The most moving interviews he says, were done with the prisoner Eric Edwards and the Massenbergs, a family living in the notoriously crime-ridden Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago’s South Side. “They were so extraordinarily articulate about the forces arrayed against them in the inner city that I learned so much and I was very deeply moved,” Gates says.
The interview with Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan proved to be the most enlightening, Gates says. Milchan told Gates that if the 2002 movie Panic Room, which starred Jodie Foster and grossed $100 million at the box office, had starred Halle Berry, it would have made half as much money. According to Milchan, the reason for this disparity would be that white people are “not interested in watching a black woman and her son being terrorized by burglars.”
Milchan also said, according to Gates, that a love story starring Denzel Washington and Halle Berry would never be made because both actors demand $20 million to appear on set, and the film would only make $50 million because “white people aren’t interested in watching black people fall in love and make love."
"But if it were Russell Crowe and Halle Berry, it would make $200 million, maybe $300 million,” Gates reports. “It’s astonishing. And [Milchan] was just very honest and graphic about it.”
Best of Times, Worst of Times
Gates says he is both pleased and disturbed by what he learned on his journey through black America.
“It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times,” he says. “It’s the best of times because the middle class is doing so well. It does me proud to see Colin Powell as Secretary of State or Condi Rice as National Security Advisor.”
“But on the other hand, we have so many of our people stuck behind in the ghetto of despair,” Gates says. “And it made me sad and want to embark upon a campaign to restore the value of education to our people, and a campaign for a revolution in attitudes."
“Black people need to vote, we need to stay in school, we need to do our homework, we need to graduate,” he says.
During any given week, only 45 percent of black people in Chicago are gainfully employed, according to Gates.
He says part of the problem stems from historical forces such as institutional racism, though personal choices also contribute to the phenomenon.
“But simultaneously we have too many of our people who have internalized their own oppression. They’re having babies in their teens, they’re dropping out of school. They’re not deferring gratification. All those elements combined with a few more devastate the economic fabric of a community. And we can’t wait for Abraham Lincoln to come riding down the street on a white horse to save us anymore,” he says.
Blacks need after-school programs based on institutions like Hebrew school, for example, in which the traditions and customs of a people are taught in a safe haven, Gates says.
In fact, he and former Carswell Professor of Philosophy K. Anthony Appiah started the Martin Luther King after-school program in Roxbury. The program teaches computer skills and black history using Encarta Africana, which Gates and Appiah developed together.
“If Jewish people had waited for gentiles to stop being anti-Semitic, there wouldn’t be Jewish people,” Gates declares.
