Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., is all over the place. He was a consultant to the movie Amistad and is a writer for New Yorker magazine, the featured guest in a BBC series on Africa, a book author, a department chairperson, and a professor. Described by many as an "intellectual superstar," the million-dollar earner has put Harvard University's Afro-American studies department on the map by attracting a "Dream Team" of mostly male scholars.
New information? Hardly. "Skip" Gates's work has been in the limelight for a while. His career has skyrocketed since he won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award a decade or so ago. In a recent article, he is described as "the most eloquent voice articulating the middle class Black experience to White America." However, the awestruck and somewhat fawning article, featured in the April edition of Boston Magazine, became the subject of some national debate -- not because of its content, but because of its title.
"Head Negro In Charge," the headline blazes. In the body of the piece, author Cheryl Bentsen rather coyly explains this as longhand for H.N.I.C. However, most folks don't translate "H.N.I.C." so politely. Her laudatory profile, therefore, was transformed into the subject of debate.
Rev. Charles Stith, a prominent Boston minister and civil rights activist, demanded an apology for the use of the "historically offensive phrase." Boston Magazine editor Craig Unger demurred. Gates, the subject of all the furor, let days pass before telling Boston Globe writer Mark Jurkowitz that he felt terrible about the furor and was dismayed about the headline because it might "exacerbate racial tension" in Boston. Newsweek described the tumult as "a tempest over a headline," and the controversy hit the Today show.
In some ways, the fuss about the term used to describe Gates is less than a footnote in the volume on the status of African Americans in higher education and is not worthy of much further discussion. In other ways, though, the contention speaks Volumes about our status, both in the academy and in the media.
