Henry Louis Gates; a long over-due post

Certainly not current news, but still bouncing around in my mind, is the Academic Lecture on September 14th at GVSU which Henry Louis Gates gave. I have to admit, the lecture was not what I expected. In preparation for hearing him speak, my classmates and I read the 2nd and 3rd chapters ("Barriers to Equity" by Kathleen Fulton and Robert Sibley, and "Factors of the Divide by Karin M. Wiburg") of Toward Digital Equity ed. Gwen Solomon and others.

Expecting to hear a talk all about the digital divide, perhaps right to the point of it, I waited with the rest of the people gathered for Gates. When he arrived, he started right off with the story of why he was so late. The story included surgery the previous day, several plane delays, and a show and tell session wherein he displayed his cast and knee brace to the audience and then exclaimed that it was a "Chick Magnet." At this point I realized that the night was going to be a bit more humorous than I had expected. Gates effectively sprinkled his impressive speech with humor for the rest of the evening.

He spent most of his time telling the story of how he had worked to make W.E.B. DuBois' dream of the Encyclopedia Africana Project come true. I found the way that he always responded with the determination of "I can do it" even when faced with tasks he knew nothing about or which required more money than most people would dare to try to raise. I also was struck in awe by the way that Gates talked about pursuing education. He displayed DuBois' and his own life as a sort of pursuit of collegiate degrees from all over the world. The way he talked about the rewarding experience of earning an educational degree, (W.E.B DuBois being a "hero even though he was broke," and achieving educational honors in spite of a past full of discrimination toward African Americans in higher education systems) made these achievements seem more powerful, more envious, and worth more human effort than any amount of money which people normally chase after. This is much different than the usual obligatory sense of resistance many students feel toward education. Gates left me inspired to look at education in a more valuable way.

Henry Louis Gates also talked about his disappointment with young black people equating valuing education with being "white." He discussed how it is truly sad that young black individuals believe that their only chance at making it in life is to play for the NBA. He proclaimed that this is simply a lie and gave the anecdote that there are more African American neural surgeons than there are African American players for the NBA. "If we would study as hard as we practice basketball, there'd be no holdin' us back!" said Gates.

According to Gates, Dubois believed that if people were only educated, they wouldn't be racist any more. This provided his drive to publish the Encyclopedia Africana to educate the world about Black people in order to eliminate racism. Later in life he realized that it was not such an easy fix, but Gates still holds to a tempered version of this dream in some ways. Now the Encyclopedia Africana is published in digital form. Gates talked about the content of it possibly luring young Black people onto the Internet and into an opportunity for education. He also talked about Google's mission to make writing from all over the world available on line as a way to educate people about the intellect of the African people.

In "Barriers to Equity," Fulton and Sibley discuss barriers to connectivity, hardware, software, and relevant content as major problems in the digital divide (Fulton 15-16). On a possibly hopeful note, in "Factors of the Divide," Wiburg explains that "Some Indigenous groups are using technology to their cultural advantage through projects such as language preservation" (Wilburg 33). Gates addressed similar issues as he talked about making scholarship easier in third world countries in Africa. He explained how there are great scholars in colleges in Africa who simply do not have access to the current flow of publications and information that the rest of the world takes for granted. It is simply too expensive for these colleges to buy and house all of the books, magazine and journal publications that we do here. He sees digitization as an answer to this problem. While recognizing that it will take some time to "democratize access to these schools" and to make sure that appropriate resources and connectivity are in place, Google is now working on making the content available. Gates talked about how he is currently negotiating with Google to digitize 5,000 books written in Arabic by Black men which now can only be accessed by traveling to a library in Timbuktu. He explained that racist intellectual minds believe that the African people do not write, that they are not intelligent and that they are lesser humans because of this. Here is proof that the African intellectual exists and thrives.

I found this very exciting. When thinking about helping third world countries, I never even imagined this kind of project but it seems so hopeful and beneficial. I realize that it will certainly take some work to make technology readily available to 3rd World educational institutions, but I am now seeing that this is actually a more feasible and possibly more affordable solution than housing books in a library. I enjoyed Gates' lecture at GVSU and I still view it as an opportunity to possibility think. It's important to be a believer in the hope that the world will be a better place and that we have the know-how to make it so. It also is so beneficial to see how vital and valuable education and literacy is to people who have been the brunt of afflictions. It makes me realize how much I should be thankful for, and that I should more ambitiously use the technology and educational opportunities which are already available to me and my future students.

Democratizing access to schools Google is making the content available. In Negotiations with google about Africa Series to Timbuktu. "Africans can't write" Black men who wrote books in Arabic 5,000 books written in Arabic