Henry Louis Gates Jr. Delivers Convocation Address

Henry Louis Gates Jr. came to Oberlin Thursday evening to discuss "The Future of Race Relations in America" in a convocation address in Finney Chapel.

Following Oberlin tradition, the convocation was introduced by a musical piece. tonight from Don Giovanni with Michael Preacely and Elena Loskova performed Don Giovanni proceeding Mr. Gates' speech.

Gates is a W. E. B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, director of Harvard's W. E. B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research, and host of a PBS television series and co-creator of Encarta Africana.

Gates spoke of his enrollment at Yale in 1969 "from the backhills of Appalachia" where his father had warned him of the two different types of white folk; the Irish and the Italians, and how to tell them apart: the Irish have names that begin with O's, the Italian's have names that end with O's. At Yale, Gates wanted to learn how to be a proud black man, and he played the role in his senior column in the paper, where he admitted turning everything into an issue of black and white.

The discussion of his actions in college gave way to his subsequent philosophies on multiculturalism and identity politics. Gates captured the Oberlin crowd with one-liners and memorable quotes from his hero, James Baldwin, such as "each of us contains, and is a part of, the other." Gates stressed the theme of loving one's neighbor throughout the convocation in various forms: his insistence on looking at multiculturalism as mutual accommodation, and of ideas of provisional tolerance and American pluralism, which Gates believes needs to be more about breaking things down and acknowledging the fluid identities of one another.

Later in the address he openly discussed his ideas for solving ethnic identity problems, which he believes will be at the top of the world's problems of the 21st century. He discussed his definition of liberalism as having clarity as well as compassion, courage and conviction without arrogance but with the ability to assert itself. Gates said his kind of liberalism is that which starts not with identity, but with the ability to identify with, and create a general global shift from politics of identity to politics of identification. This can be implemented, Gates said, by the teaching of a rigorous multicultural education in schools. Gates used the teaching of the story of America as a plural nation as an example.

He proceeded to discuss the economic situation of the African American community, which he introduced with a daunting fact: the ratio of African Americans in jail to those receiving a college degree in 1990 was 99:1, while with whites it was only 6:1. He proposed three solutions to this problem: 1) To get all the education that you possibly can, 2) To have African American communities praise high education, and to know that you don't have to fail to be black, and 3) To destroy the view of the 35 million African Americans all belonging to the same social class, and to realize variation where it is present and has been present for over 400 years.

Gates proposed that once people are aware that the causes of poverty are both structural and behavioral they can start to function as ethnic cheerleaders. He mentioned many organizations nationwide that have developed to counter the spread of despair and hopelessness in the black community and to bridge the class-gap between the poor and the wealthy. He ended with a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.: "none of us is free until each of us is free."

At the conclusion of the speech many wanted to ask questions, but Gates was only able to receive a few. He addressed his ardent and passionate support of affirmative action (his entry into Yale was dependent upon affirmative action and thus he supports it wholeheartedly), and ways of making capitalism more humane and working within the system to foster change.

Gates strove to make the audience realize the beauty of Oberlin, saying in his closing remarks that by going to Oberlin and living in this diverse community, Oberlin students know first hand that all racial stereotypes are rubbish. "It's a great school," Gates said.