Henry Louis Gates, esteemed Harvard scholar and cultural critic, makes some very interesting observations about black Americans in the recent edition of Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. In a radio address broadcast over hundreds of black radio stations across the nation, Professor Gates, chair of the African and African-American studies department at Harvard University, urged black Americans to: "take control over their own destiny and stop relying on the excuses of victimization and racism as the root causes of black inequality. "We need an attitudinal revolution among the members of the black community," Professor Gates said. "Stay in school, do your homework, don't drop out, don't get pregnant when you're 16, don't do drugs, don't sell drugs, and stop equating education with being white. . . . The Blackest thing you could be in the 1950s was an educated man or an educated woman. The Blackest thing you could be was Thurgood Marshall or Martin Luther King Jr. It wasn't a basketball player. It wasn't a football player."

It will be interesting to see how the liberal black intelligentsia will react to this "advice". When conservative icons like Justice Thomas or Stanford economist Thomas Sowell make such observations they are quickly dismissed as being racial traitors, irrelevant and out of touch with the reality of racist Amerikka (sic). Well, if this is true then it would only be logical to add Professor Gates name to the list of infamous commentators out of touch with the reality of racism. Apparently when Professor Gates was espousing these ideas he must have forgotten that he was affirming the same heresy of his intellectual enemies. QED

-- Anonymous, February 26, 2004