President Obama eventually intervened to defuse the tension by inviting both the professor and the arresting officer to the White House for a glass of beer by Rose Garden. Prior to the media circus surrounding that "Beer Summit," Dr. Gates was already well known as a tenured Professor at Harvard University, as well as director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research.
KW: Dr. Karanja Ajanaku, (executive editor of the Memphis Tri-State Defender, says: "You seem to be making the point that in the U.S., we are mostly unaware, substantively, of "blacks" in Latin America. Would you speak to how aware or unaware, substantively, "blacks" in Latin America are of African Americans? HLG: No, I didn't see any sign of that, because most of those folks' first identity is a national one, as a Brazilian or a Cuban, not as a black person. For instance, in the Dominican Republic episode, Juan Rodriguez says he never even thought of himself as black until he visited New York. One of the points of the series is that identity is a very complex and ever-shifting matter. We might think that these people are obviously black, but they might not identify themselves that way.
This spring, Professor [Henry Louis Gates Jr.] returns to PBS with "Black in Latin America," a new four-part, four hour series. Focusing on six Latin American countries - Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Brazil, Mexico and Peru - the series explores the influence of the African diaspora on Latin America. On his journey. Gates discovers a shared legacy of colonialism, slavery and people marked by African roots. In his new series. Gates sets out on a quest to discover how Latin Americans of African descent live now, and how their countries acknowledge - or deny - their African past.
