How Henry Louis Gates Jr. changed my mind about responding to racism

Henry Louis Gates Jr. doesn’t seem too worried about “critical race theory” or “white fragility” or “woke warriors” or any of those ridiculous buzzwords that get tossed around when people talk about race instead of talking to one another.

“Despite the superficial differences,” Gates said to a packed house at ASU Gammage, “at the level of the genome we’re 99.99 percent the same.”

The 71-year-old Harvard professor doesn’t seem too affected by the controversies uncovered by digging into long-buried family secrets.

And he certainly doesn’t seem to care anything about time, at least not when he’s telling stories.

“I got interested in genealogy … when I was 9 years old,” Gates said. “And I even know the date: It was July 2, 1960. And why do I know that date? Because that’s the day that we buried my father’s father.”

Gates chose to connect and unite the crowd

Lessons in maturity and magnanimity were on full display as Battinto Batts, the dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, interviewed Gates on the last day of April at the theater formerly known as Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium.

Batts asked how Gates’s PBS show “Finding Your Roots” got its start. He might as well have put down his microphone and walked off the stage as Gates took the 1,000 or so audience members through a concert of storytelling improvisational jazz.

He Miles Davis-ed through his Appalachian roots, John Coltrane-ed through his Yale and Cambridge education and Charlie Parker-ed into finding himself as a Black man.

The audience hung on his every note. Each pause. Each inflection. Each gesture. Each expression. Each syllable. Each joke. (Most of which they wouldn’t dare repeat.)

Gates could have told the crowd to storm the state Capitol, but instead he chose to connect and unite. To remind everyone that we’re less different than we are alike.

“You can’t let people divide us,” Gates said, referencing the near-identical genetics all humans share, “because of superficial differences in color, hair texture, facial features or religion or belief system or sexual preference or gender identity.”  

The audience hung onto his every word

Applause.

“I don’t choose my friends by their ideology,” he said at another point, referencing Ben Carson. “The politicization of even the idea of a friendship in America disgusts me. You are all intelligent people. We have the right to be Republican, Democrat, independent. We have the right to disagree with each other without being cancelled.”

More applause.

“There never was one way to be Black. … There are 42 million African Americans. There are 42 million ways to be Black. Never let a bully tell you what to think or what to believe.”  

I was several rows back, but it’s entirely possible that women were tossing their stockings on stage along with perfumed love notes.  

“Anybody who stands against the principle of openness … toward immigrants is being un-American, because we’re ALL the descendants of immigrants.”

By the time it was over, Gates got a standing ovation from people who were pulling out their phones to look up genealogy services.

I was angry at Gates' response in 2009

I couldn’t have imagined anyone cheering for Gates in 2009.

I was working the news desk in Kansas City when he was arrested in his own house. I was 30 years old, watching reports come in from The Associated Press.  

A white woman had called the police, saying there were two suspicious Black men in her neighborhood. Gates, who is Black, and his driver, also Black, were trying to get into the home after Gates found the front door stuck. A white cop showed up and wouldn’t accept the professor’s explanation.

Gates was handcuffed on his front lawn.

Then President Barack Obama invited Gates and the white officer who arrested him, Sgt. James Crowley, over to the White House for a beer?

As a Black man, I was furious. As a journalist, I had to be unbiased. And as a young, Black man in a predominantly white newsroom, I chose to be silent when I could have exploded.

Looking back, it was one of those moments that shaped my career. I was going to go into management or opinion writing – or I might go insane.

I didn’t want these powerful African American men to go easy on an officer whom I saw as an unapologetic perpetrator of a clear example of the racism that so many of us experience every day.

I hated the decision Gates made to accept Obama’s invitation.

But 1 speech from Gates turned me around

About 13 years later in Tempe, Gates turned me around with one speech.

He knew then what so many still struggle to understand: The enemy is racism.

“Finding Your Roots” brings people together by making history real through stories.

It also uncovers things people might not want to know.

To this, Gates says simply that he’s inventing a genre and a code of ethics, concurrently. There’s no sense, he says, in ambushing someone who finds out their mother was adopted or that their father isn’t their father.

He could take a hardline approach and reveal every nitty detail regardless of the emotions of the participants, the way a traditional journalist or historian might.

That’s the way I wanted him to handle the 2009 “Beer Summit.”

But if he had done that, if he had made the decision to divide rather than unite, he wouldn’t have a top-rated show on PBS or an auditorium full of people ready to adopt his every position.

This is how he influences the world

Gates wasn’t too worried about speaking for one side or the other in a debate over race.

He wasn’t too worried about what people such as myself might have said about him.

Gates, simply, was going to speak for himself.

It looks like he’s influencing the world while he’s doing it.

And he’s influenced me already to look for my long, lost uncle. More about that soon.

Reach Moore at gmoore@azcentral.com or 602-444-2236. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter @SayingMoore.

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