On Monday, October 20th, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. delivered Hackley’s W.E.B. DuBois Research Institute Lecture to a combined audience of Hackley’s Middle and Upper School students and faculty in the Zetkov Gymnasium. Prior to the address, The Dial received an exclusive interview with Dr. Gates.

Q: At Hackley, our English classes have evolved over the years to include literature from many different cultures and perspectives, particularly in our American Literature course during junior year. I found that in my class last year, students were very receptive to works from different American perspectives in works such as Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and the more modern The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. You’ve been a proponent of expanding the “western canon” to include more multicultural author and I was wondering if you think this should be adopted in more places.

A: I think it pretty much has been adopted. We fought the so-called “culture wars”, as they were called, in the 90s. We won, we being people who believed in African-American studies, feminists, and people who believed gay studies, essentially “the cultural left”. I’ve never been on the radical left, I’m pretty centrist in my personalities. For example, some of my colleagues thought the whole idea of evaluation should be thrown away so there was no difference between pulp fiction and Herman Melville. But there is a big difference, and if you can’t tell the difference, you shouldn’t be a professor of English. I never wanted to get rid of evaluation, standards, and quality. I wanted the canon to reflect excellence in different guises… By and large, I think that centrist approach worked and has proven to be very effective. So if you look at the contents of the Norton’s Anthology of Literature from 1990, 1970, and 2010 you will see a rise in the number of black authors and women.

Q: What is your opinion on recent trends in celebration or analysis of black culture, as seen in satirical films such as Dear White People or dramas like Django Unchained and Twelve Years a Slave?

A: I love diversity of representation, and the more films about black people, Hispanics, Asians, the better the world is for it. And I like them to be straight-up historical documentaries, like I make, or satirical and parodic like Dear White People or Django Unchained. And how can you even classify Django? And if you hate Django, you’ll love 12 Years a Slave. For some people it’s a work of genius and other people can’t stand it! I have a class I co-teach at Harvard called “African American Studies” and we look at ways black people have been debating what it means to be black since the eighteenth century. And we have an in-class debate, with one team arguing for Django and the other for 12 Years a Slave. But the point is that a diversity of representation is good and healthy. I can’t see a downside to proliferation of the diversity of representation.

Some scholars, particularly in my generation, would only want sacred texts to be treated in a sacred way. But I like approaches that explode it, deconstruct it, tear it apart and make you look at the world. And I’m for artistic freedom; I think censoring an artist is disgusting.

Q: History, in the classical sense, tends to be a big overarching subject where you learn events and dates, etc,, but I’m very interested in the personal stories that define history.

A: Me too, I love biography. That’s the approach I took in Many Rivers to Cross. Genealogy allows you to personalize vast historical events, in the same way biography does. For example, I recently had Ben Affleck on my television program. His great-great grandfather, Allman French, was a lawyer in Ohio and he’d never heard of this guy. We found a copy of his autobiography, and we learned he became a spiritualist in 1870. Spiritualism was a movement that took off after the Civil War after two percent of the American population died and there had not been anything in the United States like that. It was incredible carnage and devastation, and the shock of it was apparently very hard to process. People wanted to communicate with people who were gone. Ben Affleck’s ancestor was one of those people, he was a medium… All of a sudden, Ben Affleck had a purchase on spiritualism, the Civil War, and the post-Civil War period. He also had an ancestor who lived in Lexington, MA and fought alongside George Washington in the American Revolution.

Q: I know in recent months, there’s been a large controversy regarding racial profiling, especially with the events in Ferguson this summer. You’ve famously been part of the story of racial profiling in America, and I was wondering on your opinions on the matter.

A: I think it would be unethical for what happened to me to be compared to terrible things that happened in places like Ferguson or the kind of implicit racial profiling that led to the murder of Trayvon Martin. That’s why I don’t talk about it very much because I don’t want to represent myself as a victim. Do I look like a victim to you? I teach at Harvard, I was in jail for four hours. By the time I got there in the police car, the legal counsel of Harvard was there. My whole situation was so unlike what happened to a normal black person. What happened to me was such a fluke, in the airport, people know who I am. It was just completely bizarre.

I’ve talked to the police officer who arrested me, and he told me that all he wanted to do was get home to his wife. And in his mind, there were two black guys in this house, and what compounded it even more was that I had just come back from China and there were two suitcases open in the foyer of my house so the two stereotypes combined into one. I had a bad day, but I’m still here. That said, I think that racial profiling is a huge problem and I think that police officers should take ethnic and racial sensitivity training.

Q: I had a question about Many Rivers to Cross, and I was interested in some of the phrases you used when you were talking about the program and how you were “handing history” to Tina Fey or Ben Affleck or Derek Jeter. What are some ways to foster “handing that history” in a personal way for ordinary citizens?

A: Every time there’s a racial incident, like Ferguson, someone calls for a conversation on race. People get together at a town hall, they stand up and testify, make personal comments, someone’s angry, everyone disperses, and another person gets killed in racial profiling. The real conversations on race have to happen in the classroom. The classroom in America, like every other society, has always been the place where you shape citizens. It’s where you learn how to be a member of the community. In my day, we had to learn “The Pledge of the Allegiance”, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee”, “America the Beautiful”, etc. But your teacher never said, “today I’m going to teach you how to be a citizen”, they just taught you how to be a citizen. To go back to your first question, diversity of the canon, like diversity of the classroom, are very important implicitly in shaping the values of who belongs in a society,  and norms of a society and what it means to be an American!

You do it by osmosis, not by the “Black History Month Lecture” or a “post-Ferguson Conversation on Race”. I don’t think those things make a permanent change. What makes a permanent change is integration of the classroom. The headmaster of this school went to a school that integrated in 1955, the same year that the schools in my county in West Virginia that were supposed to integrate. And that county had a whole different set of racial relations as than the counties in my state that didn’t integrate. So I see putting a face on history as part of that larger process of shaping expectations of what who or what a citizen should be, about being an American.

That’s my first big goal. My second goal is to make teaching history more fun! I don’t even have a PHD in history, I teach history without a license. I have a PHD in English Literature. Personal history is like a mnemonic device. It’s like a memory system. What I’m trying to do is to have you create a memory system. It puts a face on big historical events that are just boring. Unless you have that chip, in which case it’s all exciting. I love it when I can trace a guess to some historical event- it’s amazing, and it comes alive, even to me.