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Another "PBS special" from Henry Louis Gates? White supremacists can be forgiven if they are not shaking in their boots. Five and a half years ago, the bourgeois professor fouled Black History Month by narrating an ambitious, four-part, and British-directed Public Broadcasting System television series titled "America Beyond the Color Line." Purportedly dedicated to providing a provocative new take on race, class, and black experience in the U.S., Gates' documentary spent an inordinate amount of time beating up on impoverished blacks for not having any, well, class. Accepting the dominant privilege-friendly and Euro-bourgeois notion that success, empowerment, and freedom are essentially available to all who exhibit proper individual initiative and "personal responsibility," Gates argued that poor African-Americans are largely to blame for the fact that blacks stand at the bottom of the nation's steep US socioeconomic pyramids. In "American Beyond the Color Line," Gates did not understand class in the radical way that the term has been used by leading black intellectuals and activists like W.E.B. DuBois, CLR James, Martin Luther King and Manning Marable: as an oppression structure that is intimately and inseparably (dare I say dialectically) bound up with race (today we must of course add gender) in the construction and preservation of American inequality. <1> He used "class" rather in the bourgeois and accommodationist Booker T. Washington <2> sense, arguing that lower-class blacks needed to work harder and smarter to acquire the middle- and upper-class skills, education, habits and values possessed in greater degree by black elites. One of those elites Gates held up as a role model in "America Beyond the Color" was the leading imperialist figurehead Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, featured as an example of what blacks could accomplish when they work hard, study, save, and behave decently.
"Unless there is a moral revolution and a revolution in attitude among our people," Gates told Chicago Tribune reporter Steve Johnson as "America Beyond the Color Line" hit the airwaves, "unless
decide to stay in school, learn the ABCs, not to get pregnant when you're 16, not to run drugs, not to sell drugs...we're doomed to have a relatively small black middle class and huge underclass and never the twain shall meet. The only way we can succeed in society," Gates said, "is mastering the ABCs, staying in school, working hard, deferred gratification. What's happened to these values?... My father always said, and it's true, if we studied calculus like we studied basketball, we'd be running MIT. It's true and there's no excuse."
This was the key theme in a previous PBS special narrated by Gates. In that documentary, titled "Two Nations," Gates proclaimed that black poverty was pretty much about poor decisions: "deciding to get pregnant or not to have protected sex. Deciding to do drugs. Deciding not to study. Deciding, deciding, deciding..."
The Tribune's Johnson reporter found that "America Beyond's" "most striking" aspect was "the degree to which it pushes the idea of personal responsibility as the best solution to the black community's problems," which, the reporter says, "is perhaps not something you expect to hear from a man who identifies himself as politically ‘center-left.'" While knowing full well that larger, interrelated forces of capitalism and racism play a role in the creation of deep and disproportionate black poverty, (he is not stupid), Gates decided (perhaps I should say "decided, decided, decided") in "America Beyond" and in "Two Nation" to skip past structural-racism and get to the meat of the matter: the personal responsibility of poor blacks.
It' was a comforting message, no doubt, for much of white America, most of which has embraced the convenient notion that racism (structural or otherwise) no longer poses serious problems for blacks and that the real barriers to black success and equality are located in the African-American community itself. "As white America sees it," noted Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown in their excellent study By The Color of Their Skin: the Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race (New York: Plume, 2000), "every effort has been to welcome blacks into the American mainstream and now they're on their own." Predominant white attitudes at the turn of the millennium are well summarized by the comments of a white respondent to a survey conducted by Essence magazine. "No place that I'm aware of," wrote the respondent, "makes people ride on the back of the bus or use a different restroom in this day and age. We got the message; we made the corrections - get on with it."
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http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/22126 
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