My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 65

Indeed, Toni Morrison’s generous
stewardship has served as the model
for bonding and the creation of a
literary sisterhood that seems to take
it for granted that good writing will
find a publisher. Gone forever is the
notion that only one black writer can
emerge from the group, in splendid
commercial isolation, as ‘the black
writer of the decade.’ With Gates it was
“my movement can beat your movement”
and later in Time Magazine he made
the equally extravagant claim that
something he called “The Fourth
Renaissance” would eclipse all other
Renaissances.6 His Fourth Renaissance
was pretty much a bust.

64

Elizabeth Nunez, novelist and
Distinguished Professor at City
University of New York, responded to
Gates Jr.’s October 1994 Time article in
which Gates suggested that the trend
among Black artists is to discard “the
anxieties of a bygone era” and “pressure
the universality of the Black experience.”
Nunez suggested that the school of
critics who are currently praising Black
writers for dropping those anxieties, are
in fact praising these Black writers for
writing about universal themes, universal
problems. “But…” she continued…
Black writers have always written
about universal things and
universal problems. They have
always done that. However, what
they have insisted on doing
is locating [those themes] in
particular situation[s]… They have
seen this as their responsibility…
They have emphasized the
particular, and that happens to do
with discrimination and racism and
oppression. I don’t think that in
doing that they have been universal.

Nunez’s criticism of Gates is the reason
that you won’t find this superior writer
in the African American, Norton 3, Vol.
2. which is not meant to give scholars,
teachers, and students a survey of the
best black fiction, poetry, theater, and
fiction, but instead is used to issue
rewards and punishments, or to back
up Gates’s sensational boasts.
Meanwhile, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was
hauling in cash by editing anthologies
of Black Feminist theory and fiction,
and “discovering” lost manuscripts by
black women writers, one of which had
been “discovered” before.
In 1989, he and I clashed over an
introduction to Zora Neale Hurston’s
Tell My Horse, which Gates asked
me to write. I mentioned that Zora
Neale wasn’t a feminist. She said that
women have it fine in the United
States; it’s in Jamaica where they have
problems. She even wrote a minstrel
whose stereotypes about Africans
were consistent with those found i n
the Tarzan movies, a phase of Ms.
Thurston’s career that her worshippers
choose to ignore. He told me that
I was waving a ‘red flag’ at feminists.
He was thinking of the cash register.
The cover art had a black man riding a
black woman’s back. This had nothing
to do with the book, but was put there
to insult black men and insult Ms.
Hurston’s research, albeit unintentionally,
but that’s what happens when you
are wedded to ideology — you might
hit your target, but those whom you
favor may be victims of literary friendly
fire. I asked him about the cover and
he told me to take it up with the
publisher. This incident happened in
nineteen eighty nine.

Black feminists wanted Gates to share
the lucrative Women’s Studies
Departments money. Women’s Studies
being an offspring of Ethnic Studies
that was pioneered by Askia Toure,
Nathan Hare, Sarah Fabio, Amiri Baraka,
Bobby Seale and others. Michele
Wallace called Gates out in the Village
Voice, another source of black male
hatred directed by feminists like Karen
Durbin, one of those who is hard on
the brothers but easy on the misogynists
who share her ethnic background.
Durbin takes credit for inventing Gates
as a public intellectual, his reward
for kowtowing to feminist ideology.
Wallace said that he’d become leader of
the black feminist enterprise as a result
of something having to do with his
mother. The late Dr. Barbara Christian
also challenged him. His solution
was to invite her to become an editor
of the Norton Anthology of African
American literature, which was originally
supposed to be edited by white males.
She complained to me until the day she
died that she and Nellie McKay did all
of the work, while Gates got the credit.
(Norton 3, 2nd volume is dedicated to
the late Nellie McKay, but no Barbara
Christian. This is what happens when
you challenge the Skip machine.)
This seems to be the modus operandi
of the Skip Machine; others do the
work and the dirty work. He signs his
name to the work and invokes
plausible deniability for the dirty work.
The Anthology of Rap for which he
wrote the introduction was so error
filled that it was called out by Slate one
of The Root’s sister publication.7