 Hello, I'm Tansy Thomas at the Davis Community Television Channel 5. I'm pleased to introduce you to my guests, Associate Professor of Sociology, Carl Jorgensen, and the Assistant Professor of American Studies, Nicole Fleetwood, and the Assistant Professor of Sociology, Bruce Haynes, all from UC Davis. Welcome. This discussion is America Beyond the Color Line by Henry Louis Gates, a public broadcasting documentary aired recently in the Sacramento area. And I will start off again by asking my guests to make an initial statement about their reaction or any feelings they want to share with us about the documentary. Well, let me start by describing Henry Louis Gates that he was going to interview black people the way they talked to other black people in order to expose that to the country as a whole. And there were four segments to the series. One was basically upper middle class people in the South, and the other was very successful black people in the North. The third was about the black poor in Chicago, and the fourth was about black Hollywood. And I think he does a very good job of engaging these people in casual conversation of the type that you would hear as a black person. I think in that sense it's very successful. I think it's very interesting in exposing us to how much more successful black people are now, or some black people are now, than they were 10 or 15 years ago. The types of houses they have, the types of positions they have, you know, black man head of Fannie Mae, one of the biggest corporations in the country, et cetera, et cetera, Hollywood stars. I think that the film is limited in a couple of senses. The first way in which the film is limited is that he really talks to upper middle class and lower upper class, and he talks to the poor, but he doesn't talk to working class people or middle class people. He doesn't talk to janitors or high school teachers or social workers, et cetera. So we get a look at sort of both ends of the spectrum of black America, but not much in the middle. And the second thing I think he does is some of the people have, they're telling their view of the situation, but their view of the situation is not necessarily an accurate view. So it's useful to know their view, but we can't really take it necessarily as reality. And so there's a problematic there. So I'm really very pleased with the series, but I also thought there was some real limitations to it. Before I start with Professor Bleatwood, it dawned on me that I didn't give some information that would be helpful to the public. So let me go back and talk to you a little from the press release issued by the public broadcasting system. And it says 100 years ago that celebrated African-American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois, famously identified the problem of the 20th century as, quote, the problem of the color line, unquote. America has come a long way since Du Bois made his prophecy and the politics of race have undergone dramatic change. So what? A century later are the new challenges faced by African-Americans. For Gates, this is both the best and the worst of times. Black Americans are center stage in almost every arena. And opportunities have opened up that just three decades ago seem unimaginable, but huge obstacles remain. Many African-Americans say they still feel excluded from mainstream American life. And a fifth of all black Americans currently live below the poverty line. In four programs, Gates travels to four different parts of America. East Coast, the Deep South, and inner city Chicago and Hollywood. Explorers this rich and diverse landscape, social as well as geographic, and meets the people who are defining black America from the most famous and influential Colin Powell, Quincy Jones, Samuel L. Jackson, Fannie Mae's Franklin and Reigns, Jesse Jackson, Russell Simmons, Chris Tucker, Alicia Keys, Maya Angelou, Morgan Freeman, to those at the grassroots. Now I will ask you to make any statement or comments. This is Professor Nicole Fleetwood. Well, I agree with Carl that, you know, the documentary is ambitious and it's really important. I like how Gates frames it as a journey, his kind of personal journey through four various regions and different socio-economic groups. I was disappointed in how male-centered the series is. He rarely interviews black women and when he does, I feel like he ghetto-ized their issues and often leaves the women to discuss gender issues as if gender issues don't impact men. I also was a little troubled by how he portrayed the South as this, you know, kind of folklore place in the past that is still framed by, like, Jim Crow, you know, kind of oppression and he doesn't understand why black successful people would ever venture into that area and he seemed to actually kind of pathologize blacks for moving back to the South. I also had trouble with how he talked about black poor in Chicago and his call to the upper class blacks to kind of solve black poor problems or to teach the black poor how to integrate into American liberal democracy. These are issues that I'd like to discuss amongst the group, but I want to, you know, go ahead and pass it on to Dr. Haynes. Professor Bruce Haynes. Well, I agree with everything that's been said so far. I'd like to focus, I guess, on two aspects. One is the notion that Carl brought up, that the views that were presented, although very informative, insightful in the sense we get to see really how people like Colin Powell think about race and racial issues. They're not social scientists and don't necessarily know what the trends are happening within black America. And so some of the things I wanted to address, Nicole just touched on sort of the idyllic south that Skip Gates presents. He also kind of reproduces what I call the kind of idealistic vision of the civil rights movement that revolves around Martin Luther King and without giving, and I guess, or I say at the expense, I should say, of focus on other folks such as Bayard Rustin or other individuals who are instrumental in the movement. He also alludes to the fact that two distinct classes are emerging within black America, one who is making it, one who is lagging behind in places like the Chicago projects that he made reference to. But this is not a new phenomenon. Scholars have talked about this since William Julius Wilson's book, The Eclining Significance of Race, published in 1978. And that gap has been increasing across the nation, not just with black Americans, but with Americans in general. And so I think we have to understand this widening wealth gap within a broader American context. By the same token, we have to understand the movement or the return to the south, which has been occurring since 1970s. Again, this is not a new phenomenon. But the new census data suggests that African Americans are increasingly suburbanizing, but we don't really know where they're suburbanizing from. So we don't really know is this a increased return from northerners to southern suburbs or this other southerners suburbanizing from other regions of the south. So there's a lot of... You could come away from the series with a lot of misconceptions about the state of black America. How are some of those misconceptions? The black middle class family. The average white middle class family is dependent upon two-way journeys. They're not living in McMansions on larger states, returning to Atlanta, for example. So some of the people that are very successful, though certainly suggestive of institutional... An institutional opening since the Civil Rights Movement, that doesn't really speak to the state of the average middle class black American. And what's that? I guess I would love to turn it over for discussion. Open discussion. Go for it. I thought another misconception also was that blacks in general blame other blacks for their conditions. Yes. Because often Gates affirms his questions like, for example, I can think of his questions to actors in Hollywood. Is this an issue of race or an issue of talent? Exactly. Over and over again. Or his questions to residents of housing projects in Chicago that are very loaded. Basically, what are the troubles in your neighborhood? Well, they live in an all-black community of other poor people. So, of course, they're going to talk about what happens within those confines. Exactly. No, I completely agree with you. I found that segment the most disturbing. Professor Gates presents the right saying they say it's all about culture and behavior and values. The left says it's all about structure and conditions. And he presents himself as going to shed light on these two sort of intractable debate. And we're going to talk to the tenants themselves to really understand what's going on. But the tenants themselves can only talk about what they know, which is the deteriorating conditions in the community, the deteriorating conditions of their neighbors, the drug use of their neighbors, the delinquency of their neighbors. And so we walk away with a feeling of individual dysfunction rather than understanding how did that housing project get there in the first place? Why is that housing project predominantly black in the first place? What happened to city services when that housing project got built? What happened to the public schools in that neighborhood? What are the other social conditions that maybe lead to some of these social pathologies that we're often talking about? Yeah, I'd like to talk maybe for a few minutes about some things. One is about Davidson pathomorphic studies. It started really in 1968, to 1968, about 1978 or so. Everyone, other people heavily involved in afro-american studies, were so stressful that a lot of people got sick. Five people, and some of you will remember them, died before they were six. Jackie Mitchell, Paul Hardy, James King, Chuck Irby, Ed Turner, they died before they were six. That's a true fact. And that's five out of about 12 people. And the other people who were heavily involved, like myself, Carl Mack, McNeil, got sick to the point of needing medical attention. Then the university started, decided to put six FTE in each program. I mean, at that time afro-american studies only had two faculty members or two and a half faculty members. When that happened, all of a sudden people weren't getting sick anymore. Now you could look at the people who died at a young age and point to things that they did that they shouldn't have done. But the fact is, you change destruction, all of a sudden you have this change. And also, other faculty of color who came here between 1970 and 1977. To the best of my knowledge, only one or two ever became full professors. But after the culture changed, everyone, you know, people making normal progress. And so you could look at those people who didn't become full professors and talk about, well, what is their pathology? What is it that they could have done differently? You can always look at someone and say, how could they have done better? But sometimes, you know, the structure, you change conditions and people are able to succeed where they weren't before. I mean, for example, now we've had this great increase in the number of women going to college. I mean, when I went to Harvard, a quarter, the Radcliffe students were a quarter of the male student body. Now, the female students are 55 to 58 percent of the college students. And everyone's wondering, what's happened to the males? Why have they fallen behind? I mean, that's just an example of how much social structure can change things in ways where we can't figure out why it happened. But we can see that it happened. And I think that this is in part what's missing here. I mean, you have all of these, you know, I'm keeping track of the police stuff. You know, we just had a policeman in New York City shoot a guy unarmed walking around on the rooftops in New York. We just had the police in South Carolina do these drug arrests and the school was 80 percent white. And they came in at such a time where there were mostly black people there and they harassed the black people. And we just don't know what the effect of the moment that is. If I can follow up on that. I mean, part of I think what you're alluding to is that is the glass full or the glass half empty in looking at middle-class black marriages? Yes. On the one hand, if we look at the post-1965 era, we can see great institutional change. We have Colin Powell. We have Condoleezza Rice. We have, and of course, some of these folks are conservative and whether or not they support the issues as the black community defines them as a different issue. But the fact that they are people of African descent, we've made it into these positions of power. That in and of itself symbolizes major structural change in America. Yes. On the other hand, we have plenty of evidence to suggest that the black middle class, for instance, lags behind in wealth compared to people of equal status in the white community, equal education, equal occupations. There's evidence that that middle class is less able to pass their wealth on to their children. That is a concern. There is an education gap occurring right now in college attendance for African-American men and women. Women are going on to college. Men seem to be lagging. That will create a crisis down the road for young African-American women who tend not to marry out of a race. Who will they be married? So there are issues that are of critical concern to this expanding black middle class that if you walked away from the segment, you would have thought you just need to get a job like one of the crisis and you would be okay. But don't you find that some of these trends also encourage occurring in other populations? I understand that the white populations begin to show that sort of trend. Some trends, but some trends are distinctly racial in terms of, for instance, the educational gap is a distinctly racial effect. The wealth gap is a distinctly racial effect. The ability of middle class parents to send their children to places like UC Davis. For instance, if they live in a community where their house is devalued, therefore they cannot take out as much money on their second mortgage, therefore they have less capital to spend on other things. So there is a cumulative impact that we see when we're just looking at black and white classes. And also changing the quality of life issues, such as a lot of lower middle class blacks don't have health insurance, you know, and issues of that did not come. I think those are really important kind of structural issues. I see that as I think in terms of the gatekeepers that sort of who are the gatekeepers and their impact on who gets in and under what circumstances, that sort of thing. And so that's how I look at it. And do you, so far as the black middle class is described by Henry Lewis Gates in his documentary, what did you make of them? Did you think it was all right for them to be comfortable in their black suburbs? Well, what was interesting, I think, as Carl pointed out, many of the people that we saw, most people would not think of them as middle class. People who earned a million dollars a year, people who earned five million dollars a film, people who buy 100 acres of land in upscale communities at a time. These are not your typical middle class African Americans. Your typical middle class African American works through the state or city government or they work in a corporate segment in personnel or human resources or in some segment of affirmative action. That's more typical of your average middle class African American. So what we didn't really see, middle class African Americans, what we saw were pretty upper class African Americans and people who were still stuck in housing projects. And those were sort of two extremes of black America. You rarely see folks like us. We're middle class black Americans. In a sense, you rarely see us on TV. You know, folks who are middle managers at the local drug store. Folks who are managers on floors at department stores. These are your middle class folks. You're talking about the media blackout? Exactly. I mean, civil servants, social workers, teachers, policemen, firemen. But that's a great point. I mean, the documentary in fact fits in with kind of the ways in which non-narrative television frames black America as incredibly successful and hyper-visible, the athlete, the Hollywood star or extremely poor, degenerate and culturally dysfunctional. Exactly. So the kind of the majority of black Americans are missing from the documentary. Right. And I thought when I think when you asked me what I thought was striking about the documentary, one of the things was they said one fifth of black Americans live in poverty. And I think the media image is the other way around. I think that's one of the reasons why in Davis there's a tendency to think that everybody's own welfare, even though you're professors, or you're here to burglarize something or your children are just seen as inner city children needy and kind of scary. Well, during the Reagan era there is a lot of public debate, particularly coming from the right that associated welfare with urban blacks, particularly women. And I think, I mean, that stereotype has existed historically, but it really got solidified in the 90s during the Reagan era. And there's a good book by a scholar named Marty Gillins, I think he's at UCLA now, about the images of welfare women on the media. Yeah, it's scandalous. I remember I became enraged during the Reagan era in which a report, I was working at the Attorney General's office. Well, I had seen this report put out by the Department of Social Services in which it gave the profile of the average welfare recipient in California at that time. And it was a white married woman and a legitimate white child was the average welfare recipient. Well, I couldn't believe it, but a month later the Republican caucus had this, I guess it was a white paper. It was saying like, stop welfare and they had a pregnant black woman on the cover. And so I called in to San Francisco station and I said, it's racist. And of course they scoffed at me. It was a KGO and they scoffed at me. And I said, look, I've seen the report that was signed by Ronald Reagan and it gave the profile. So to humor me, he called and checked that apologetically to the state office and said, this woman says blah, blah, blah. And the woman says, she's right. And he's what? And the debate was going on about, I don't know if you remember the debate about taking away illegitimate children from welfare recipients. Then he says, well, then what is this debate about? And there wasn't another call came in. I just wanted to, your reaction to his report about women going to, now the numbers are greater for women going to college. Did you have anything to add to his comment about the, do you see that as a problem and how do you see it? And what do you see as any kind of, is there a solution or something we're supposed to do or just something we observe about? Well, I mean, I think that still college enrollment for black males and females is disproportionately low. So, yes, I mean, we should look at that as a minor success that we see black women in college, but the numbers are still quite low, especially compared to whites entering and also Asian Americans entering and increasingly even Latino students entering. When we talk about kind of the lack of black males on campus, we also have to talk about issues of public education and the criminal justice system and what's happening, what type of training is happening to young black males. We can't separate those issues, I think. I just wanted to clarify one thing. We don't know exactly who's going to college. We simply know there's an aggregate gap. So in other words, we don't know if it's the working class or poor middle class kids who are actually attended. We just know that there's a gap in the attendance, overall attendance rate. So later we will know more when they, And then there's also the issue of staying in school because black, black college dropout rate is quite high compared to whites and Asian Americans. But we do know this about college attendance. We do know that colleges are increasingly getting costly even public education and we do know that increasingly middle class parents are taking out second mortgages to finance their college education. So all things being equal, we could expect a disproportionate impact on middle class black families to finance their children's education. Who are not eligible for financial aid. Right, exactly. I have a perspective on this. I would expect that. At Davis, I looked at one of the classes I think 2001 and the ratio of male to female across ethnicity. And blacks are about in the middle. I mean, it's a little higher than average, but it's not that much higher. And there are other groups, I can't name them right now, didn't bring this with me, where the rates are higher. So what we're seeing is sort of a general phenomenon that's being represented as a black phenomenon and then pathologize. It's sort of like the general welfare phenomenon, you represent it as a black phenomenon, you pathologize it, then you say, oh, these people is character they could do better. So that in fact, what's happening, I talked about this in my interest on personal dynamics class, is that a lot of the young women in the class, I mean, the whites too, they're more white females than white males here. They were thinking about, I have to be ready to marry someone who's not as educated as I am. If I can find someone that's good, that's okay. But they're sort of dealing with their parents who want them to marry a doctor or a lawyer or something. And they're saying that, hey, those could be disproportionately women, that's maybe not going to happen. And so this isn't a specifically black problem. It may be a little more acute in the black community, but it's a general issue. I'm not even sure I want to call it a problem, but it's a trend that's going on. Now I want to say something else about this pathologizing. You know, Carl Stack, a friend of mine who was at Berkeley is now retired. When she did All My Kin, where she's white, she was studying a black working class in poor community outside of Chicago. And she decided that she as a graduate student at the time would try to help people negotiate with the city agencies. And she said at the end, I couldn't negotiate with those city agencies any better than the people did unless I pulled out my status card. You know, unless I pulled out that I was a graduate student, blah, blah, blah, then I would get, then things would get done. And there was a book by Charles Valentine and his wife, whose name I don't remember, which came to the same conclusion. That it wasn't a question that these people didn't know how to negotiate with these systems and needed more education. It was that, you know, there was a bias there that couldn't be broken through unless you had status. And I'm kind of reminded of when my mother was sick and needed to go back in the hospital and my sister was there and I was there. And the people there were saying, we can't put it back into the hospital until we get a doctor to say she has to go in the hospital, blah, blah, blah. And then my sister said, my sister's married to an orthopedist and she said, this is Dr. Morgan's, you know, mother-in-law. And he would, you know, greatly appreciate it if you took care of her. I mean, it was done in like 20 seconds. You know, so, you know, there's this way of pathologizing people. That's part of it. But I think there is a major educational issue that is definitely missing from the documentary and that is that we do need to discuss it. You know, the recent, but bad boys, I can't think of the author, the name of the author who did an ethnographic study of public schools. Ferguson. Yeah, Ferguson. Yeah. And looking at how. Disdeportually punished. Black male students are. And also, before going to graduate school, I was a public school teacher. Yeah. And in especially most urban areas, special education divisions are almost solely made up of black male students. So black male students are from elementary on being targeted and placed into. Urban. And placed into special education programs. You raise a point that I wanted to make sure I hit, which the title of the show is called. Beyond the color. Beyond the color line. We've gotten beyond it. If we look at the data, whether it's housing discrimination, whether it's the resegregation of public schools that you talk about, whether it's the fact that poor black children are likely to attend schools full of other poor black children, that segregation is a persistent problem and has never gone away. And this title sort of begs the question. What falsifies. For those folks that he interviewed, in fact, it raises probably not much of an issue for them. The middle class. Well, the upper middle class. The upper middle class. Well, I think money gives you, you know, choices, gives you options and that they opted out of the integration model. Because it's, as they said something about, we want to be with people who look like us. Yeah. And it's a nice, we want our children to be around, you know, people that look them. And it's much easier. Well, their money gives them that option. And then to there's been a lot of change in the white community. And I hear many middle class people saying, is this what I want to integrate into? Because the dramatic change in how white society is functioning. You know, because remember the mandate that beginning at Prakit abolition was we were supposed to uplift the race. And we're supposed to emulate white people, right? Of course, the quality white people. That's who we are. So the aristocratic model, the white model that the middle class aspired to seem to have kind of a lot of it has collapsed. Or appears to from looking at television. The popular media. What's on right now is not making. Give us a specific example, Tansen. You have seen on that trash TV. That's what you mean. Yeah, I'm talking about the media. All the different programs, I see a general dumbing down of the media when it comes to the popular culture. And the MTV culture that our kids are taking. You know, your clothes come from MTV. You wear two dimes and a nickel. And the language and the lack of stability, that type of thing. And I see the upper middle class who still aspire to that almost patrician aristocratic model. They aren't going for it. And so that makes them, they are taking the option they're opting out. That's an interesting idea. How I see, as you well know, many of them are still maintaining these aristocrats. They have adopted to the current media model. So I think that that's part of it for those people. At any rate, did you want to visit any of these? I sent you like a copy of these. The questions, discussion questions that they put on the PBS web page. I think we topped them on this. I'll read them down real fast and then see if you want to even bother with any of them. The questions that they address are after noting that wealthy blacks in the south are opting to live with people of their own class who look like them. Gates asked, what would Dr. King think of this? What do you think, Martin Luther King would think of this? I would like to address that. I wrote a book about a middle class suburb called Running Heights in Yonkers, New York. And it's a suburb that came into existence around 1914. And it's one of the first black suburbs in Westchester County. And it's an all-black or predominantly black enclave. And if you look at the history of that community, it was segregated by race and by class. But what makes it unique was that the residents of this community built their homes in an area that was surrounded by predominantly white homeowners. And they never experienced the traditional ghettoization process that historically the black middle class has experienced. That means they can only move to the border areas of the ghetto where whites live. And more blacks come in from migration and the ghetto encapsulates their home-owning status. So you would have had more black enclades, suburban, middle class homeowners, had they had the opportunity to purchase homes like the residents in my community did. So this new phenomenon of class suburbanization and class segregation is not new. What is new is the opening up of housing for those black folks with money. That is what is new. And the scale. And the scale in which that's taking place. Exactly. You know, $600,000 homes. Exactly. The scale both in terms of the numbers and in terms of the money. That has changed. Yes. But the process, the social structural processes are very similar to how this black enclave and other, my community is not the only middle class enclave. There are other places, Greenberg and White Plains and St. Albans and New York City. There are other places that are predominantly middle class and black. And you can look in the census data. There they are. There's trouble by Gates' line of questioning to the family from Michigan who moved back to the south. And he seemed really suspicious of their decision to live in an all black neighborhood. And I'd like to kind of posit that against another interview he did with an upper class black family. And that's a family who integrated an all white neighborhood in New Jersey. And he was celebratory of what they did because they integrated this all white exclusive neighborhood. And yet he was suspicious of blacks kind of returning to upper class neighborhoods in the south. And in some ways actually kind of implied that they were going against King's dream. He actually answers the question at the end. But he answers it through his suspicion that in fact that what we should be moving towards is integration. And it shouldn't even be beyond the color lines. It should be there is no color line, the title. Because he wants to believe that we can move to a moment or a place where color doesn't matter. And I don't know if that is... That's not my agenda. I'm not necessarily interested in that movement. I don't know how that would benefit us. And it's also not possible. Well also federal housing studies still show rampant racial discrimination in the housing market. That middle class blacks are participating in. So all of the movement to live in a black enclave is taking place in a context of... What do I want to say? Where they're being unwanted in the Donnelly white areas. So is it black retreat or black rejection or white rejection of blacks? I think it's an option. Their money gives them. Exactly. Now they can exercise an option in the past. So there's a difference between, remember the Bugaboo forced integration. And so there's a difference between forced integration or forced segregation. But when you have separate, I think they call this separation of people choosing to live elsewhere. And just like the lady in that article, that segment said, she says, we do not shut out white people. They choose not to live here with us black people. Yeah, well this is what I like to... I mean I think, you know, I grew up in a community that was black and we had a beach community that was black. But there were white people in it. There were white people who were part, who wanted to be part of the black community. So I mean I think the idea that these communities are segregated is a little misleading because I think that black communities are open to non-black people who want to be part of a cultural and political and social life of that community. That's what the women say. Whites flew away from black communities after they come to black. That's correct. And so I don't... I mean you can spend some time... Spending some time in a black space is not a bad thing. We used to have a black gospel choir which had a lot of non-black people in it. Okay, that's fine. I mean you have a symphony orchestra, which is sort of a white, more or less white space and you have non-white people in it. You have a black gospel choir, you have non-black people in it. That's fine. What's missing from the notion that we have reached the colorblind stage where blacks who have money can simply just choose to either be in a segregated environment or an integrated environment misses the critical point that widespread in the housing market is racial discrimination. So it characterizes those choices that people make. So whether they admit it or not I guess the jury is out for me until we have a colorblind structural environment whether or not blacks will actually choose to live in all black environments. That reality has never been in America. Do you expect it to be? I don't know. We have to wait to get there. Let me tell you a story. My sister went to Wellesme and one of her white roommates once, a former white roommate, my sister's kids went to the University I think of North Carolina and Calvin, the black football star, Calvin... That's... I'm sorry, there was a famous black basketball player there and this white woman asked my sister if her daughter could get introduced to this black football player. I mean, seeing a sort of a white patrician that her daughter having a match with this black basketball player would be a good match. And I mean, so I think some things are changing for some people. Oh, sure. But, you know, not necessarily for... And that's why I say, you know, is the glass half full or half empty because Gates sort of showed us the positive side. Calvin Hill and the son was Grant Hill. She wanted her daughter to get introduced to Grant Hill. Yeah, well, I think that we're still talking about, I think people have an option or choices. And I don't think there should be a straight, you know, like an either integrate or separate or who you have to associate with. It doesn't make it easier to know that what you're doing is your choice rather than that you're being forced. And it's when structural racism gets in the way that we're complaining about. Yeah. But, you know, I would like to... There was a point made in the video that's related to what you said, which is Chris Tucker talked about, you know, if you're a black star, you're a star. And if he comes into a restaurant... He transcended race. If I come into a restaurant, he says, you want this seat over here, you know, you want the best seat? White man, get out of that seat, Mr. Tucker. That's only to a degree, though. No, but what I'm pointing out is that there is this different place where these stars are. And there's this different place maybe where some of these elites are where, you know, the color line may be going away more than it does for other people. Well, money offers access. You have access, but look at OJ. I mean, as soon as you get in trouble, you're cold black. Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson. Yeah. Even if a poor tiger was, you know, let him stab someone, and all of a sudden he'll be black as you can be. Remember this, the mayor of New York City, when he was no longer mayor, could not hail a cab on the street. There was an article in New York Times about that. So, yeah. Yeah, it's just like Malcolm. Because he was just another black face. And he's not a very distinct looking black face. Yeah. But I would like to talk about something that Gates poses at the end of the Hollywood section. And you paraphrased it well in terms of he's asking, will Hollywood move to a moment when race doesn't matter, right? Race doesn't matter, yeah. And it seems that all four sections of the series is asking that question in some type of way. And I'm ambivalent about that. And I want to know what you all think. Can we move to a place where race doesn't matter? Is that our goal? Is that what we're attempting to do? I don't think we can ever move to a place where race doesn't matter. I think we have to move to a place where race doesn't handicap. Which is different than a place that race doesn't matter. People are going to hold on to their sense of history and culture and identity. But those things to me are completely separate from the issue of discrimination, access, equal opportunity. Well, yeah. But it seems like Gates is encouraging an integration into, I mean, I thought his going on a field trip with Dr. Lenore Fulani and her students was kind of a perfect moment of what he hopes this documentary will accomplish. And it's that blacks will, you know... Tell them more about what Fulani is doing. I mean, I think it goes back to the other point that you made that the gentleman from New Jersey, he held up with great esteem and the couple who relocates Atlanta to the black community he didn't look so favorably upon. Do you want to talk about the Fulani's program a little bit? For the public, yeah. Well, Fulani, which is interesting because, I mean, Fulani has a long history in New York City of being in sort of left politics. And she's been around for maybe 30 years now. And so, but I'm not sure the public who would see her would see her. So she was sort of just presented as an activist, educated. So that was a little out of context for me in the first place. But she had a program that is kind of a cultural immersion kind of program, it seemed to me, that was teaching urban poor students, black students how to act in social situations outside of the ghetto. Yeah, with elite whites, Wall Street. And she emphasized that concept of performance, right? Yeah, she had to teach students a set of performance skills. And it's how to operate in capitalist structures primarily. What was interesting, see, it's an idea that's very popular right now. I think it's an anthropology. There's a scholar named John Jackson, John L. Jackson, who wrote a book called The Harlem World, where he talks about race as performance. And so when I heard that, I said, oh, okay, because Gates is at Harvard. So that just seemed to me a sort of academic buzzword to throw in there, performance. It's all about performance. It's always been about performance, how you act, how you speak. It's always been about performance. Race and class are always about performance. And gender. Exactly. I see it as like being bicultural or multicultural, altering your behavior as you change, as your environment. Being able to function in various environments is how I see it. Because that's what happened to me. Being, like I said, come from a, my mother couldn't read. And I was, you know, we wrote Fang on Relief. I was born in 31. And so that's like the tail end of the depression and all that. And desperately poor. But we lived on a black street and white people's part of town, white folks' part of town. And so I went to a white school. And whatever was going on there wasn't what I knew in my neighborhood. And so then I had to learn to function. This is how I behave in my neighborhood and this is how I behave in the school. And that's how I do it. First I tried to incorporate, but it didn't work. I used to tell what was going on in school. And my mother and all her friends, they'd laugh at me. Oh, what are they doing in that stupid school? So I quit telling her what was going on in school. What was learning? Because it sounded silly to many of them. If it wasn't just, you know, ABC or something. But I said, oh, H2O, the teacher said H2O is water. And they laughed for hours. Any rate, so that forced me to function and to look at it. This is how I do here. And that's how I got along. And that's essentially what you're talking about. Any, as we wrap up this discussion, are there any closing remarks or something that you feel you must say as we... Yeah. The segment on Hollywood I thought was very good. And one of the white producers was on there talking about how if you put a black face on a movie, or many black faces in a movie, that, you know, the capability, the movie to make money goes down, unless it's sort of an, I guess, an A-list star. And arguing that there's a certain discrimination, but it's sort of based upon what will sell. And so, you know, you sort of needed to have a white buddy in the movie or a white love interest. You couldn't have a love story with two black people, but if you got Halle Berry and Russell Crow, well, that would be wonderful. And I thought this was interesting because I remember when I was in college and someone told me that the place I went to eat wouldn't hire a black female as a waitress because they were afraid that the customers wouldn't come. And because, you know, when a person who was dealing with malls came to talk here, they say, they don't put malls in black areas because whites won't come. And it sort of seems an expansion of this same issue. You could have this thing which is supposedly non-discriminatory, but if it's based upon a sense that there's a white antipathy to, you know, black employees, then it ends up being very, very discriminatory. Yeah, well, that's how affirmative action worked because then that gave them a little leverage. Well, you know, you can explain to the white person, I really wouldn't have this black person yet, but the loss is I have to. And that worked at times that way. And I thought... I thought like the Black Hollywood section just played into the star system. Like there's so much that happens in media that is outside of Hollywood and there are so many independent black producers who are doing quite well, who are self-sufficient and doing very interesting work like kind of Marlon Riggs type work, you know. So that doesn't fit it within his kind of structure of what counts as a media representation. And in fact, he interviewed one young director about his struggle getting funding for a film and the film, the Black Hollywood section, ended with the credit that this director received money for Bikers Boys. Well, I got online to look up Bikers Boys and in fact, Bikers Boys didn't make enough money to actually meet its cost. So then what does that say, you know? So it was actually a flop. Yeah, it was a flop. You know, after... Well, the question is, yeah. But it was framed as if he was doing this kind of for the race, you know, the film, for the race. I mean, it was a pretty kind of, you know, canned action adventure film that the fact that Lawrence Tate and Lawrence Fishburne didn't add much to the film. You know, and I think that there's all these things that are happening outside of Hollywood that Gates, like, well, Gates is not interested in because I think he has his own fascination with power and money. And that kind of, throughout all force sections, you kind of see that obsession he has with power and money and talking to people who have both, you know? I would like to talk about something that kind of angered me. I mean, I thought that... It shows another reason why this is so problematic. I thought that In America was a pretty good film, but I thought it was hyped way over its quality. You know, I mean, it was another story about, you know, immigrant whites coming to America, making good with the help of a black person, and the African guy gives a good performance, I thought, in the film. But then there was a film, Dirty Pretty Things, which I thought was a much better film, and it was about a different context. It was about black and Turkish immigrants being in England, and the struggles the Turkish woman was having with sexual exploitation, and the black man who was a pathologist but had to leave his country because of political things, how he was negotiating, using his medical skill to help his fellow people, you know, even though he didn't have a license, and other complications. I thought it was a really great performance, but they didn't nominate him. And Hollywood is always nominating these black people who are helping white people. Yeah, I'm sorry. We're running out of time. I would like to know what grade you give this documentary. You think it was worthwhile? Will it discussion? Do you have any sense that this will begin a discussion about America beyond the color line? Well, the good thing about Henry Lewis Gates, regardless of what he does, is he's so big, people will talk about it, and that's usually always positive for the black community. I want to just sort of make one small point about what I thought was a sort of conservative conclusion that Skip Gates constantly kept bringing us back to. As we close this out. And Jesse Jackson ended it very well by saying, if we have sick villages, we have sick children. And I think in understanding the context of why folks don't make it, it's very important. B plus. I think you say B plus. What are you saying? I think it's definitely worth seeing, but I think it's, you know, we've already seen these images before. I don't think it offers anything new to the discussion, kind of where blacks are. Well, then the discussion goes on, doesn't it? Hopefully it will. That's what I'm hoping. I'll give it a solid B. A solid one? A solid B. All right. Well, there you have the grade for the documentary on America, Beyond the Color Line, with Henry Lewis Gates. And I want to thank the wonderful crew at Davis Community Television. Really appreciate it. And we hope to be back with some further information for the discussion on this topic. Thank you. That's it. It's a little warm, isn't it? Underneath the lights. It is warm. And you need to get to which train? Yeah, if you and I leave at 840, where is the train station? Is it 5 minutes? It is 10 minutes. Okay. So we would run 830. We have a half hour. What is it? 8 o'clock right now? Yeah. No, I would use the film part of my class. I thought some of the interviews were really interesting, actually. That's, I mean... Thank you. No, I thought not. It was good. It was so... It was so canned, though. It was so canned. The interviews were good. Some of the interviews were good. But like you said, he takes the interviews and he wraps them back up into conservative interviews. You know, he does these things with the interviews. Is it?