Loose Canons: Notes

On the Culture Wars

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Oxford University Press

$19.95

"HE SIMPLY DOES NOT speak for the Black community at Harvard," I was told a couple weeks ago about DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis Gates Jr. "He's just not integrated with what many young Blacks are feeling."

Really? Why not?

"I'm not sure he understands us."

Fair enough. Unfamiliar with most of Gates' work (and, aside from blockmates, unfamiliar with the Black community here), I couldn't really comment. So when I read Loose Canons recently, I watched for Gates' views on campus strife, Black students and the feelings of young Blacks in America. I found much more.

Gates, as he likes to tell the audiences so eager to hear from him these days, thinks of himself as a moderate. That was his problem with Duke University, he told a packed Junior Parents Weekend crowd last March. Folks at Duke, where he taught until coming to Harvard last year, thought he was a radical. No ordinary intellectual, but a deconstructing, canon-busting lefty. The charge, he told the group, was overstated. He was right.

GATES' NEW BOOK, LOOSE CANONS: Notes on the Culture Wars, is a collection of 10 essays, most of them previously published, many of them brilliant. Written mainly in 1990-91, they were printed in everything from Newsweek to PMLA.

Two are hit-and-miss, near-slapstick stories about one "Sam Slade," a private investigator who eventually sells out to the worldwide network of conspirators defending The Canon. (One of the conspirators is Porter University Professor Helen Vendler, who orders her bodyguard "Malloy" to throw an over-inquisitive Slade out of the New York Harvard Club.) Most, however, are serious essays--from the lucid "Integrating the American Mind" to the wandering "Trading on the Margin."

Basically, Gates' project is to offer a defense of multicultural curricula and Afro-American studies programs. But in broader, no-less-successful terms, he seeks to explore two questions: What is a national identity? How does cultural pluralism fit into such an identity?

The defense of multiculturalism frames Gates' on-target attack on the right. The second essay, "The Master's Pieces," opens with a scathing assault on former Secretary of Education William Bennett and cultural critic Allan Bloom '56, chargins that they "symbolize for us the nostalgic return to what I think of as the 'antebellum aesthetic position,' when men were men, and men were white, when scholar-critics were white men, and when women and persons of color were voiceless, faceless servants,...filling brandy snifters in the boardrooms of old boy's clubs."

The problem, however, is not just a couple of reactionary men; they "are really symptomatic of a larger political current." Indeed, Washington Post reporter Thomas B. Edsall has shown that in the electoral realm, conservatives in the 1980s successfully linked race with welfare dependency, crime and illegitimacy--a general decline of "American" values.