community. But I’m very concerned about the inequality
within the African-American community.
How did this situation come about? People like me who
entered Yale around 1969 are solid members of the Ameri-
can upper middle class, and it’s because of affirmative ac-
tion. My colleague Lani Guinier once said that affirmative
action initially was a class escalator, but now it’s a class
perpetuator. Many black students admitted to Ivy League
universities are the children of the upper middle class—
the very people whose class status was transformed by af-
firmative action. That should be enormously troublesome
to every African American because we need the curve of
class in the black community to resemble the larger curve
for American society as a whole. And it doesn’t.
What do you think should be done about that? One,
we have to defend affirmative action. Two, we have to
change the way we fund public schools so the amount
spent per child is the same in every district. I’m not opti-
mistic about that happening, but that would be the great-
est contribution to equality across the board.
How would you describe the state of racial equality
in the U.S. today? I think each black person still fights
stereotypes about racial difference that are inherited
from the 19th century and the institution of slavery—if
you just look on the Internet, many people see a black
person and think that they’re fundamentally inferior to a
white person who is the inheritor of “world civilization.”