Just found that article ... easy to see how he and 0
could have much in common.
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“LAMB: At one point you had a line in there, something to the effect, “My mother despised white people.”
GATES: My mother hated white people.
LAMB: All her life?
GATES: Probably. I didn’t know until — in 1959 we were watching Mike Wallace’s documentary called “The Hate that Hate Produced.”
It was about the Nation of Islam and I couldn’t believe — I mean, Malcolm X was talking about the white man was the devil and standing up in white people’s faces and telling them off.
It was great. I mean, it’s what black people did behind closed doors, but they would never do it in — I mean, they were too vulnerable to do it, say, where they worked, at the paper mill or downtown, as we would call it. And here was a guy who had the nerve to do that, and I think if I had been a character in a cartoon, my eyes would have gone Doing! — like this.
I couldn’t believe it. As I sat cowering in a corner of our living room, I glanced over at Mama and her face was radiant. I mean, this smile — beatific smile started to transform her face. And she said quite quietly, “Amen.” And then she said, “All right now,” and she sat up and she said, “Yes.”
And she loved Malcolm X and she loved what the Muslims were doing. And I couldn’t believe it. It was like — as I write, it was like watching the Wicked Witch of the West emerge out of the transforming features of Dorothy. This person I had thought of as this pioneer of the civil rights movement really had a hard time with white people.
And the more I got to know her — and, you know, these weren’t easy anecdotes for her to repeat, but the older I got, she became more willing to share painful experiences of white racism — the way that she was treated when she was a girl and a servant in the house of wealthy white people just a block down the hill from where we lived.
My brother and I eventually went back and bought that house for her, and that’s how we found out that she had been so horribly treated by these people. She never trusted white people. She didn’t like white people. She didn’t want to live with white people.
But she wanted us to go to integrated schools. She wanted us to live in an integrated economy. She wanted us even to live in integrated neighborhoods. She wanted us to be able to get the best that American society offered.
She wanted us to be articulate, to speak white English, as we would call it, as well as black vernacular English. You know, she wanted us to know how to dress, how to talk, how to act, how to behave.
She wanted us to go to private schools, to the Ivy League. I mean, she wanted us to be as successful as it was humanly possible to be in American society. But she always wanted us to remember, first and last, that we were black and that you could never trust white people.
And so when I brought my fiancee home, who happened to be a white American, I thought World War III was about to break out between me and my mother, not to mention between my mother and my fiancee.
LAMB: And is your wife white?
GATES: Yeah. She’s white.
LAMB: How did your mother react to the — did she go to the marriage?
GATES: Oh, yeah. She was fine. I don’t think I could have done anything to make my mother stop loving me. But my mother took a long time to decide how she felt about my wife. And they had many confrontations, many bad — my mother used to do things like say, “I bet you hate black people, right?”
And I’d say, “Mama, please,” you know, “this is not the way we should start our relationship.” She’d say, “Just checking.” And we’d all laugh and my wife got used to it, but she fought my mother back. The key was to stand up to my mother. My mother wanted to see what she was made of. And I’ll probably do crazy things like that when my daughters bring their lovers home. I mean, who knows?
LAMB: How long you been married?
GATES: We’ve been married 15 years this September 1st.
LAMB: And how does the society that you live in and Harvard and places you travel deal with the mixed marriage?
GATES: Oh, I live in academic environments, and so it’s removed from the world. I mean, what do we do? We go downtown Boston, downtown New York, downtown San Francisco, European countries.
We function at a level where certain forms of racism don’t impact upon you so immediately or so obviously. But on the other hand, we go for drives in the country or, you know, we stop at a country gas station, people might look at you in a strange way.
But we experienced so much racism when we were first starting out in West Virginia. We met working for Jay Rockefeller in his gubernatorial campaign of 1972, and we took a lot of flack. And we lived together seven years before we got married, and we were harassed.
We’ve been stared at, we’ve been cursed. But, you know, if this had been the typical aspect of our experience, I would talk about it. But it’s been just the opposite. But had we been members of the working class or had we lived outside of an academic environment, then I think our experience would have been vastly different.
And our daughters have lived in integrated, academic communities essentially their whole lives and have gone to integrated schools. So they have a thorough knowledge of African-American middle-class culture, we might say, but traditional African-American culture they didn’t know very much about.
And that’s one of the reasons that I wanted to write this book. We also send them to West Virginia quite a lot, so they can be with all their cousins on my side of the family, and that’s full immersion in traditional black culture.
http://www.booknotes.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1220
He thinks people stared at him because he was in a biracial relationship and the hicks were too unsophisticated not to stare.
OTOH Prof. Gates, might it have been that they knew a condescending, arrogant pr!ck when they saw one? Just sayin.
Great mother.
>:- \