Les Américains n'ont pas fini d'entendre parler du 16 juillet, jour où Henry Louis Gates Jr., l'un de leurs professeurs les plus connus, titulaire de la chaire d'études africaines-américaines à Harvard, grand spécialiste de l'histoire du racisme et de la ségrégation, a été arrêté chez lui comme un vulgaire malfrat par un policier blanc du commissariat de Cambridge, dans le Massachusetts. La victime a promis d'en tirer toutes les leçons. "J'en ferai un documentaire, a-t-il juré. Le système de justice pénale est vraiment pourri."

Le professeur revenait d'un séjour en Chine, où il était allé enquêter sur les origines familiales du violoncelliste Yo-Yo Ma. Depuis que le recours à l'ADN s'est banalisé, Henry Louis Gates s'est spécialisé dans les recherches généalogiques. Avec l'écrivain Maya Angelou, il est remonté jusqu'en Sierra Leone. Avec l'acteurDon Cheadle, jusqu'à la tribu indienne des Chikasaw. A chaque fois, il en rapporte un documentaire vu par des millions de téléspectateurs. Il a aussi fondé un site Internet "black", financé par le Washington Post, The Root. A Cambridge, où il habite sur Ware Street, dans une maison à quelques blocs de l'université, les gens le saluent dans la rue.

Ce 16 juillet, la serrure de la porte de sa maison était un peu grippée, la clef tournait mal. Avec son chauffeur de taxi, M. Gates a forcé la porte. Voyant deux Noirs à l'ouvrage de ce quartier bourgeois, une femme (dont l'identité n'a pas été révélée) a appelé la police. C'était le début de l'après-midi. L'appel fait mention de "deux grands Noirs" munis de sacs à dos.

A ce stade, les versions divergent. Le professeur Gates a montré ses papiers, prouvé qu'il était chez lui, et à son tour, a demandé à son interlocuteur de justifier de son identité. Le sergentJames Crowley, onze ans de métier, aurait refusé et le professeur Gates aurait dénoncé un délit de faciès.

La discussion s'est terminée au poste, où l'universitaire, un homme de 58 ans et d'allure plutôt chétive, est arrivé menotté. Il n'est ressorti qu'au bout de quatre heures et après l'intervention deCharles Ogletree, alias "Tree", célèbre professeur de droit de Harvard et mentor du présidentBarack Obama au début de sa campagne.

L'incident, qui s'est déroulé suivant un scénario bien connu des Noirs américains, a réveillé les réflexes classiques. "Les seules personnes qui vivent dans un monde post-racial sont les quatre habitants" de la Maison Blanche, a commenté M. Gates, amer. Dans le Washington Post, le journaliste Wil Haygood a raconté d'expérience ce moment où, quel que soit le statut social, les individus reproduisent des comportements qui les dépassent : "Oubliez Harvard, (M. Gates) est dans cette zone délicate où se rencontrent la peau noire et les forces de l'ordre (...) Ce moment où l'homme noir porte une éternité pour bagage."

Le sergent Crowley a refusé de présenter ses excuses. Il n'a probablement pas fini non plus d'entendre parler de l'incident. Le professeur Gates compte en faire l'emblème des contradictions de l'Amérique à l'heure de son premier président noir. L'élection de novembre 2008 n'a pas été suivie de "changements structurels", a-t-il constaté. Vu la popularité des démocrates à Cambridge, le policier a "probablement voté pour Barack. Cela ne m'a pas été d'un grand secours".

Pendant sa conférence de presse, mercredi à la Maison Blanche, le président Obama a été interrogé sur l'incident. "Skip est un ami, a-t-il dit, en utilisant le surnom du professeur. Je risque d'être partial." Toujours extrêmement prudent dès qu'il aborde la question raciale, pour ne pas apparaître comme l'homme d'une communauté, il a cette fois-ci pris parti. "D'abord, je crois qu'on peut dire, que nous serions tous assez en colère (dans cette situation). Deuxièmement, la police de Cambridge a été stupide d'arrêter quelqu'un alors que la preuve était établie qu'il était dans sa propre maison. Troisièmement, cet incident nous rappelle qu'il y a une longue habitude dans ce pays de contrôler les Africains-américains et les latinos de manière disproportionnée."

Source : Le Monde 

Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Jr. (born September 16, 1950) is an American literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor, and public intellectual. He was the first African-American to receive the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, and he has received multiple honorary degrees and awards for his teaching, research, and development of academic institutions to study black culture. In 2002, Gates was selected to give the Jefferson Lecture, in recognition of his "distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities." The lecture resulted in his 2003 book, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley. As the host of the 2006 and 2008 PBS television miniseries African American Lives, Gates explored the genealogy of prominent African Americans. Gates sits on the boards of many notable arts, cultural, and research institutions, and currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, where he is Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. 

 Biography

Early years

Gates was born in Piedmont, West Virginia, to Pauline Augusta Coleman and Henry Louis Gates, Sr. He went to Yale and gained his B.A. summa cum laude in History. The first African-American to be awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, the day after his undergraduate commencement, Gates set sail on the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 for the University of Cambridge, where he studied English literature at Clare College. With the assistance of a Ford Foundation Fellowship, he worked toward his Ph.D. in English. While his work in history atYale had trained him in archival work, Gates' studies at Clare introduced him to English literature and literary theory.

At Clare College, Gates was also able to work with Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian writer denied an appointment in the department because, as Gates later recalled, African literature was at the time deemed "at best, sociology or socio-anthropology, but it was not real literature."^[1] Soyinka would later become the first black African to be awarded the Nobel Prize; he remained an influential mentor for Gates and became the subject of numerous works by Gates. Finding mentors in those with whom he shared a "common sensibility" rather than an ethnicity, Gates also counts Raymond Williams, George Steiner, and John Holloway among the European scholars who influenced him.

Career

Gates withdrew after a month at Yale Law School, and in October 1975 he was hired by Charles T. Davis as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale. In July 1976, Gates was promoted to the post of Lecturer in Afro-American Studies with the understanding that he would be promoted to Assistant Professor upon completion of his dissertation. Jointly appointed to assistant professorships in English and Afro-American Studies in 1979, Gates was promoted to Associate Professor in 1984. After being denied tenure, he left for Cornell in 1985, and stayed until 1989. After a two-year stay at Duke University, he moved to his current position at Harvard University in 1991. At Harvard, Gates teaches undergraduate and graduate courses as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and as Professor of English.^[2] Additionally, he serves as the Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

As a literary theorist and critic, meanwhile, Gates has combined literary techniques of deconstruction with native African literary traditions; he draws on structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics to textual analysis and matters of identity politics. As a black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon and has instead insisted that black literature must be evaluated by the aesthetic criteria of its culture of origin, not criteria imported from Western or European cultural traditions that express a "tone deafness to the black cultural voice" and result in "intellectual racism."^[3] Gates tried to articulate what might constitute a black cultural aesthetic in his major scholarly work The Signifying Monkey, a 1989 American Book Award winner; the work extended the application of the concept of "signifyin(g)" to analysis of African-American works and thus rooted African-American literary criticism in the African-American vernacular tradition.

While Gates has stressed the need for greater recognition of black literature and black culture, Gates does not advocate a "separatist" black canon but, rather, a greater recognition of black works that would be integrated into a larger, pluralistic canon. He has affirmed the value of the Western tradition but envisions a loose canon of diverse works integrated by common cultural connections:

Every black American text must confess to a complex ancestry, one high and low (that is, literary and vernacular) but also one white and black...there can be no doubt that white texts inform and influence black texts (and vice versa), so that a thoroughly integrated canon of American literature is not only politically sound, it is intellectually sound as well.^[3]

Moreover, Gates has argued that a separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes and maintains that it is "ridiculous" to think that only blacks should be scholars of African and African-American literature. He argues, "It can't be real as a subject if you have to look like the subject to be an expert in the subject,"^[1] adding, "It's as ridiculous as if someone said I couldn't appreciate Shakespeare because I'm not Anglo-Saxon. I think it's vulgar and racist whether it comes out of a black mouth or a white mouth."^[4]

Mediating a position between radicals advocating separatism and traditionalists guarding a fixed, highly homogeneous Western canon, Gates has faced criticisms from both sides; some criticize that the additional black literature will diminish the value of the Western canon, while separatists feel that Gates is too accommodating to the dominant white culture in advocating integration.

As a literary historian committed to the preservation and study of historical texts, Gates has been integral to the Black Periodical Literature Project, an archive of black newspapers and magazines created with financial assistance from the National Endowment for the Humanities.^[5] To build Harvard's visual, documentary, and literary archives of African-American texts, Gates arranged for the purchase of "The Image of the Black in Western Art," a collection assembled by Dominique de Ménil in Houston, Texas. Earlier, as a result of his research as aMacArthur Fellow, Gates had discovered Our Nig, the first novel in the United States written by a black person, Harriet E. Wilson, in 1859; he followed this discovery with the acquisition of the manuscript of The Bondwoman's Narrative, another narrative from the same period.

As a prominent black intellectual, Gates has focused throughout his career not only on his research and teaching but on building academic institutions to study black culture. Additionally, he has worked to bring about social, educational, and intellectual equality for black Americans and has written pieces in The New York Times that defend rap music and an article inSports Illustrated that criticizes black youth culture for glorifying basketball over education. In 1992, he received a George Polk Award for his social commentary in The New York Times. Gates' prominence in this field led to him being tapped as a witness on behalf of the controversial Florida rap group 2 Live Crew in their obscenity case. He argued the material the government alleged was profane, actually had important roots in African-American vernacular, games, and literary traditions and should be protected.

Asked by NEH Chairman Bruce Cole about how Gates would describe what he does, Gates responded, "I would say I'm a literary critic. That's the first descriptor that comes to mind. After that I would say I was a teacher. Both would be just as important."^[1]

Personal life

Gates has been the host and co-producer of African American Lives (2006) and African American Lives 2 (2008) in which the lineage of notable African Americans is traced usinggenealogical resources and DNA testing. In the first series, Gates learns of his European ancestry (50%), and in the second installment we learn he is descended from the Irish King, Niall of the Nine Hostages. He also learns that he is descended in part from the Yoruba people of Nigeria.

Gates was married in 1979 to Sharon Lynn Adams. They have two daughters. He has since remarried.

The popular Harvard-area burger restaurant, Mr. Bartley's Burger Cottage, sells a Professor Skip Gates burger topped with pineapple and teriyaki sauce. 

Bibliography

Books (author)

• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1987). Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self (First edition ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 019503564X.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1988). The Signifying Monkey (First edition ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195034635. American Book Award
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1992). Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (First edition ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195075196.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1994). Colored People: A Memoir (First edition ed.). New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0679421793.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.; Cornel West (1996). The Future of the Race (First edition ed.). New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 067944405X.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.; McKay, Nellie Y. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (First edition ed.). W. W. Norton. ISBN 0393040011.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1997). Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (First edition ed.). New York: Random House. ISBN 0679457135.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1999). Wonders of the African World (First edition ed.). New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0375402357.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (2000). The African American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Century (First edition ed.). New York: Free Press. ISBN 0684864142.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (2003). The trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's first Black poet and her encounters with the founding fathers. New York: Basic Civitas Books. ISBN 0465027296.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (2007). Finding Oprah's Roots: Finding Your Own (First edition ed.). New York: Crown. ISBN 9780307382382.

Books (editor)

• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1999). Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (First edition ed.). New York: Basic Civitas Books. ISBN 0465000711.
• Crafts, Hannah; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (2002). The Bondwoman's Narrative (First edition ed.). New York: Warner Books. ISBN 0446690295.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and Hollis Robbins. (2004) Searching for Hannah Crafts: Essays in the Bondwoman's Narrative. New York: Basic/Civitas. ISBN 0465027148
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (2008) The African American national biography, New York, NY : Oxford Univ. Press, ISBN 9780195160192
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.; Yacovone, Donald (2009). Lincoln on Race and Slavery. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691142340.

Articles

• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1 December 2008). "Personal History: Family Matters". The New Yorker 84 (39): 34-38. Abstract and related family history materials.

Filmography

• From Great Zimbabwe to Kilimatinde, BBC/PBS, Great Railway Journeys, Narrator and Screenwriter, BBC/PBS, 1996.
• The Two Nations of Black America, Host and Scriptwriter, Frontline, WGBH-TV, February 11, 1998.
• Leaving Eldridge Cleaver, WGBH, 1999
• Wonders of the African World, PBS, October 25-27, 1999 (six-part series) (Shown as Into Africa on BBC-2 in the United Kingdom and South Africa, Summer, 1999)
• America Beyond the Color Line, Host and Scriptwriter, (four part series) PBS, 2004.
• African American Lives, Host and Narrator, PBS, February 2006
• African American Lives 2, Host and Narrator, PBS, February 2008
• Looking For Lincoln, Host and Narrator, PBS, February 2009

CD-ROM

• Appiah, Anthony; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr (1999). Microsoft Encarta Africana Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Black History and Culture (First edition ed.). Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corp. ISBN 0735600570.^[25]