Henry Louis Gates Jr. is one of a handful of academics who have crossed over into something approaching true celebrity. Which is apparently what happens when you’ve written and edited dozens of books of popular history; had a guiding hand in 18 major documentaries on black history, the most recent of which was “Who Killed Malcom X?”; and spent six seasons uncovering the genealogical mysteries of famous people as host of PBS’s “Finding Your Roots.” Gates’s desire to reach beyond the ivory tower — in addition to writing landmark works of literary criticism like “The Signifying Monkey,” he’s the director of Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research — was motivated by some very personal feelings. “My brother asked me once,” says Gates, 69, recalling a time when he and his work were less well known, “‘When are you going to write a book that Daddy and Mama can read?’”

There’s no arguing that popular storytelling and factual scholarship can be combined in useful ways. What I’m curious about is your opinion on the limits, if there are any, of that combination. It’s an excellent question. It took a long time for black scholars and filmmakers to feel comfortable representing black historical figures in three dimensions. Take Harriet Tubman. Students think Harriet Tubman was basically leading a train of slaves out of Grand Central Station. But I think the number she saved was closer to 70 — which was a lot, by the way. Or: The myth that our ancestors were kidnapped by your ancestors, David, is just untrue. The fantasy is that my 10th-great-grandmother and -grandfather were out on a picnic and some white people jumped out of the bushes and they ended up on a plantation in Virginia. That’s not how it happened. But one of the things that I’ve dedicated my career to is showing that black people are just as complex, positively and negatively, as anybody else. For years, the mythos that undergirded black history was that the slaves were the victims of European dominance. But really it was the Europeans who were selling guns to African kings, who engaged in wars against other Africans in order to defeat them and then sell the victims to Europeans. I remember once I was asked to consult on a project about Martin Luther King. I said, “You can’t do hagiography anymore.” King was complicated. He had affairs and doubts. He was a flawed person but also a great man, and showing him in his full complexity would make for a better film than pretending he was a walking saint. But the historian who was involved in this project said: “Too many racists. They’re not ready for that.”

Henry Louis Gates Jr. addressing a class at Harvard in 1996. John Blanding/The Boston Globe, via Getty Images

Was conciliatory thinking along the lines of “racists aren’t ready for that” in your head in 2009 when you were dealing with the incident with the Cambridge police? Oh, yeah. President Obama made an innocent comment that the arrest was stupid, which it was. Then all of a sudden all these racists are beating up on him. My whole attitude was channeled through the desire to protect our first black president. But there was another motivation. I thought that it would be hubristic and dishonest if I compared what happened to me to what happens to black people in the inner city. I thought, If I didn’t have the protections of class and status —

The outcome would’ve been very different. Right. When the policeman, Sgt. Crowley, and I met, I said, “Why did you arrest me?” He said, “I was afraid that I wasn’t going to be able to go home to my wife, because I was convinced that your partner was upstairs and he was going to come down and blow me away.” He told me he had gotten a call: “Two black guys are breaking into this house.” One of them answers the door — me — when he rang the bell, and I’m stepping over suitcases, because I’d just come back from a trip. Unbeknown to me, one pattern of thievery is bringing empty suitcases to a house. So the officer saw a black face, he saw the suitcases: That’s part of a profile. I was what Barbara Johnson calls “an already-read text.” He couldn’t hear me, couldn’t see me. Well, that might be related to police excesses and abuses, but it’s a far end of the scale, and I was able to reverse what happened to me, unlike an Eric Garner. So my whole reaction to my arrest was determined by two things: The attacks on President Obama and my own determination not to claim too much for my own victimization.

Then when you actually had the “beer summit,” did President Obama say anything helpful, or was that whole thing pro forma? Oh, that’s interesting. I was at Martha’s Vineyard, and I had been getting instructions from the White House, through Glenn Hutchins. They told me not to wear a bespoke suit. “We don’t want it to be about class.” All of the sudden I was the upper-class black person against the working class. I go, “I’m the victim!” They go, “No, don’t wear one of those suits.” I go: “These are the only suits I have. I’m not going out to Sears and Roebuck and buying a suit.” Then they go, “Do not fly down in a private plane.” Glenn Hutchins owns a private plane. Glenn’s a billionaire. He’s one of my best friends. The only way we could get to Washington was on Glenn’s plane, because there was fog. Anyway, we got to the White House, and we and Sgt. Crowley’s family all got to the library at the same time. I walked over to Sgt. Crowley. He had his kids there, and I said to them: “Hi, I’m Professor Gates. Hope you come to Harvard one day. Maybe you’ll take one of my classes.” Then I said to him, “Can I have a word with you?” He and I went off and did the beer summit ourselves. I said, “Look, I don’t know about you, man, but I just want this to go away.” He goes, “This is a nightmare.” I said to him: “The president has come under attack. Racism’s coming out of the floor. I’m sure you’re a decent person. I forgive you. Let’s move on.” He goes, “That would be the best thing that could happen.” I said, “Maybe we could find a way to lecture about it.” He laughed and said, “Anything I can do to get off the beat.” I realized he was funny. I think that gay people have a sense of who’s homophobic. I think that Jewish people have a sense of who’s anti-Semitic. I definitely think black people — I could walk out there and tell you, “That [expletive] is a racist.”

The White House ‘‘beer summit,’’ held in the Rose Garden in 2009: from left, Vice President Joe Biden, Gates, Sgt. James Crowley and President Barack Obama. Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg, via Getty Images

And you’re saying you didn’t get that vibe from Sgt. Crowley? I didn’t get that vibe from him. When we were called into the Oval Office, I said to the president, “Mr. President, we had a great conversation in the library.” He said, “Oh, it sounds like it’s all settled.” The actual beer summit was us doing small talk. And the reason Joe Biden was there is that the Cambridge police had insisted that because there were going to be two black guys at the table, they wanted two white guys at the table! They had sent somebody involved in the Cambridge police structure to be there. As we were walking out to the Rose Garden, somehow that guy got pushed to the side, and Joe Biden jumped in the line. That’s what nobody ever figured out: Why is Biden at the table? He was there to be the second white guy.

As far as you can tell, how much is Biden’s appeal to black voters solely about his association with Obama? Biden, wisely, has wrapped his arms so tightly around Barack Obama that they’re inextricably intertwined, at least in his speeches. He’s polling so positively among black people because of the Obama residue. But that could change overnight. I haven’t endorsed any candidate, because I have too many friends. Elizabeth Warren was my colleague. I did Bernie Sanders’s family tree. In 2018, I got an award in Delaware, along with Joe Biden and Ron Chernow. I spent a whole evening with Biden, and I liked him. All of this is to say that I have been sort of watching the field. But, I mean, I’m going to vote for whatever Democrat emerges. I want to say this right, because I haven’t said this to anybody: Among all the candidates, the person who I believe could stand toe-to-toe, strongest and longest with Donald Trump is Mike Bloomberg.

Why? Who do you think his constituency is? I know Mike Bloomberg socially. Every summer I go to a dinner on Martha’s Vineyard with Mike Bloomberg. I’ve argued with him about policies that I didn’t like. He is enormously intelligent and capable. When he was mayor, I watched him. He could wear it lightly. It’s not like Jimmy Carter with the weight of the world on him. I think that he’s tough, and I think he could take on the bully Donald Trump. Very few people can stand up to a bully. Mike’s got some bully in him. I think he’s good.

“Stop and frisk” isn’t too much of a problem for him? He faces two problems that he has to overcome. He has already apologized for “stop and frisk,” but he has to put it behind him, and also the Central Park Five. What the city and the legal structure did to those five boys was shameful. The mayor has to put that behind him. If he’s successful doing that, I think black people want him, because he is smart, sensitive, strong. I think he cares about health care. He understands the economic system. This is not an endorsement. But I would support him if he got the nomination.

Something I see your guests do on “Finding Your Roots” is framing their narratives as triumphant ones, and I’d say a similar form of exceptionalism shapes how a lot of Americans think of the country’s past. In what way does our propensity for that kind of thinking inhibit our ability to fully reckon with subjects — like racism and slavery — that don’t easily fit into a narrative of exceptionalism? Because that tension is obviously at the root of the conflict over, for example, the removal of Confederate monuments. I feel as if you and I are sitting here, we’re having coffee, and we hear this noise, and these zombies come out of the floor, and the zombie is white supremacy. We thought these [expletive] were dead. I’m trying to use the popularity of “Finding Your Roots” to get these political messages in there without being a scold. I am trying to deconstruct notions of racial purity. There is no racial purity. We are all diverse. Showing diversity is important to me politically, and insofar as we can achieve that, our series has an educational value for the larger country, particularly at a time when we’re at Redemption redux.

Gates with Soledad O’Brien on the set of “Finding Your Roots”. PBS/Ark Media, via Everett Collection

We understand the Redemption era now as a white response to the gains black people made during Reconstruction. Is it too simplistic to say that the energy driving the current moment is also a reaction to black progress and Obama’s becoming president? I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about your question, and I don’t know the answer. If we’re sitting around in a bar with a bunch of black people, they could say, “Barack and Michelle drove all the white people totally out of their minds.” I think that’s partly true. The other thing, though, is that between Martin Luther King’s death and now, the black middle class has doubled and the black upper-middle class has quadrupled. But simultaneously, if you look at the wages of white workers — the chance of your kids doing better than you if you were in the white working class, that’s over. So you might look at a black family in the White House, all these black people who joined the upper-middle class, and there’s a kind of collective “What the [expletive]?”

Which you’re saying resulted in resentment? It’s the curve of rising expectations. When it’s interrupted, people go nuts. After World War II, G.I.s got mortgages so they could live in the suburbs and buy a house, buy a car, then a TV. Their kids could go to college. Their grandchildren could be doctors. That was the promise of America. That promise is over. That drives people crazy, and then they target, they objectify, they need a scapegoat. So it’s not just Michelle and Barack. They are part of the larger phenomenon. To go from them to Trump is a seismic revolution that is the result of a collapse of expectation.

You mentioned college: I went back and read “Loose Canons,” and there’s a line in there in which you say that college students are too old to form but not too old to challenge. How does a line like that resonate today, when challenging students can seem like such a fraught proposition? Political correctness is heinous if it comes from a person on the left or the right or a person of color or a white person. Let’s take a hot-button issue. I wrote the introduction to the 50th-anniversary edition of Albert Murray’s “The Omni-Americans,” and there was this paragraph I wrote last summer that I saw when I was cleaning out my Word files on my iPad. In it I said, “Only people not familiar with this history of slavery or Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent work would wonder if there was an economic disadvantage to African Americans subsequent to the Civil War because of slavery and then because of the rollbacks of Reconstruction.” I said, “However, reasonable people could disagree about reparations. But,” I continued, “there are few people today who have the courage to stand up within the community and say, ‘I genuinely think reparations is a mistake.’” Now I’m not saying that’s my position. But I’m saying you will find nobody black standing up and criticizing reparations — it’s very rare — because they’re afraid that students are going to boycott them or that they’ll be called an Uncle Tom. That’s not right. We fall apart, particularly in the academy, when we succumb to or perpetuate that kind of intellectual bullying.

What is your position on reparations? I do believe that it’s impossible for any rational person not to understand the cost of 400 years of slavery and then another century of Jim Crow. We have to find ways to compensate for that cost. Affirmative action, to me, is a form of reparations. So is health care — Obamacare or a variant. And there’s reform of public education. One of the most radical things we could do to reform public-school education would be to equalize the amount of money spent per student in every school. That is never going to happen, but that would constitute a radical shift. Those are my three big principles of reparations, and two of the three affect poor people in general. But I’m a scholar of African and African-American history. There were palpable costs to antiblack racism that have had profound effects on the state of black America. These effects are cumulative, and somebody has to do something about it.

In terms of your own writing, you’re a long way from the guy who made his name with a dense academic book like “The Signifying Monkey.” Something like “Stony the Road” is written in much simpler language with much less jargon. How do you make sense of that evolution? “The Signifying Monkey” is my tenure book. I was just trying to get tenure. I was trying to be a bridge between the black tradition and poststructuralism and deconstruction. Then I got tenure, and as far as the evolution of my own prose, once you get tenure, you could write films, you could do anything. A crucial point came when I gave a lecture at Howard University. A friend of mine invited me down to deliver my essay called “Binary Oppositions in Chapter 1 of ‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.’” I thought I was introducing structuralism. When I was done, I expected a standing ovation. The first question I got was: “Yeah, brother. All we want to know is, was Booker T. Washington an Uncle Tom or not?” That had a profound effect on me. I have an ego. I want the audience to be with me. That’s what you see in my evolution.

David Marchese is a staff writer and the Talk columnist for the magazine.

This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.