Customer Reviews

Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars

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This is Gates, a Harvard black scholar, opining about multiculturalism debates in the early 90s. It said some useful stuff which may seem a little dated now. For example, he asks why can't all campuses be like Berkeley where there is no racial majority? Well, that question is totally moot post-Proposition 209. As all Harvard black scholars have become recently controversial, this book will be a good intro book for lay readers to see what the controversy is all about. This book is written in a simple fashion that any person should be able to understand. Do not sleep, however! Gates has written many articles and books that only elite readers could understand. Do not believe the lies of the new Harvard president.

Gates' commentary in this work is insightful without coming across as pretentious or apologetic. Surprisingly, Gates has written a book about race without injecting any invective or peppering it with position papers for how things ought to be, as many political figures would and as Gates himself has done on talk and panel shows. Gates does illuminate the history of black figures in literature and their achievements and accomplishments which may tend to steer this work toward a literary criticism and away from a criticism more appropriate for ethnic studies or black studies. All in all, Gates is a proper steward of black culture: he offers it to the world without any strings.