Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has not returned to his Cambridge house after his fateful encounter with Sgt. Crowley, retreating instead to his house on Martha’s Vineyard.
On Sunday he spoke to the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival, and according to this report in the Vineyard Gazette today he had some interesting things to say.
He certainly seemed glad to be be out of Cambridge, calling Martha’s Vineyard his “refuge.”
No intrusive media here, just supportive friends who had “come by the house… brought me food … asked me to get Barack’s autograph….”
“I think the Vineyard is the most integrated community I’ve ever experienced,” he said. “That’s why I like it here. It is racial heaven for me.”
Perhaps more surprising were remarks indicating that he may have misgivings about race-based affirmative action.
He noted that since Dr. Martin Luther King was killed in April 1968, the black middle class has quadrupled by some measures. But the percentage of black children living at or below the poverty level remained essentially the same, at around 38 per cent.
“In other words, we have two classes within the black community. The black ‘haves,’ who are perpetuating themselves and the black ‘have nots,’ who are perpetuating themselves,” he said.
And affirmative action policies which had served as a “class escalator” for some black people, now served as a way to perpetuate their class position.
“I think we need a class-based affirmative action. I grew up in the hills of West Virginia with poor white people and I can testify from my own experience the culture of poverty is color-blind,” Professor Gates said.
Martha’s Vineyard, of course, was quite pleased … with itself, as nicely revealed by the Vineyard Gazette’s conclusion to its coverage of his talk:
So spoke a genuinely post-racial thinker, to a large post-racial crowd on a small post-racial Island.
Now, if only the rest if the country can catch up.
I think it would help the rest of enormously in our struggling effort to “catch up” with our moral betters on The Vineyard if Prof. Gates would go national with his support for official colorblindness. He could start with his friend in the White House.
