Episode 1376 - Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuck nicks?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast WTF.
Marc:Welcome to it.
Marc:I am not at home.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:Where are you?
Marc:Where are you guys?
Marc:What have you been doing?
Marc:What's going on?
Marc:Are you traveling?
Marc:I've been traveling so fucking much.
Marc:I don't even I don't know if I've had enough for I love it.
Marc:I don't I can't.
Marc:This one's a long one coming over to Europe, being in New York for a few days, doing London, doing Dublin, actually having days to to hang out.
Marc:I want it to be great.
Marc:I think it's been good.
Marc:It's been very busy.
Marc:But look, let me ramble about that in a second.
Marc:Today on the show, I talked to Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
Marc:Yeah, the guy that talked to me about my roots, the guy from Finding Your Roots, that guy.
Marc:He's a scholar, a literary critic, a filmmaker, a historian.
Marc:He's a professor at Harvard University.
Marc:And he hosts that show, Finding Your Roots.
Marc:And he's got this new documentary series on PBS.
Marc:It's called Making Black America.
Marc:And I watched a few episodes and I am constantly amazed at everything I do not know.
Marc:I do not know so many things.
Marc:It's so fucking disturbing to me sometimes that I feel like I have a general sense of things, a general education of things.
Marc:I find that I've been interested and put stuff into my brain and learn new things.
Marc:But until you really put things into historical context and at least expose yourself to facts about how...
Marc:Shit went down one day after the next, year to year, when and how and why, in a thorough way.
Marc:What do you really know?
Marc:You know these general ideas.
Marc:I know general things about...
Marc:the black community.
Marc:But I don't know the evolution of those communities and how they were built and how the entire black business world and system was created in post reconstruction during the failed reconstruction.
Marc:It's just fascinating.
Marc:And there's part of me that thinks, well, I should know.
Marc:Why don't I know this?
Marc:Well, I wasn't taught it.
Marc:And oddly, that's exactly what they're not going to teach in red states because school boards are shutting them down from teaching that it's part of the history.
Marc:And there's part of my history.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:It's all as I get older, I realize I don't know a lot of stuff and I kind of spin around.
Marc:With the stuff I do know, I add new things.
Marc:I do, I'm learning things.
Marc:I retain enough of it to say like, oh, I heard about that.
Marc:And right, I saw a thing in that.
Marc:Isn't that have to do with this?
Marc:Right, that was that thing that was kind of, that was like the thing that happened after that other thing, right?
Marc:But I mean, who has the kind of memory retention?
Marc:I mean, I'm getting older.
Marc:So as I put new stuff in, shit is draining out.
Marc:I mean, I just, it's unreal to me.
Marc:And I'm not even at this point, I'm not even being nostalgic in terms of my life.
Marc:I'm just sort of trying to, you know, go through the bag and hold on to stuff, pull stuff out that I can look at it and, and, and sort of put it on the shelf or, or let it go.
Marc:And there's just some things that just gone.
Marc:There's like an entire wall missing from my memory.
Marc:So what else am I gonna do here?
Marc:What else have I done here?
Marc:Jeremy Strong gave me some restaurant recommendations.
Marc:I already went to one, an Otto Lingi restaurant, because I have his cookbook, which is beautiful, and then I went and had the food.
Marc:It was good.
Marc:I'm gonna probably get some Indian food.
Marc:Last night, this was kind of interesting.
Marc:Helen Hunt reached out to me because she had listened to the episode I did with Michael Morris, who was the director over at the Old Vic.
Marc:It turns out that Helen Hunt is in a show there right now called Eureka Day.
Marc:I believe it was the name of the play.
Marc:And she said, look, I know you're going to be in town.
Marc:Why don't you come see this play?
Marc:And I went to see it.
Marc:I went with my manager, Kelly, and I went to see a play last night.
Marc:See, this is what's happening.
Marc:This is what I make sure that I do when I go away, especially to these cities that have something to offer.
Marc:I go to the theater if I can.
Marc:I go see art if I can.
Marc:I go get good meals if I can.
Marc:And I get out in the world.
Marc:So I went to this play, Eureka Day, which I have to assume will eventually hit Broadway because it's just too tight and too relevant and kind of cleverly handled.
Marc:It's a play.
Marc:It all takes place at a progressive, I think, elementary school in Berkeley, California.
Marc:It's the board of directors, the few parents in charge and the head of the school and some of the teachers.
Marc:It's like four or five characters.
Marc:And it is able to deal with all of the things that we've sort of been dealing with in the cultural discourse around point of view, opinion, vaccine.
Marc:And it takes place in 2017 and revolves around a mumps outbreak at a progressive school.
Marc:So it really kind of has the arc
Marc:And there's some extremely funny and touching moments in it.
Marc:And Helen Hunt's great.
Marc:Mark McKinney from Kids in the Hall is in it.
Marc:He's great.
Marc:The other performances are great.
Marc:I don't mean not to know them, but I have to assume that this is like a sort of test run and it'll make it to Broadway.
Marc:It was nice to see Helen, who I hadn't seen since I talked to her, and Mark McKinney, who I don't think I've ever talked to on the podcast.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Isn't he a missing kid?
Marc:I do know him.
Marc:The play was good and it sort of inspired me to, you know, think about doing a play.
Marc:That would be something I haven't thought to do in a while.
Marc:Maybe I should make myself available to that because I got to be honest with you.
Marc:One of the problems with being sort of not so much a homebody, but a guy who's prone to panic when he's away too long for one reason.
Marc:I don't know how people do it with kids.
Marc:I don't know how people do it with farms.
Marc:And I guess you just kind of look out for yourself and go do what you got to do.
Marc:But the worry element, I guess not everybody does that.
Marc:I guess people put people into place, which I have, or put things into place or work shit out or make sure things are taken care of and just kind of do their life.
Marc:I have to assume that whatever is wrong with my brain in this area is what keeps me from, I don't know, what?
Marc:From being a global superpower?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Something.
Marc:It's holding me back from something.
Marc:Maybe enjoying life and travel.
Marc:But I'm going to do it.
Marc:I'm going to get out there today.
Marc:Today, I do.
Marc:It's going to be yesterday by the time you hear this.
Marc:But I'm going to do a live WTF tonight with David Baddiel.
Marc:We're going to get into the Jewish thing, as I do occasionally, and as he's made a life of as of late.
Marc:And I don't know him.
Marc:I've got interviews this week.
Marc:There's an outside chance.
Marc:Don't mention it.
Marc:I'm not going to mention it.
Marc:I'm not going to mention who I'm going to interview because we don't know how it's all going to go.
Marc:And I don't want people going, what happened to that?
Marc:It didn't happen.
Marc:So you'll just have to wait.
Marc:You'll just have to wait.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:I'm talking it out.
Marc:I got to go back.
Marc:I am going to go back.
Marc:So I don't know what's going on here.
Marc:That's the other thing.
Marc:It's like I am so immersed in the cultural and political issues and environmental issues of America.
Marc:I barely can keep up with that.
Marc:London and England has a totally different spectrum of problems and politics and things I don't understand.
Marc:It makes me feel a little bizarre in terms of like, should I know?
Marc:Aren't there things I should know?
Marc:Is this more that I should know?
Marc:How much can I contain in my brain?
Marc:Did I already blow it with the knowing stuff?
Marc:Have I blown it for the knowing?
Marc:All I know is that Kit wanted a souvenir commemorating the passing of
Marc:of the queen and i've got her many because they just have stores full of that it's not like you can go to a nice store to get touristy bullshit you go to a bullshitty touristy store which there's one right down here in piccadilly circus and i bought a bunch of uh stuff
Marc:Bunch of Queen stuff for Kit.
Marc:Yeah, that's some British shit right there.
Marc:So anyway, here we go.
Marc:Okay, Henry Louis Gates.
Marc:This documentary is an important documentary because it doesn't deal with... I feel like there's been many docs and movies I've seen dealing with the sort of slavery experience or the Underground Railroad experience.
Marc:This doc series that he's made, Making Black America, is really about, you know...
Marc:how black communities put themselves together through business, through fraternal orders, through organizations of women, through politics.
Marc:It's a look into a world that I knew nothing about, and I'm assuming that many people, certainly white people, don't know about.
Marc:But it was very informative and mind-blowing, really.
Marc:It airs Tuesdays on PBS stations nationwide.
Marc:You can also stream it
Marc:on PBS digital platforms.
Marc:It's called Making Black America.
Marc:I will now talk to Henry Louis Gates and try to deter him from going over my genealogy again.
Guest:You know, I often think of the three generations on the Finlandia from Antwerp in 1920.
Guest:Is that where it was?
Guest:On your mom's side, yeah.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:The one's from Galicia.
Guest:Galicia, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I want to put this on tape.
Guest:We're on.
Guest:Oh, we are?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, I often think of what's unusual about your family tree and your family's experience is that three generations came together on the same boat.
Guest:Right.
Guest:In 1920 from Jehovich.
Guest:Jehovich.
Guest:Jehovich.
Guest:Yeah, Jehovich.
Guest:Yeah, Jehovich.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I have to tell so many people that...
Guest:that only one generation came yeah or only one individual came right and a sibling left a sibling behind and then that was the wrong choice heartbreaking yeah oh really it screws people up well no because the nazis would end up right you know killing the person who stayed behind yeah we we avoided nazis but i i think back there there were some russian problems
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Big time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Golda Fear.
Marc:F-E-E-R.
Marc:That's my grandmother.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's right.
Marc:We're doing it again.
Marc:Should I go get the tree?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Well, Golda came with her mother, Molly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And her grandmother, Perla.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's what makes your family interesting, your family history, because they escaped as a unit rather than singly.
Guest:So many people come to the United States alone.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Look, I'll tell you something.
Marc:I've been watching that Ken Burns, America and the Holocaust bit.
Marc:Tough to watch.
Marc:It's not always a tough to watch, but I watched a few episodes of yours.
Marc:And as a kind of like relatively intelligent white guy,
Marc:I don't know any of this shit.
Marc:I really, you know, like as a Jew, I had no idea how dug in anti-immigrant policy was and always has been.
Marc:And when watching yours, you start to really realize that whatever problems we're having now are the exact same fights that have existed since the beginning of the country almost.
Guest:No, it's true.
Guest:But I was so inspired by Ken's
Guest:When I first heard another documentary on the Holocaust, and I happened to watch as many documentaries about the Holocaust as I possibly can, I thought, well, I wonder what Ken could say that's new.
Guest:And what was new was the history of anti-Semitism in America in general, and more specifically within the government, even Roosevelt's government.
Marc:Right, the State Department, he had no power over a completely white supremacist State Department.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:Shamelessly white supremacist.
Guest:Yeah, and just proud of it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And they didn't even lose sleep.
Marc:But that's what's happening now.
Marc:There's so many people that...
Marc:When I watched the first two episodes of yours, I realized, like, this is exactly what red state school boards are trying to keep out.
Marc:It's not the framing of the black experience as slaves or as an alternate history, but it's literally the history of American people that is not the narrative that they grew up with.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:You know, I tell my students, I teach a large co-teach with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, a large...
Guest:lecture course at Harvard, Intro to Afro, I call it, Introduction to African American Studies.
Guest:And early on in the semester, I tell the students there are two streams flowing constantly under the floorboards of Western culture and American culture.
Guest:One is a stream of anti-black racism.
Guest:The other one right next to it is a stream of anti-Semitism.
Guest:And they are activated by the same forces which are when you strip away all of the apparent causes
Guest:yeah excuses yeah explanations yes gets down to economics it all flows from economic insecurity economic jealousy um and economic motive motivation in the case of african americans being reduced to commodity themselves right think about what is the um ultimate formula for commodification it is blackness and slavery
Guest:You know, you were an economic entity colored black.
Guest:And you were an economic entity because you were black.
Guest:A working object.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:And with Jews, they didn't suffer enslavement except a long time ago, as we know from Godown Moses and Pharaoh.
Guest:Right.
Marc:But I always felt uncomfortable when Jews kind of played that card because it's like it's not in our experience.
Marc:It's a biblical history.
Marc:I mean, the experience of a modern Jew is genocide.
Marc:Genocide.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It is six million of your brothers and sisters.
Guest:Just a few years ago.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And all killed in just a few years.
Guest:it's it's i can't okay so yeah but how's the what do you explain the economic part of the jewish thing the jews have all the money right yeah they they are they are you know hitler hitler says we can balance our checkbook if we just confiscate all the property of the jews and kill them yeah and and take the gold in their teeth and all of everything that they possibly could um own that can be converted into cash and that's what he did
Marc:But like I like in watching your show, like what in terms of your your coming of age.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And you deciding, you know, what your role is in in academics, in the black community and just your your life's work.
Marc:You know, where does that start for you?
Marc:Where I mean, where did you grow up?
Marc:Oh, that's a great question.
Marc:Oh, you're going to do My Roots?
Marc:Sure.
Marc:I'd like to.
Guest:I don't have the research, but I can get it out of you, maybe.
Guest:You got me.
Guest:I was born in Piedmont, West Virginia, which is a paper mill town.
Guest:Population 2,500 in the year in which I was born, 1950.
Guest:386 black people that year.
Guest:It's an Italian...
Guest:Irish-Italian paper mill town.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And my family, as it turns out, has lived in a 30-mile radius of this little town for the last 200 years.
Guest:But I didn't know that until we started filming Finding Your Roots and our genealogical team Trace My Ancestry.
Guest:Were you the first guest?
Guest:Actually, in the first season, in the first iteration of the series, I only did African Americans.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because that was my brand, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was called African American Lives.
Guest:And I was trying to be the genealogical guru for other African Americans.
Guest:Because I wanted to do Alex Haley one better.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I wanted to do what Alex Haley purported to do.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I wanted to do that in a laboratory in a test tube.
Guest:Yeah, for a lot of different people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I wanted to do it only for African Americans first.
Guest:But that's what I mean.
Guest:Yeah, but there's a full range, right?
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Guest:Where people come from and what they...
Guest:And I found out the more I learned how various that range is.
Guest:But let me go back to Piedmont and bring me back to that.
Guest:So I was born in 1950.
Guest:I had an older brother, Paul, who's an oral surgeon.
Guest:He's five years older.
Guest:And...
Guest:My dad worked two jobs at the paper mill in the daytime West Vaco paper company, and he was a janitor at the telephone company in the evening.
Guest:My mom, who studied to be a seamstress in Atlantic City in a vocational school, was a housewife from the time that my brother and I were born.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because that's the way it was.
Guest:My dad worked two jobs.
Guest:Right.
Guest:My mom didn't have to.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And because he had two jobs, we were we had the most comfortable existence of all the black people in Piedmont, West Virginia.
Marc:Why?
Guest:Because he.
Guest:Well, because he had double income.
Marc:Oh, OK.
Marc:Not because he was like he didn't he didn't come home and yell at you.
Guest:No, no, he didn't do any of that.
Guest:So I was always raised to think of myself as privileged because vis-a-vis all the other black people in town, I was.
Guest:And my family had a long history in this area.
Guest:Again, I didn't know how long.
Guest:Piedmont is in the Potomac River Valley in the Allegheny Mountains, halfway between Pittsburgh and Washington.
Guest:I like Pittsburgh.
Guest:It's not exactly a hotbed of black culture when you think about the hills of West Virginia.
Guest:But that's where my family was from.
Guest:That's interesting.
Guest:So how did they get there?
Guest:I'm going to tell you that.
Guest:But I was raised to be a doctor.
Guest:For my mother, God bless her soul, in heaven there was a father, son, the Holy Ghost, and a medical doctor.
Guest:And all smart little colored boys and colored girls, as we were back then, were raised to be doctors.
Guest:So Skippy Gates was raised to be a doctor.
Guest:So for Christmas, I got stethoscope.
Guest:How'd you get that nickname?
Guest:When mom was pregnant, she was reading a book and the character was Skippy or Skipper.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so that was a name she liked.
Guest:And my family's very big on nicknames.
Guest:Henry Louis Gates Sr.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Was Heine because he was born in 1913 in German variation.
Guest:All right.
Guest:My mother was called Pun because she liked language so much.
Guest:So she was Pun.
Guest:Paul Edward, name for the two grandfathers, my brother, that's our family tradition, was Rocky, because she was reading a book five years before with a character named Rocky.
Guest:And you're Skip.
Guest:And then I was Skip.
Guest:So it took me a long time not to become a doctor.
Guest:I mean, a very long time.
Guest:All through Yale, I was gonna be a doctor, and I got a fellowship to go to England, to Cambridge.
Guest:and it was there that I realized that I wanted to be a scholar, I wanted to be a professor.
Marc:So when you got, now a premium obviously in something about the documentary series, The Making of Black America, that the evolution of just the educational structure
Marc:for African Americans, was all self-driven.
Marc:And I imagine that would be the generation, like maybe two before you?
Guest:Well, take my brother, born in 1945.
Guest:He went to the colored schools.
Guest:He went to Lincoln, was the segregated elementary school, and Howard High School was the segregated high school.
Guest:So he started at the segregated school.
Guest:Brown v. Boards in 1954 when I was four.
Guest:For reasons, Mark, that nobody knows.
Guest:The white people who dominated the vote in Mineral County, West Virginia, voted to integrate the schools immediately.
Guest:And so our school system integrated completely without Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, without a peep.
Guest:in 1955, and I started at the White School in 1956.
Guest:I'll tell you a funny story about that.
Guest:My dad was hilarious.
Guest:My dad was one of the great storytellers.
Guest:My dad made Red Fox look like Undertaker.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:He was hilarious.
Guest:So my dad...
Guest:Sat me down the day before I started at the white school on August 31st, 1956.
Guest:And he took me in our formal living room.
Guest:I mean, our house is as big as your studio here, really.
Guest:But we had a formal living room where the furniture, I remember, was covered in plastic.
Guest:And I don't know who my mom thought was going to ever come to visit.
Guest:The Queen of England was going to drop in, right?
Guest:The president.
Marc:Is that when the plastic comes off?
Marc:I never knew when it comes off.
Marc:It never came off.
Guest:It never came off.
Guest:It disintegrated.
Guest:I went up in smoke.
Guest:So my dad took me into our formal living room.
Guest:And he said, boy, he called me boy.
Guest:He lived to be 97 and a half.
Guest:He called me boy to the day he died.
Guest:And he said, boy, it's something that I need to explain to you.
Guest:And he said, sit down.
Guest:And I thought I was in trouble because nobody ever went in that room.
Guest:And I said, what is daddy?
Guest:Terrified, and he said, you're going over to the white school tomorrow, and there's something you need to know.
Guest:I said, what's that?
Guest:He said, well, there are two kinds of white people.
Guest:And I go, two kinds of white people?
Guest:Now, I grew up in this white town, this Irish-Italian paper mill town.
Guest:So I saw white kids all the time.
Guest:And I didn't know they came in kinds.
Guest:I go, well, how do you tell the difference?
Guest:He said, that's why I brought you into this room.
Guest:He said, they're the Italians and the Irish.
Guest:and there's a crucial difference between them.
Guest:I go, okay, what's the key?
Guest:And he said, the Irish have names that begin with O, and the Italians have names that end with O. LAUGHTER
Guest:And it's true.
Guest:And that's the secret to my success of all these years.
Guest:So I started in a fully integrated school in rural West Virginia, and I never had any experience of racism by any.
Guest:I was elected class president.
Guest:Why does that feel like an anomaly to me?
Guest:It is an anomaly, particularly when you see how strongly my fellow West Virginians came out for Donald Trump.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you associate West Virginia with when you see Joe Manchin up there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You associate it with being very conservative.
Guest:But it wasn't when I was growing up and it was very liberal about race.
Marc:Do you think that was because that those other two communities were only a generation or two away from the immigrant experience?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, the motto of West Virginia is mountaineers are always free.
Guest:And those mountains, there's a kind of rugged individualism.
Guest:Sounds corny, but it's true.
Guest:And it's in our DNA.
Guest:In fact, I tell people when I'm interviewed that growing up in West Virginia was as important to my identity formation as being an African-American because I was very much a West Virginia.
Guest:I grew up hunting.
Guest:I grew up fishing.
Guest:The first day of deer season was a holiday.
Guest:When you're 12, you got a 410.
Guest:You know, I was a country boy.
Guest:And that's just the way it was.
Guest:Did you want that out of you at some point?
Guest:No, no, I love it.
Guest:I liked to vacation at the beach, but not in the mountains, because I saw the mountains every day until I went off to Yale when I was 18 years old.
Marc:So now the Yale thing, was that always the school you wanted to go to?
Guest:Or how did that work?
Guest:Well, I was raised to be a doctor.
Marc:What does that mean, though?
Marc:It was just pummeled into your head that you're going to be a doctor?
Guest:I was going to be a doctor.
Guest:The teacher said I was going to be a doctor.
Guest:Your brother's a doctor.
Marc:So they got one.
Guest:They got one.
Guest:And if you ask me, I was just going to be a doctor.
Guest:That's it.
Guest:So now I went through two phases of interest in college.
Guest:And it's funny because we just...
Guest:I just presided over the Hutchins Center Honors at Harvard.
Guest:I'm the director of my day job of the greatest center for the research in African, Afro-Latin American, African American culture.
Guest:It's called the Hutchins Center, endowed by my friend Glenn Hutchins and his wife Debbie Hutchins, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.
Guest:And our big annual ceremony is to pick seven individuals
Guest:to present the Du Bois Medal in honor of W.E.B.
Guest:Du Bois, the first black man to get a PhD from Harvard University in 1895.
Guest:1,200 people were there and Kareem, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was one of our honor ends.
Guest:And it made me remember
Guest:That when I was an early teenager, I wrote to UCLA to get the course catalog.
Guest:You know, back in the day, course catalogs were like little books.
Guest:And I got UCLA's because of Kareem.
Guest:Kareem was there and I was going to go to UCLA and they had a great medical school.
Marc:He's a thoughtful guy, intellectual guy.
Guest:He is.
Guest:He's an old friend and someone I admire very much.
Guest:I mean, Kareem had even studied Arabic at Harvard in summer school.
Guest:So I went through this whole first phase.
Guest:I mean, I also wrote to Michigan, Michigan State, you know, the schools that had great basketball teams.
Guest:Not that I was ever going to play basketball, but those were the ones that I saw on TV.
Guest:But then it was Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.
Guest:And we had a tradition of attending Harvard in my father's family.
Guest:My father's first cousin, George Lee, actually graduated from Harvard Law School in 1949, the year before I was born.
Guest:And his wife, Dorothy Hicksley, got her PhD in comparative literature from Harvard.
Guest:in 1955.
Guest:So they were held up as the, you know, you can imagine, you're from a culture that privileges education just like I am.
Guest:And they were the touchstones for academic excellence.
Guest:One day you could grow up and go to Harvard like your cousin George.
Guest:And I thought, wow, Harvard.
Guest:And then I was watching TV and smart kids went to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, right?
Guest:That became a metaphor.
Guest:Then they went to Oxford or Cambridge.
Guest:So by the time I was in
Guest:say ninth grade yeah i had a deep desire to go to the ivy league get a road scholarship and then go off to england that was what my fantasy of and you know not as a doctor and well i was going to be a doctor the road scholar but i was going to do that and then come back and um be careful what you wish for right i ended up graduated from yale and then i
Guest:I got a fellowship to go to the University of Cambridge where I had my master's degree and my PhD.
Guest:And to my astonishment, on June 22nd, my alma mater awarded me an honorary degree, which is the first African-American male.
Guest:I'm the second African-American in the history of Cambridge with over 800 years.
Guest:to get an honorary degree, my friend Jesse Norman, who's left us.
Guest:Jesse Norman was the first in 1989, and I was the second.
Guest:It was one of the greatest honors of my life to be honored by the place where I studied.
Guest:So my father's father had three sisters.
Guest:And my father was born on the Gates Farm, 200-acre farm.
Guest:My grandfather worked that farm with his father, Edward Gates, and his wife, Maude.
Guest:And Edward was born in 1857.
Guest:My grandfather was born in 1879.
Guest:My dad was born in 1913.
Guest:My dad was born on the Gates Farm.
Guest:At the turn of the century, my great-grandparents did something so extraordinary that I still can't process it.
Guest:They kept the son on the farm, the oldest child of five, and sent the three girls to college.
Guest:Can you imagine in a black family?
Guest:They sent my three great aunts to Howard University.
Guest:One became a nurse and the other two became teachers.
Guest:And one married a dentist, one married a pharmacist, and one married a sign painter.
Guest:And so my brother is the third generation dentist in the extended Gates family.
Guest:So without affirmative action, I would have gone to Howard.
Guest:But what affirmative action did was open up historically white universities so that people like me could fairly compete.
Guest:People forget that's what affirmative action did.
Guest:So why would I say we're the affirmative action generation?
Guest:Because the class of 66 at Yale had six black guys to graduate.
Guest:The class that hit New Haven in September 69 with me had 96 black men and women.
Guest:So what was it, Mark, a genetic blip in the race and all of a sudden there are 90 smart black kids who existed in 69 who hadn't existed before?
Guest:No, affirmative action lifted
Guest:a racist quota that had obtained at Yale and Harvard and God knows Princeton for a long, long time.
Guest:So there were only six in 65, 64, 63.
Marc:But as a scholar, when you're there, I have to assume that in the 60s, when you start...
Marc:Yale.
Marc:When did you start?
Marc:69.
Marc:I mean, everything's coming apart.
Guest:It was the Wild West days of revolution.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We went on strike in the second semester for the Black Panthers.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Bobby Seale was on trial in the New Haven courthouse a block from Calhoun College where my dorm was.
Guest:Did you go?
Guest:I was secretary of the black student organization.
Guest:I had no choice.
Guest:I was terrified, baby.
Guest:The Black Panthers were around.
Guest:We had the Black Panthers.
Guest:We had the Black Muslims.
Guest:We had the cultural nationalists.
Guest:It was wild.
Guest:I'd like to write a novel about it.
Marc:So where did you find yourself in the middle of all that?
Guest:I mean, you know what it made me realize?
Guest:What?
Guest:It made me realize I hated bullies.
Guest:I hated ideological bullies.
Guest:I hated people who would tell you that you weren't black enough, that you weren't the authentic thing.
Guest:You weren't the real deal.
Guest:And I guess they all kind of did that.
Guest:They all did that unless you subscribe to their doctrines, right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I was lucky because I had a strong nuclear family and deep roots in this funny little...
Guest:community of black people in the hills of West Virginia.
Guest:And I knew myself.
Guest:And it was a challenge because there were forces saying, you're not black unless... Remember, this is the period of black power.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And so I had an Afro.
Guest:Black is beautiful.
Guest:You were doing all the right things.
Guest:We were doing all the right things.
Guest:I became I volunteered to be the secretary of the black student organization.
Guest:So I wouldn't have to say anything.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was just taking notes so I could watch the sort of landscape of blackness that was unfolding.
Marc:Was it was it was it actively debated all the time?
Guest:All the time, man.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And somebody was always jumping in somebody's face and saying, unless your Afro's two feet high, you're not black enough.
Guest:Unless you got a closet of dashikis.
Guest:Unless you're learning Swahili.
Guest:Whatever.
Guest:I call them the litmus test of blackness.
Marc:But what's interesting to me in hearing you talk about that is that a lot of that stuff was of the time and it was specifically...
Marc:identity-driven, whereas it seems that your life's work has been to incorporate the work, the literary work of black writers into the respect that the white canon gets.
Marc:So it was not about the sort of ideas about blackness ideologically, but about the full spectrum of black scholarship.
Guest:Oh, absolutely.
Guest:I am...
Guest:I realized very quickly I never was going to be a member of a party.
Guest:I'm just not made that way.
Guest:I'm too cynical.
Guest:I'm too skeptical and too independent.
Guest:I want to be a fly on the wall.
Guest:I want to write about a political rally.
Guest:I don't want to be in a political rally.
Marc:But when you were pressed at that time, did you speak up?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I had an Afro.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:But I never, ever was embarrassed about having white friends.
Guest:I had a white girlfriend my sophomore year.
Guest:My friend, Eddie Jackson, was in love with an Irish-American woman who was a student at Albertus Magnus College, which the Catholic girls go up the street.
Guest:And he was bullied and...
Guest:And he gave up the love of his life, and he never got over it.
Guest:I mean, he actually committed suicide years later.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:And I will go to my grave believing that one of the reasons that Eddie did that was that he could never live with himself for cutting loose the love of his life.
Guest:And I was determined nobody was going to tell me how to be black.
Guest:And you know what?
Guest:In my lecture course, my lecture course ends, my section of the lecture course, I always end my lecture this way.
Guest:I structured this course around the experience I had at Yale so that every week the students learn about a debate that black people have had.
Guest:in the black community about what it means to be black, starting in the 18th century.
Guest:And so the moral of the story is there never was one way to be black.
Guest:And in my last lecture, I say if there are 42 million African Americans, that means there are 42 million ways to be black.
Guest:Never let a bully tell you how to be black.
Guest:You're here at Harvard because you're a special person, you're gifted.
Guest:And most of my students are white.
Guest:I mean, all the black kids take the class, but-
Guest:Overwhelming, you know, we've got 150 kids.
Guest:We can't have 150 black kids at Harvard.
Guest:And I say, each of you is special.
Guest:And even if you're not black, if you're Jewish, don't let somebody tell you there's one way to be Jewish.
Guest:If you're from China, don't let someone tell you that there's one way to be Asian American, et cetera, et cetera.
Guest:So it's a metaphor.
Guest:But the reason that...
Guest:I have this sense of stubbornness about protecting the individuality of your identity is because the experiences I had at Yale and because the secure background that I had at home.
Guest:My dad, when I got into Yale, my parents bought me a new car because they thought...
Guest:All the rich white kids had cars.
Guest:I got up there, man.
Guest:I was the only kid I knew who had a car.
Guest:I had a new Royal Electric typewriter, all new clothes, of course.
Guest:But my mother was, you know, seamstress.
Guest:So we always, you know, had new clothes, always had new textbooks, et cetera.
Guest:And my father packed up the car, and I drove up there by myself.
Guest:But my father, right before I left, said...
Guest:He said, I would give you three bits of advice.
Guest:It's hilarious.
Guest:At this time, this is September 69, news about the black table in the Ivy League was hitting Time magazine because the historically white institutions like Harvey and Yale were opening up because of pressure of affirmative action.
Guest:But to everyone's surprise, the black kids were all sitting together in the cafeterias, right?
Guest:It was called the black table.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My father said, don't go up there sitting along with all these black kids at the black table.
Guest:He said, you're going to Yale, not Howard.
Guest:You know, like go up there.
Guest:He said, and don't go up there getting black roommates.
Guest:Don't go up there.
Guest:Black people call it Jim Crowing yourself.
Guest:He said, don't go up there.
Guest:have a black roommate.
Guest:You know what he said?
Guest:You're going to love, no, you got to hear that.
Guest:He said, I said, well, what kind of roommate should I get, daddy?
Guest:He said, get a Jewish guy.
Guest:He said, they've been good to our people.
Guest:Might learn something.
Guest:This is funny.
Guest:And then he said, and for Christ's sake, don't go up there studying another called black study.
Guest:He said, because your ass has been black for 18 years and I ain't paying for that.
Guest:So here's what I did.
Guest:This is, I want you to know what a dutiful son I am.
Guest:Every lunch I ate at the black table.
Guest:I had three black roommates.
Guest:And though I didn't major in Afro-American studies, as it was called at Yale, every semester when I could, I took a course of black content because I took the first course in Afro-American history that I was ever exposed to my first semester.
Marc:Who was the teacher of that?
Guest:William McFeely, a white guy who subsequently got the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Ulysses S. Grant.
Guest:And everybody black took that course.
Guest:There were a couple hundred of us in there, plus a lot of white kids.
Guest:And I was riveted.
Guest:And every fact that I read, every story that I heard just stuck to me like glue.
Guest:And so I developed almost this skin of...
Guest:African and African-American studies.
Guest:Things just stuck to me.
Marc:Well, it's interesting, though, what you say about what your father said, because even in the, I don't remember which episode of the doc, that there are arguments now that the black community makes about maintaining and staying in a black space.
Marc:Yes, that's right.
Marc:That your father was saying, you've done that.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It's time to go out and see the world.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But now, the entire documentary seems to be about what black communities and black people did in the shadow of ongoing racism.
Guest:Behind the veil, as Du Bois put it.
Guest:But there's a difference between enforced segregation, enforced separation, and willing association.
Guest:It's a funny thing, an interesting chapter in our history.
Guest:Right after Brown v. Board was announced by the Supreme Court, there were a group of the leaders of the black community organized.
Guest:Ralph Ellison, the great novelist, tells this story.
Guest:He was called to a meeting in New York.
Guest:He lived in New York.
Guest:and he was dispatched to Tuskegee, where he'd been a student, to tell the people that they were soon going to go out of business, that all black schools were gonna go out of business because they only existed because of segregation, and there was gonna be no need for them.
Guest:And now you look back and laugh, but enrollment applications of black schools have never been higher because people have chosen
Guest:to associate with other black people and to participate in historically black institutions willingly because they embrace the culture.
Guest:I think the model for that is the Jewish community, where you can observe the Sabbath, you can observe the high holy days, but be fully integrated into American society.
Guest:That you can be both.
Guest:You can celebrate your Jewish identity, either religiously or not,
Guest:But certainly culturally.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And be thoroughly integrated into the American economy and American culture.
Marc:Well, that's what struck me about the stuff in the documentary, because it's stuff I didn't know, that the idea that there was a schism in the black community around trying to appease the whites by acting like them.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But really, in what you sort of set out in the documentary to show, is that building businesses, building fraternal orders, building banks, building a varying degree of entrepreneurship, was not trying to be white, this is how the country worked.
Guest:Right, absolutely.
Guest:And we were excluded
Guest:from the white examples, the white instances of those.
Guest:So what did we do?
Guest:Did we sit around and just wring our hands?
Guest:Did we sit around and cry and complain?
Guest:No, we replicated the world from which we were excluded, just like Jewish people did.
Guest:They couldn't go to white country clubs, I mean WASP, the country clubs of the Goyim.
Guest:They did the Catskills, right?
Guest:And 1,001 other examples of that.
Guest:But look, my three generations of dentists in the Gates family,
Guest:The first two generations couldn't join the American Dental Association.
Guest:So what did they do?
Guest:They formed the National Dental Association.
Guest:The black doctors couldn't join the AMA.
Guest:They formed the National Medical Association.
Guest:Black lawyers, like my cousin, graduated from Harvard Law School, couldn't be in the American Bar Association.
Guest:They formed the National Bar Association.
Guest:National, like the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, National coded for black.
Guest:Isn't that cool?
Guest:You couldn't be in the American one, but you could be in the National.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:But it's fascinating to me to know that, I mean, like, I panic about the nature of our system now, right?
Marc:And you're friends with Barack Obama.
Marc:And, you know, you went through your own issues around, I mean, a very well-publicized arrest at your own house.
Guest:The worst day of my life.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:I do not recommend arrest for anybody.
Marc:But it was interesting in that when they talk about the Reconstruction, when they talk about this idea of a multiracial democracy or a biracial at the time democracy, that...
Marc:When you see that all these other communities thriving within social, within democracy and capitalism, that there is still a separation there, but that there is sort of the opportunity on some level.
Marc:But do you think in your experience and in your studies that that multiracial democracy is working?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I think that, well, it's very complicated.
Guest:To see Donald Trump waiting in the wings might give one pause, right?
Guest:But my wife, who's Cuban, a Cuban citizen, a professor like me, says to all my friends whenever we're complaining, yes, but you can throw them out.
Guest:You still have the right to...
Guest:Donald Trump can get elected and Donald Trump can be thrown out.
Guest:I think that we have to remember that, that we do live in a democracy and a multiracial coalition elected Barack Obama.
Guest:There was a backlash against Obama as a black man, without a doubt.
Guest:And remember I said there were two streams always running under the floorboards of American culture.
Guest:That force is called white supremacy.
Guest:And having a black man in the White House
Guest:Triggered those four.
Guest:That beast, which was slumbering, many of us thought it had been banished, came roaring out of the floor.
Guest:And a lot of people were freaked out in part because ultimately economics.
Guest:Why do I say that?
Guest:Because many of the people I grew up with.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:who based their sense of being an American on an idea of progress that was infinite.
Guest:They would start in the labor pool at the paper mill.
Guest:Then they'd get promoted to the craft unions.
Guest:When you made good money as a plumber or an electrician or whatever, you send your kids to college.
Guest:The kids would come back, maybe be an engineer, work in the paper mill, too.
Guest:Buy a bigger house.
Guest:You'd buy a house, work your way up.
Guest:And then your kids' kids, your grandkids, they would go to college.
Guest:Maybe they'd be a doctor.
Guest:Maybe they'd be a lawyer.
Sure.
Guest:Fiction of infinite upward mobility is over.
Guest:And a lot of people don't know how to deal with that.
Guest:What is the new narrative?
Guest:How are we going to make sure that the world is better economically for our grandkids?
Marc:Or even there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The paper mill is gone.
Guest:Literally in my hometown.
Guest:There was nothing else there but that paper mill.
Marc:What is it like there now?
Guest:It's like a ghost town.
Guest:Instead of 2,500 people when I was born, there are, I think, 800 people in the last census.
Guest:And there are people who just will never, ever leave.
Marc:But, you know, this idea, though, maybe I'm cynical about, you know, you can just vote somebody out as these...
Marc:You know, not unlike the school boards, there's a certain strain of religious fascism, I think, that is kind of radicalizing some state legislatures.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:And more importantly, is the voter suppression.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Reconstruction ended because of voter suppression.
Guest:Let me give you a little background.
Guest:Until 1910, 90% of the African-American people lived in the former Confederacy.
Guest:And get this, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana were majority black states.
Guest:Georgia, Alabama, Florida were almost majority black states.
Guest:give black men the right to vote.
Guest:Remember, only men had the right to vote.
Guest:That's called black power, baby.
Guest:And so the black men in the former Confederacy got the right to vote because of the Reconstruction Act in 1867.
Guest:And Mark, when they voted, they elected the president in 1868.
Guest:Ulysses S. Grant won the Electoral College overwhelmingly, but he only won the popular vote by about just over 300,000 votes.
Guest:500,000 black men voted in 1868.
Guest:in the general election of 1868 and in South Carolina, which was ground zero for black power, the state legislature, the House of Representatives was majority black.
Guest:Secretary of Treasurer, Secretary of State were all black.
Guest:Holy mackerel.
Guest:And the way they shut down Reconstruction most effectively, most devastatingly,
Guest:was to take away the right to vote.
Guest:And starting in 1890, with what was called the Mississippi Plan, each of the former Confederate states ratified a new state constitution.
Guest:And without using the word black or Negro, as we were then, or race, they effectively took away the right to vote of these black men throughout the South through poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses.
Guest:You wanna know how effective it was?
Guest:Take Louisiana.
Guest:In 1898, there were 130,000 black men registered to vote in the state of Louisiana.
Guest:After Louisiana ratified their new racist, redemptionist constitution, by 1904, that number had been reduced precisely 1,342.
Guest:That is voter suppression.
Guest:And that's what we see today.
Guest:And that's what we have to fight against.
Guest:Because if people of color...
Guest:have the right to vote protected.
Guest:There won't be a return of Donald Trump.
Guest:The Republicans know this, which is why they're doing all this rope a dope gerrymandering and trying to, in various ways, suppress the right of people of color to vote.
Guest:So that they can win in the relevant districts.
Marc:But now the language of the GOP is blatantly white supremacist.
Marc:Yeah, it seems that way to me.
Marc:And what you were saying that we used to think it was underneath the surface.
Marc:Now not only is it out, but it's shameless.
Guest:Well, Donald Trump just lifted up the floorboards.
Guest:Sure, I get it.
Guest:You know, someone asked me the other day, when Donald Trump was elected, I was interviewed, of course, and they said, do you think he's a racist?
Guest:And I said, well, I don't know the man.
Guest:I don't know what's in his heart.
Guest:So I'm prepared to give him the benefit of that.
Guest:Is he racist now?
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:But I don't know if he's... I don't know.
Guest:But it's important for me to say this.
Guest:I don't know if he's a racist like Orville Faubus was or George Wallace was racist.
Guest:In a sense, it doesn't matter.
Guest:But those guys were born racists.
Guest:I mean, they just hated black people.
Guest:I think Donald Trump is an opportunistic racist.
Guest:In the end, it still makes him a racist.
Guest:But he saw that he could stir up all of these...
Guest:Buried sentiments and unleash them and profit from the people who believe those things.
Guest:He could tap into fear.
Guest:Instead of assuaging people's fear, which Obama sought to do, the Republicans wouldn't let him do it, but he sought to do that.
Guest:Obama really thought that he could be a healer, and he wasn't.
Guest:He was very divisive because these people in the grip of white supremacy were...
Guest:We're terrified.
Guest:And they said, Jesus, they've taken over.
Guest:I mean, God, they've taken over the White House.
Guest:What's next?
Guest:And despite the man's best efforts, he could not become the figure of healing and reconciliation that we all thought he would be.
Guest:But you believe it was still a successful presidency.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Guest:He did as well as he could.
Guest:I mean, when you have the Speaker of the House give a press conference and say, we're going to do everything we can to see that he fails, you know, or the majority leader of the Republicans in the Senate say, you know, we are going to undermine this guy.
Guest:Day by day.
Guest:And they did that for eight years.
Marc:But it still doesn't take away the fact that it was pretty amazing that he was president.
Guest:It was America at its finest elected Barack Hussein Obama.
Guest:America at its worst elected Donald Trump.
Guest:It's like a joke.
Guest:It's like satire.
Guest:Yeah, it is.
Marc:It's like it caused me a tremendous amount of stress every day.
Guest:Yeah, well.
Guest:You?
Guest:Yeah, it worries me, but I'm constructed fundamentally around the embrace of optimism.
Guest:I believe that the American people are decent people.
Guest:A lot of the kids I grew up with went to high school with.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:told me the summer before the election with Hillary that they were going to vote for Donald Trump and he was going to win.
Guest:When every summer my wife and I spend two months on Martha's Vineyard, which I love, and the seven women whom I met on the first day of first grade in Piedmont, West Virginia, August 31st, 1956,
Guest:They come and spend four days with us on the vineyard.
Guest:Six white girls and one, I call them girls because I met them when I was six, women.
Guest:And all of them, almost all of them voted for Donald Trump.
Guest:So I know that Trump had a lot of people who supported him who were not racist.
Guest:Because they aren't racist.
Guest:They voted for him because they felt that there was no hope.
Guest:They felt that there was too much corruption.
Guest:They saw him as a populist.
Guest:Cornel West and I did a huge event on Friday at Loyola Marymount.
Guest:1,200 people came.
Guest:Just now?
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:And he had a brilliant, I was interviewing him.
Guest:I'm doing a series of conversations at Loyola Marymount this year.
Guest:And just three.
Guest:I started with Cornel, my dear friend.
Guest:And he talked about how Donald Trump appealed to populist instincts.
Guest:But the history of populism in America goes two ways.
Guest:Either it goes toward a liberal democratic ideal, the best of us, or the white supremacist underbelly, the worst of us.
Guest:Donald Trump took it right that way into the bowels, the depths of white supremacy, the worst of us.
Guest:And he did it consciously, and he was very effective at it.
Guest:But still, we beat them.
Guest:But how do you feel about those people?
Guest:I think they're frightened.
Marc:And you still socialize with them every year?
Guest:Oh, you mean they're my best friends.
Guest:Look, they knew me when I was six years old.
Guest:I would never turn against them.
Guest:Listen, the only way I'd ever turn against one of my friends, remember to go back to my, what was my crucial shaping experience?
Guest:It was Yale being surrounded by ideological bullies, right?
Guest:So I never judge my friends on their ideology.
Guest:If you put on a Klan suit and were burning crosses on my lawn, we might have to talk.
Guest:Friendship might end.
Marc:But as an intellectual person, I don't know to what degree...
Marc:their belief was, but it seems that propaganda and misinformation and certainly conspiracy theories now seem to corrupt a good deal of relatively good people's brains.
Guest:Well, I think that with my friends, they thought that the lives of their children and grandchildren would be better if Donald Trump was president.
Guest:I don't want to have to defend them because I have no idea why anybody could be fooled by Donald Trump.
Guest:But that's why they voted for them.
Guest:They didn't vote for them because they were racist.
Guest:I know these people.
Guest:I love them.
Guest:They sleep in my house.
Guest:I know them like the back of my hand.
Guest:That's why we have to be subtle in our analysis.
Guest:Because if we just demonize people that we disagree with, if we underestimate their complexity, we'll never reach them.
Guest:Well, tell me, when you got arrested, what year was that?
Marc:I can't remember.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:What, you don't want to talk about it?
Marc:No.
Guest:You're done with that?
Guest:Yeah, I've turned that page.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I just was like, in talking about the learning moments in terms of transcending ideology or at least giving some kind of empathy,
Marc:towards what appears blatantly insensitive or racist, that you were able to do that.
Guest:Well, I didn't want to ever actually or appear to profit from an event that I thought was an aberration.
Mm-hmm.
Guest:So imagine me as a poster boy for police brutality.
Guest:That's ridiculous.
Guest:I'm a privileged person.
Guest:I was in the jail.
Guest:Within an hour, it was full of Harvard professors and even the legal counsel of the university.
Guest:Everybody realized they made a mistake.
Guest:They just had to figure out how to get out of it.
Guest:And then here comes Barack to the rescue, bringing us down for a beer.
Guest:The whole point was designed to make it go away.
Guest:But it did make me very, very sensitive to the abuse of the police and prison reform.
Guest:And I'm a passionate advocate of prison reform, and I participate in a program attempting to get books to prisoners.
Guest:It's very difficult to get books to prisoners.
Guest:It should be very easy.
Marc:It's getting difficult to get books to students.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, that's true.
Guest:Well, one of my books has been banned in Texas.
Guest:And guess what?
Guest:It's a chronology.
Guest:All it is is a listing of 500 years of African-American history from the first black man to set foot on the North American continent, Juan Garrido, who was a free black man, a conquistador, through Obama.
Guest:And that book has been banned.
Marc:I mean, that's crazy.
Marc:But what do you make of that?
Guest:It turns my stomach, makes me want to vomit.
Guest:My fundamental principle is that any form of censorship, including cancel culture, is offensive.
Guest:Censorship in all of its hideous forms is to art and free expression as lynching is to justice.
Guest:And if you think of the two things that way, it allows you to understand that you should never tolerate any form of censorship.
Marc:But this seems to be completely to program or reprogram.
Marc:young people around a very specific idea of history.
Guest:Absolutely, and it's designed to whitewash the history of the American people, and we have to fight against that.
Guest:Look, my whole career has been based on integrating the curriculum, establishing the black presence, as you said, within the canon of American literature and world literature on the one hand, and our presence within the weave
Guest:of American history, because American history has always been about race and race relations from the get-go.
Guest:You can't tell American history without talking about the history of race.
Marc:Right, but it just seems like the telling of that history as a progressive person and as somebody who has seen the arc of some progress, we've now arrived at seemingly the worst progress.
Guest:possible manifestation of it.
Guest:But at the same time, I'm a consultant with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham to the college board, and we have the first AP course in African-American studies.
Guest:So that means that we're about to experience a revolution in the teaching of African-American studies in the schools through all the kids who take AP courses.
Guest:What's AP?
Guest:Advanced placement.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So you can take a course in AP history.
Guest:So you've got to be gifted to know the truth?
Guest:Well, unfortunately, it is incumbent upon all of us who love freedom and the history of democracy in this country to fight any attempt to censorship.
Guest:All these school boards, we have to take them on.
Guest:But I can't just write an op-ed piece for the New York Times.
Guest:We're talking about...
Guest:Fighting at the granular level.
Marc:I know.
Marc:We need people fighting.
Marc:But it used to be censorship was based on some somewhat vaguely moral idea about Christian values.
Marc:And now it seems to be thoroughly rooted in white supremacy.
Guest:Oh, it is.
Guest:It is about whitewashing the complex history.
Guest:Look, nobody, you know this, I sit every week.
Guest:I have the most popular show, nonfiction series on PBS.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Every week I have to tell people uncomfortable things about their past.
Guest:I don't judge them.
Guest:I don't do that.
Guest:Christopher Walken, I did his family tree.
Guest:Two brothers, bakers.
Guest:German.
Guest:One comes to the United States, one stays home.
Guest:Well, guess what the one is doing who stayed home in Germany?
Guest:He turns the page and there he is in a Nazi uniform.
Guest:I don't do that to make him feel bad.
Guest:Did he?
Guest:He said that he naturally assumed that family stayed in Germany.
Guest:What was he going to do?
Guest:Conscientious objection?
Guest:But the point is not to make people feel bad.
Guest:It is to talk about the complexity of
Guest:of world history.
Marc:And I appreciate that.
Marc:And I was talking to my producer this morning about taking in the information in your new series, The Making Black America.
Marc:I mean, I don't know the specifics about a lot of things.
Marc:I know where my heart is, but it was all new to me.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And I had a great uncle and aunt who were American communists, and I had the entire collection of W.E.B.
Marc:Du Bois.
Marc:Yeah, of all his writing.
Marc:Right, that's great.
Marc:Yeah, and they had, they used to, you know, I've got free Angela buttons.
Guest:So you're a red diaper baby.
Marc:Kind of, well, by virtue of that, I was exposed to it, but still my knowledge is,
Marc:And I'm sitting there as a 59-year-old guy who's hungry for information and having these realizations watching your series and watching Kevin Burns' series about the nature of this country.
Marc:And then I'm realizing alongside of that that this is exactly, this information, not the history of slavery, but the history of the black experience
Guest:in this country is exactly what they're saying cannot be taught but that's why it's incumbent upon people like ken people like me people like stanley nelson it's incumbent upon us to keep telling the story all right over you know there's an old hymn i love to tell the story oh yeah of jesus but what if it's fun i love to tell the story of the american people and the african-american people and oh
Guest:Whether it's the African experience on the continent, in Europe, or in the New World.
Guest:And you know what?
Guest:As long as I have an outlet through PBS, I'm going to keep telling that story.
Guest:And I reach millions of people.
Guest:I know.
Guest:Millions of people.
Guest:And I know because they stop me on the street and talk to me all the time.
Marc:But do you ever reach people?
Marc:Do they stop you on the street and say, like, you know what?
Marc:I was a monster.
Marc:And now I'm not.
Guest:No, I've never had that experience.
Guest:But I've had experience when people say, I mean, what kind of person is going to say I was a monster or not?
Guest:But I've had recovering monsters.
Guest:Well, I have not had the pleasure yet.
Guest:But I have had, over and over, people with Make America Great Again hats on and T-shirts or Donald Trump stop me and say,
Guest:I don't like your politics, but I love your show.
Guest:And I go, well, that's good enough for me, brother.
Guest:Thank you very much.
Guest:Yeah, I hear that.
Guest:They said, can I have a photo?
Guest:I said, of course you can.
Guest:I'm not going to set myself up as an ideological bully.
Guest:I don't think that when you're interviewing someone for a job, okay, how many people on your staff, on your crew?
Guest:Just me and my producer.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Would you ever ask your producer who she voted for?
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:I have 16 people who work for the Hutchinson.
Guest:I have no more idea how they vote.
Guest:I presume that they voted for Obama, and I presume they voted for Biden, but it's none of my business.
Guest:No, I get that.
Marc:I get that, Professor, but what I don't...
Marc:What I have a hard time sort of and I appreciate your optimism and I also appreciate that you're doing what you do to do what you think is important and to to educate and to hopefully shed light on a truth.
Marc:I get it.
Marc:You know, it's just I guess I'm stuck in an ideology or in a point of view where I'm like, well, it's never going to be enough.
Marc:Right.
Guest:But I need you.
Guest:You need people like me, and I need people like you.
Guest:We need people pushing, protesting.
Guest:You need people like me inside the institution.
Guest:I heard David Remnick use a metaphor at Clifford Alexander's memorial service, one of my heroes, first black secretary of the army under Jimmy Carter.
Guest:And Remnick, you know, the editor of The New Yorker, said, you know, you need people inside the castle lowering the...
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Bridges across the moat.
Marc:I get it.
Guest:As well as people storming the gates outside the castle.
Guest:I get it.
Guest:And my role is to be inside the system fighting for change.
Guest:This is, as I discussed with Cornell, this is the second front in the history of American culture wars for our generation.
Guest:The first was in the 90s.
Guest:And we were busy trying to get black authors like Zora Neale Hurston and Tony Moore into the Norton Anthology of American Literature.
Guest:Okay, we did that.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:So what's happening 20 years later?
Guest:Now they're trying to ban the anthologies that we integrated.
Guest:So it's ironic if you think about it.
Guest:The second set of culture wars is about banning the textbooks that we successfully integrated in the 1990s.
Guest:How ironic is that?
Guest:Well, it's ironic, but how does it make you feel?
Guest:It makes me feel like we've got to fight harder.
Guest:We have to fight to keep those textbooks from being banned.
Guest:No textbooks should be banned.
Guest:I get that.
Guest:And we have to fight to keep telling the truth of American history.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Okay, there you go.
Marc:But, I mean, curriculum can be decided.
Marc:You know, like, you know, it's like there's a fine line between banning and saying, like, well, we're not teaching that in the curriculum.
Guest:That's true.
Guest:And until we take on the school boards in Texas and places where you got the you got the you got the do we have the horses to do this?
Guest:Who are these people?
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:We have people fighting at every level.
Guest:Just regular people who want their kids to be exposed to the complexity of the reality that has shaped who we are.
Guest:But you have forces against.
Guest:Those are the people who really need to be celebrated.
Guest:The people who are fighting at the granular level.
Guest:The people who are fighting at the level of the school.
Marc:Of course.
Marc:But it's just it to me.
Marc:It's like, you know, because I work in, you know, I'm a comedian and I see that there's a schism in comedy around tribalization and anti woke and woke and whatever you want to do.
Marc:But but all that stuff is a lot of its bullshit.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You know, a lot of it is masking.
Marc:Like when you get down to the granular level, most people don't even pay attention to that news.
Marc:That's true.
Marc:They don't.
Marc:So, like, they're just caught up in this sort of, like, cortisol-driven, you know, argumentative, you know, you're wrong, you're woke, I'm, you know, anti-woke, whatever that is.
Guest:Look, censorship from the left is just as pernicious as censorship on the right.
Guest:I'm not
Guest:Cancel culture is just as offensive to me as censorship is.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Because it's just another form of censorship.
Guest:I get that.
Marc:I get that.
Marc:But like both of those sides is servicing something much more nefarious.
Guest:It is.
Guest:And that's why we have to stand up against both, no matter what form it takes.
Marc:No matter.
Marc:Censorship.
Guest:Censorship.
Guest:One of the most important shaping experiences of my teenage years, my parents, get this, gave me a subscription to Playboy magazine when I was 15 years old.
Guest:And I actually, of course I looked at the pictures, but I actually read the interviews too.
Guest:I fell in love with Lenny Bruce.
Guest:I never heard of Lenny Bruce.
Guest:15, we're at Piedmont, West Virginia.
Guest:I couldn't even go to hear his uncensored
Guest:Routines, right?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:A comedy club.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I just was so inspired by the way he fought censorship.
Guest:His use of profanity is talking about drugs.
Marc:I get all that.
Marc:But my point around the censorship is like all censorship is bad.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:But sometimes there is consequences to what one says.
Marc:And it's up to you to decide whether you're going to say it.
Marc:That's true.
Marc:And that's a reality.
Marc:That's a reality.
Marc:And that's the way, unfortunately, because of social media and other things, and it's happened on both sides.
Marc:You know, if somebody on TV said something that the Christians didn't like, they'd mobilize an entire army of people to write letters.
Marc:But that's called...
Marc:It's called democracy.
Marc:I get it.
Marc:Democracy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And that happens on both sides, too.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But I think that when you have people that are servicing an ideology that is ultimately perhaps racist or questionable.
Marc:Mm hmm.
Marc:that they might not know that, but if they can be appropriated, if you've got a comic that's servicing an anti-woke agenda, and then you've got Tucker Carlson quoting that comic, and then you've got Marjorie Taylor Greene sort of taking that joke out of context and doing it at a rally.
Guest:That would make me, if I were the person telling me a joke,
Guest:reflect on that's right what I'm saying right right but I don't want anybody to be able to just to tell them what I'm saying is that there's a lack of reflection right a lack of reflection and that's no if I I have taken okay I'll give you an example yeah there's a lot of controversy over woman king
Guest:I saw that.
Guest:Yeah, and I like Viola Davis a lot.
Guest:But Dahomey was one of the worst slave kingdoms on the African continent.
Guest:They did not rebel against the slave trade.
Guest:They did defeat Oyo, the kingdom of Oyo, when it says.
Guest:But they continued with alacrity to conquer other people and sell them.
Guest:That's very important.
Guest:But when I did, it's very important to tell the story truthfully, not to...
Guest:put rose-colored glasses on the way they do in that movie.
Guest:But when I told the story of the African world in the slave trade, the PBS documentary in 1998, people in the black community, I mean, Ali Mazuri, who was a scholar, gave a speech in which he said, I suppose we should not issue a fatwa against Gates.
Guest:Because they said that I was lying about the African role in the slave trade.
Guest:Here's a fact.
Guest:Overwhelmingly, our African ancestors who were shipped across the ocean were captured in wars by other black people on the African continent.
Guest:We were raised to think that white, your white ancestors, somehow my black ancestors were out on a picnic on a Sunday, right?
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And your white answer jumped out of a bush and threw a net on them, and they ended up in a plantation in Mississippi.
Guest:Forget it.
Guest:That never happened.
Guest:I mean, rarely.
Guest:Historians estimate that 90% to 95% of the Africans, and I got this figure from the historian John Thornton, this footnote, that the Africans captured in the slave trade were captured by other Africans, other black people in wars.
Guest:There were whole economies like Dahomey constructed around the slave trade.
Guest:And that's important to tell that story.
Guest:But people tried to censor me in 1998.
Guest:But now, even in that film, which had Viola Davis's kind of, you know, Rosa Parks fighting the slave trade.
Guest:I'm being hyperbolic, of course.
Guest:But she is saying, no, we need to get away from selling our brothers and sisters.
Marc:But that's towards the end of the movie.
Marc:And it felt a little bit disingenuous.
Marc:And I didn't even know the story.
Guest:The slave chain Dahomey went for another series of decades after they defeated Oyo.
Marc:So you're saying that the sort of protecting American black identity, the people of the community on some level were like, is it necessary that you tell that story?
Guest:Thank you for bringing me back.
Guest:Because they said in 1998, now this has all changed.
Guest:Because now you could see Woman King,
Guest:They are open about the African role in the slave trade.
Guest:They just represent Viola Davis as being Rosa Parks.
Marc:Right.
Guest:They have a problem with that.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:But in 1998, they didn't want me talking about the African.
Guest:And guess what they said, Mark?
Guest:What?
Guest:They said, white racists are going to use that against us.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:You are telling a secret.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you don't have a right to tell that secret because it will be used against it.
Guest:And sure enough, right-wing people did quote my series in the book of Winther.
Guest:But too bad it's a fact.
Guest:I can't whitewash history.
Guest:It's better for us to know how Africans— Or blackwash history.
Guest:I can't blackwash history.
Guest:It's better for us to know the history of the slave trade and to know— Ultimately, it's better.
Guest:That African elites—
Guest:or just as evil and as corrupt as European elites.
Marc:Right, but I think the point is, so you're bringing it down to this is a human reality.
Marc:A human reality.
Guest:Why should black people be less complicated and less screwed up than everybody else?
Marc:But I understand that, and I think it's important for me to hear that in the sense that...
Marc:Because there is something that, you know, when you get involved with a cause, whatever it is, and you think it's righteous.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:So, which we've both been, and I think we're on the same side of things.
Marc:Of course.
Marc:That there is this idea, it's sort of like, well, you know, if you say that...
Marc:we're gonna lose some points here, and we're right on the precipice of something.
Marc:Is it that important?
Guest:Do you have to tell the truth about?
Guest:Do you have to tell the whole truth?
Guest:Do you have to tell the whole truth about how 12.5 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean?
Guest:And I said, yes, even if you're going to issue a fatwa against me, and I took them all on, all these black nationalists and these radicals who said that I was betraying a racial secret.
Guest:And the person who defended me was Wally Sherinka, the greatest African writer in the history of the continent, who the first African to get the Nobel Prize in 1986, who happened to have been my professor at Cambridge and who is with Anthony Appiah, my kid's godfather.
Guest:And he took him up.
Guest:Man, it was like the Calvary coming to the rescue.
Guest:I stood behind him.
Guest:I go, kick your ass, Wally.
Yeah.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:Because it was terrible.
Guest:That was, you know, forget being arrested.
Guest:One of the worst times of my life was having so many people in my field say, you have raised the curtain on a dirty, dark secret.
Guest:And by doing that, you're a complicitist with white racism.
Guest:Because I told the truth about the history of the African slave trade.
Guest:And I'm proud that I did it.
Guest:And now that's become normalized part of the story of African history.
Guest:And I could not, in good conscience, censor myself.
Guest:And what, say, this was at the time when Farrakhan and Nation of Islam were subsidizing a book called The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews.
Guest:It was Jews who ran the slave trade.
Guest:That's ridiculous.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Another form of, this is like a black version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Marc:What is that about?
Marc:How did that change so hard that the Jews became the enemy of the black people?
Marc:It's a church thing, man.
Guest:No, I was sitting, I was watching Ken Burns' new series about the Holocaust and American antisemitism, which we were talking about earlier.
Guest:And I decided on my list of new PBS documentaries, I did a treatment on the history of blacks and Jews.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I am going to tell that story because we are natural allies.
Guest:If you look at the founding of the NAACP, it was done with a cross-ethnic voter registration drive.
Guest:And we need to reformulate that alliance.
Guest:So I'm going to make a film about its...
Guest:early harmonious periods and then when it fell apart in the 60s.
Guest:It fell apart in the black power.
Guest:And there were causes on both sides of the coalition.
Marc:But what was the foundation of it?
Marc:Was it the old style sort of global conspiracy or was it like slumlords, music business?
Marc:How did the Jew get the bad rap?
Guest:It was, well, I actually need to make a film about it to understand it in... But have you done any research?
Guest:You got anything?
Guest:No, but I just have anecdotal evidence, and I've read a lot.
Guest:And some of the forces that you said, it was a black activist wanting to be independent of the people who were funding them and of their... Right, why are we hanging around these rich Jews?
Guest:Yeah, or why are we hanging around white people, period.
Guest:I think that Jews got caught up in an anti-white...
Guest:ideology because of black power and the black arts movement.
Guest:And, you know, but there are aspects of the coalition still exist.
Guest:I'd like to see it reformulated because we need all the allies we can get with Donald Trump and the right wing people in the wings.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Well, now you got, you know, Kanye out there being crazy with the anti-Semitism out of nowhere, whatever's going on in his head.
Marc:Yeah, whatever's going on.
Marc:I know I get it.
Marc:But what are you finding within the world of black intellectuals?
Marc:Oh, I don't find any pernicious.
Marc:No, no, no.
Marc:But I mean, what are the fights you're fighting within the black world now?
Guest:Listen, right now, post-Obama,
Guest:Everybody is focused on the rise of white supremacy, voter suppression, the January 6th insurrection, and the forces that are at the heart of that.
Guest:We're all scared to death, and we're all focused on that.
Guest:At least that's what I'm focused on.
Guest:Also, one of my big concerns, as I said, is prison reform.
Guest:But I also am worried about the Supreme Court, affirmative action, just like Roe v. Wade.
Guest:I'm afraid affirmative action is going to happen this session.
Guest:It could happen this session.
Guest:And I wouldn't be here without affirmative action.
Guest:I'd be a doctor back in Piedmont, right?
Guest:Because I would have gone to Howard and I would have been pre-med.
Guest:And I wouldn't have gone to Yale and then to Cambridge and then meet Wally Sherry-Ink and Anthony Alpey and they'd tell me, no, you're a race man, you're going to go back and be a scholar, right?
Marc:Yeah, and Toni Morrison wouldn't be in the Norton Anthology.
Guest:She would have made it.
Guest:Even without me.
Guest:This has been great.
Guest:Thanks, man.
Guest:It was good talking to you.
Marc:Thanks for doing it.
Marc:You feel good?
Guest:I feel fabulous.
Marc:Good.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:Smart guy.
Marc:Exciting to talk to.
Marc:Informative.
Marc:Making Black America airs Tuesdays on PBS stations and is streaming on PBS digital platforms.
Marc:Please stay here.
Marc:Hang out a second, will you?
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Listen to me, folks.
Marc:Don't forget to sign up for WTF plus subscriptions.
Marc:If you want to listen to the show, add free and have access to every single episode of WTF on your podcast app.
Marc:And for full Marin subscribers, you also get weekly bonus content.
Marc:Click on the link in the episode description or go to WTF pod.com and click on WTF plus next week on Monday, Jeremy strong.
Marc:And on Thursday, Ron Carter,
Marc:Jeremy and I had a good conversation about acting.
Marc:He's an earnest guy.
Marc:He's a serious guy.
Marc:I enjoyed it.
Marc:Ron Carter is one of the architects of modern jazz.
Marc:He's an 85-year-old jazz double bassist, and he's a genius.
Marc:And he's a great contributor to all types of music on something upward of 2,200 records.
Marc:It was very exciting.
Marc:I got to see him in New York.
Marc:I also saw Jeremy Strong on the plane to New York.
Marc:So I don't know.
Marc:But good talks.
Marc:I got my shows at the Bloomsbury here in London this weekend.
Marc:And the next week I'm at the Vicar Street in Dublin on Wednesday, October 26th.
Marc:When I get back from Ireland, I'm in Oklahoma City at the Tower Theater on Wednesday, November 2nd.
Marc:Dallas, Texas at the Majestic Theater on Thursday, November 3rd.
Marc:San Antonio at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts for two shows on Friday, November 4th.
Marc:And Houston at the Cullen Theater at Wortham Center on Saturday, November 5th.
Marc:Then I'm in Long Beach.
Marc:California at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center on Saturday, November 12th.
Marc:Eugene, Oregon at the Holt Center for the Performing Arts on Friday, November 18th.
Marc:And Bend, Oregon at the Tower Theater on Saturday, November 19th.
Marc:In December, I'm in Asheville, North Carolina at the Orange Peel for two shows.
Marc:on Friday, December 2nd, and then Nashville, Tennessee.
Marc:I'm at the James K. Polk Center on Saturday, December 3rd.
Marc:And my HBO special taping is at Town Hall in New York City on Thursday, December 8th.
Marc:Go to wtfpod.com slash tour for all dates and ticket info.
Marc:More guitar jams now from the vault.
Marc:This is me and Dave Alvin from the Blasters playing Help You Dream.
Guest:Beautiful.
Guest:Well, is this seat taken?
Guest:Would you mind some company?
Guest:You've been alone all evening Would you like to talk with me?
Guest:Now do I come here often?
Guest:Well, you might say that I do And is someone home waiting?
Guest:Honey, I was just gonna ask you Cause you're the prettiest woman
Guest:I think I've ever seen Until tonight If you'd let me I'd like to help you dream You've got the nicest brown eyes Still got your little girl's smile
Guest:You know, you should have been in movies, honey.
Guest:You say you haven't heard that in a while.
Guest:Well, you sound just like Faith Hill singing on the radio.
Guest:Do you know someplace quiet where both of us could go?
Guest:Cause you're the prettiest woman.
Guest:That I think I've ever seen And tonight If you let me I'd like to help you dream To the fire Cause I think I know what it looks like When you get back home Baby, dreaming is all that you've got left
Guest:And I could tell you sweet lies like you've never heard before.
Guest:You see, I haven't stopped dreaming yet.
Guest:All right, Brother Bart.
Guest:I think I know what it looks like when you get back home Baby, dreamin' is all that you got left I can tell you sweet lies like you never heard before You see, I haven't stopped dreamin' yet
Guest:Let's see.
Guest:What's that?
Guest:Oh, wait.
Guest:What's the next line?
Guest:Do you remember the last one?
Guest:Do you come here often?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:Hold on.
Guest:It's, well, how about another drink?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Certainly.
Guest:How about another drink?
Guest:What's that?
Guest:You gotta go home.
Guest:You say it's been nice talking.
Guest:Honey, why are you leaving me alone?
Guest:Because you're the prettiest woman that I think I've ever seen.
Guest:And tonight, if you let me, I'd like to help you dream.
Guest:And then he walks across the smoky bar in 1984, sits down next to the next woman and says, Do I come here often?
Guest:You might say that I do.
Guest:Yeah!
Guest:You sounded great.
Guest:That was fucking awesome.