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.
Some of the commentary about “H.N.I.C.” speaks to the contempt in
which many hold Gates, despite his accomplishments. And some of the
commentary, frankly and unfortunately, speaks to the contempt in which
we, African Americans, hold ourselves and the short distance we have
traveled since Booker T. Washington was our nation’s designated “head
Black man,” and the Tuskegee Machine was the filter through which all
other African Americans had to be sifted.
At its best, the H.N.I.C. term is an anachronism, a throwback to a
time past when African American people were so segregated that one of
us could speak for all of us. Often it is a term used derisively to
speak of one who has an exaggerated sense of his or her own importance.
