Multiculturalism has been the subject of cover stories in Time and Newsweek and other newspapers and magazines around America. A leading literary and cultural critic, Gates says that the society we have made simply won't survive without the values of tolerance, and cultural tolerance comes to nothing without cultural understanding.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is Chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department and W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of The Signifying Monkey, Figures in Black, and Colored People; general editor of The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers; and general editor of The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute series.