Skip Gates jumps on the Cosby bandwagon, tacitly endorsing the erstwhile Dr. Huxtable's pathologization of black youth and urban black working class subcultures. I'm fine with Gates' assertion that the construction of race in America necessitates that African-Americans be in some sense bilingual, and I don't necessarily disagree with the statement that there is anti-intellectualism among poor and working class black youth, although in the many years i have spent working with high school and middle school students in both New York and New Haven, i haven't seen all that much anti-intellectualism, if any, and what may have been present certainly had nothing to do with parents' decisions to name their kids "Shaquana" or "Ali", as Cosby slanderously alleged in a capitulation to the anglo-saxon supremacist cultural perogatives of people like Samuel Huntington and Pat Buchanan. It's certainly true, as Gates argues, that "we" need to treat black people, for the purposes of this debate, as individual actors individually negotiating the structural violence of race, class, gender, sexuality, and militarism. What irks me about Gates' op-ed is that he doesn't do this, instead, as with much of what Gates writes, the paternalism which pervades his narrative and with which he endows himself with an unquestionable textual omniscience and omnipotence, treating the objects of his scrutiny very much like "helpless rag dolls" in his own "supreme act of condescension."