America Behind The Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans

by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The readable companion, in the oral-history tradition of Studs Terkel, to the PBS documentary series, peeking behind the veil "that still, far too often, separates black America from white."



Renowned scholar and New York Times bestselling author Gates delivers a stirring and authoritative companion to the major new PBS documentary America Behind the Color Line . The book includes thought-provoking essays from Colin Powell, Morgan Freeman, Russell Simmons, Vernon Jordan, Alicia Keys, Bernie Mac, and Quincy Jones.

Genres: African American, Race, Essays, Nonfiction, Ethnic

464 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. is a Professor of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. He is well-known as a literary critic, an editor of literature, and a proponent of black literature and black cultural studies.

Reviews

[Nick Huntington-Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting collection of interviews. With the exception of the last chapter, it tends to target very successful black people, which is I feel a different approach than many otherwise-similar surveys take. What I found most compelling was the repetition. At first, the fact that a lot of the interviewees said very similar things about black empowerment, about the middle/low class black divide, and other issues annoyed me. But after a while I realized that this was combating the little doubt I'd had from the beginning in putting much stock in individual perceptions of grand societal theories. It could be cherrypicking in the process of Gates' narrative reconstructions of the interviews, but given his academic background I doubt it. Definitely worth a read.

[Bob Schmitz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to read something by Henry Louis Gates but this would not be it. I read a couple of chapters and then skipped to the middle to see if it got any better. It didn't so I put it aside. The book consists of a series of interviews by Gates of a bunch of African Americans on the subject of race, their experiences, thoughts and proscriptions for the uplifting of African Americans. The book was a mishmash of ideas and opinions, many repeats of the same things, without statistics or data. It was all anecdotes. I found it boring.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

A real eye-opener.

[Theresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really very interesting interviews!!! People from a broad spectrum with very different backgrounds and most of the emphasize that education is so key. Reccomend reading "The Race Beat" first just to know some of the people mentioned in the interview.

[Farrah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really 2.5. It's very long, a series of essays by black people in different careers and levels of success. However a lot of it was repetitive and not that interesting. About 1/3 of the essays were ones where I really felt like I learned something.

[Nicko · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book. Dialogue is fiction.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many find away when there is not one.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written soon after 9/11 and 6 years before the Great Recession and first Black President. This book gives an accurate picture of mainstream and successful Black America. The optimism of hard work and a colorblind future where we are all Americans first.
The book is often repetitive using the same quotes and stories more than once and it reads like the transcript from conversations that make the material.
It is a snapshot of successful Black people who very likely changed.

[Clarence Reed · Rating 4 out of 5]

ReedIII Quick Review: This interesting collection of thought provoking essays includes a wide range of perspectives covering being black, growing up black, living black, achieving, surviving, etc. Designed primarily to uplift everyone, especially people of African American descent.

[m · Rating 3 out of 5]

A hot mess — which the internet defines as "a person or thing so spectacularly disordered that it's a source of peculiar fascination."

Indeed. Anyone who reads this book closely is likely to want to know more about its making—the motives, methodology, & means of its production.

I wish Gates' two introductory essays provided more insight than they do towards disentangling or synthesizing the contradictory (and embarrassing) informant testimony collected in this long book — 468 pages, 209,000 words, no footnotes, available online & from (probably) every library in America.

I saw Gates' PBS documentary of the same name and was fascinated by some of his informants' utterances. This book includes a textual record of his PBS interviews of 'famous' informants, their testimony proffered casually off-hand, often while Gates walks along or sits beside them. I presume that all informant testimony was gathered similarly, tossed-off in friendly conversation with Gates (or his minion), recorded, & then transcribed for publication.

I found myself wondering what questions had been been posed to informants who do not appear in the PBS documentary, and wondering too about how the published testimony may have been edited for publication.

I'm not sure what weight should be given to any of the statements or utterances found in these pages, including those in Gates' Introduction (3400 words) and his first chapter, "Ebony Towers" (7800 words). The only thing one can do to make sense of utterances is to collect a lot of them — and then look for patterns among the shards.

I presumes that most (or all?) informants had a chance to review/revise their testimony before its publication. But the musings of some informants, especially of several famous, well-educated ones — Vernon Jordan, Franklin Raines, Russell Simmons, Jesse Jackson — strike me as having worn particularly badly over the years. I've read other, extended interviews with all four of these men, so my negative view of their thinking is only buttressed by their off-hand remarks published herein. My guess is that if confronted by their remarks' contradictions, they'd make distinctions or retractions. But in no remote way does Gates, a friendly interlocutor, seek to question closely such men about the possible contradictions of their utterances. Such work falls to writers whose books are not likely to be mandatory purchases by public libraries across America.

Besides, who today hasn't said something years ago that they now wish they hadn't? It we use every man after his desert, who shall 'scape whipping?

I've taken a huge amount of notes from these testimonials. I was struck repeatedly by how often Gates, Jordan & Raines referred to Wall Street activity or employment in a positive, valorized light. Among the testimony from poorer informants, I was struck by how of it referred to the power, even dominance, of the need for money, luxury, and "fashion" in their cosmology of beliefs. Such put me in mind of King Lear, and of Daniel Bell's riffs on Weber's Protestant Ethic and Werner Sombart's Luxury and Capitalism.

This book is a little like Freud's Interpretation of Dreams or maybe Geertz's Interpretation of Cultures without anything remotely resembling Freud's or Geertz's analysis or insights.