NORTHAMPTON — In a time when some are feeling less than optimistic, prominent author, scholar and filmmaker Henry Louis Gates Jr. had a message for the hundreds who came to see him speak Monday afternoon.
“We have to presume good things about people, not bad things,” he said.
The simple thought came at the end of a nearly hourlong conversation Gates had with Smith College President Kathleen McCartney during the Presidential Colloquium.
The discussion began with excerpts from Gates’ four-part miniseries “Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise,” which aired on PBS over two nights in November 2016.
“I wanted to do a series about my life,” Gates told the crowd. “This is autobiographical for us.”
Gates is widely known for his PBS show “Finding Your Roots,” which features celebrity guests exploring their genealogy.
More than 360 people packed the Weinstein Auditorium at Smith College to see Gates speak. Some in attendance arrived an hour before the talk began to make sure they would get a seat. Ten minutes before the talk, the auditorium was packed and people were being sent to watch a live-cast in an overflow room at the campus center.
The documentary miniseries looks at the last five decades of the civil rights movement and was completed a week before the presidential election.
Recalling a conversation with friend and American Express CEO Ken Chenault, Gates dug deeper into the documentary series’ origin. Given a list of 10 topic Gates was considering doing a documentary on, Chenault told him he was missing the most important one — their own history. “‘You don’t think of it as history because it’s your life, but the last 50 years, so much has happened that has been transformative,’” Gates recalled Chenault saying. “I said ‘My God, that’s true’ and this is ancient history for kids so I need to tell the story, so that’s what we did.”
The excerpts touched on a variety of topics, including James Brown’s impact and his song “Say it Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud,” policy changes that led to the black middle class quadrupling in size, and the fracturing of black America and hip-hop music. The clips ended with the victory speech of President Barack Obama shortly after his election in 2008.
Following the film, Gates and McCartney talked about black culture, policy and how to stay optimistic while “we’re under siege” following the election of President Donald J. Trump in November.
On the topic of white America’s embracing hip hop, Gates said it was easy to engage in symbolic forms rather than meaningful change.
“The more intimacy that a person has with another person’s culture … the less likely they are to be racist, which is one reason why integrating the schools was so important, as well as economic mobility,” he said. “It’s one thing the kind of music you listen to, it’s another what your politics might be and they aren’t necessarily connected at all.”
Sharing a statistic, Gates said that there are more African-Americans than the entire population of Canada.
“Yet we refer to black America through the metaphor of community. What kind of communities have 42 million people? We have communities within the black experience,” Gates said. “There are things which unite us and there are things which divide us … the class divide began to fracture the black community in ways that had pernicious effects within the race.”
Closing out the discussion, McCartney asked Gates to “help us be optimistic.”
Gates, a self-described optimist by nature, admitted he never thought that Donald Trump would be elected and following the election was “in a tailspin.” A staunch defender of the First Amendment, Gates said he would never dream of ending a friendship because of politics.
“Friendship to me trumps politics,” he said. “I think that is important in a civil society.
“I think the problems confronting us in terms of racism and in terms of classism, in terms of sexism, are so complicated that I think that we have to be humble enough to know that none of us has the solution, and that our traditional ideologies have failed us,” Gates continued. “We have to stand up and fight the people who are xenophobic and forget that we are all immigrants in this country and that is what made us great.”
Gates’ visit to the college came out of a discussion between McCartney and two students, now alumnae, last year.
“The idea of him coming came out of a conversation of seeing more people that look like us and kind of more people that shared our experience in regards to culture and identity,” said Alexys Butler, former chairwoman of the Black Student Alliance and current graduate student at Brandeis University.
Butler said watching Gates speak at her alma mater was like a dream come true. She liked that he spoke about coming from a family that encouraged him to set and achieve his dreams.
“Him saying that kind of resonated with me … you spend all of your time in school and you set your sights on all of these amazing jobs,” she said. “He kind of just reminded me, no matter the circumstance, whatever we want to happen, we can make it happen.”
She continued, “I think that was something I needed to hear, especially having just graduated from Smith and being back in grad school.”
Emily Cutts can be reached at ecutts@gazettenet.com.