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WHEN KEEPING IT REAL GOES WRONG.
We've been ill-prepared over the last few weeks to deal with the kind of candor the president showed last night, discussing the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. Confronted by a gushing onslaught of white anxiety, Judge Sonia Sotomayor chose to back down from her statements about race and gender affecting one's perspective, allowing Republicans to perpetuate the myth that one's background and experience have nothing to do with how they see the world. But last night, the question of perspective was thrown back into focus when the president criticized the behavior of the Cambridge police. While acknowledging that "progress has been made," he said the police acted "stupidly" in arresting Gates after it was clear he was in his own residence, and joked about being shot if he himself tried to break into the White House.
Why was the president so candid? I think it has everything to do with his experience. After the incident, Gates said, "If it could happen to me, it could happen to anybody--anybody black, but also anybody less fortunate than me of any color." What the president was saying last night, effectively, was that he could imagine what happened to Gates happening to him. And, if he weren't the president, it certainly could. I'm not sure you can really understand it unless it's happened to you, but there's a severe trust deficit. Some white folks seemed unwilling to even consider that race was a factor in the Gates incident until a black moderate, John McWhorter, explained what it's like to be looked at as a potential menace by a man with a gun and society's implicit permission to use it, simply because of your race.
The president's honesty on race, quite frankly, makes people uncomfortable. Americans deeply yearn to be beyond race, and we are at times hostile to those who choose to remind us that we aren't. The president refused to do that last night, to the disappointment of those who believed in some kind of implicit promise of post-raciality inherent in his rise, and to the glee of Republicans who are busy blowing the dust off of Pat Buchanan's Nixon-era playbook. The argument during the election was that liberals were the ones who were looking for racial absolution in Obama's candidacy. But Republicans have been the pious keepers of that flame, and today they'll pour kerosene on the fire hoping it will engulf enough of the country and immolate the administration's chances to push through health care reform. For his part, Obama warned long ago that his candidacy was not an opportunity to "purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap." For obvious reasons, some people have refused to listen--the possibility of holding Obama accountable for a promise he never made and couldn't possibly keep is too tempting.
My first thought upon hearing what Obama said was that he may have allowed his opponents a crucial opening to destroy health-care reform. He certainly should have chosen his words more carefully, and if I'm being completely honest, I'd say this was the wrong moment to be real with the American people on race. There's an unfortunate and longstanding myth that racism is something that victimizes people of color. The truth is that institutionalized racism has always been a disaster for this entire country, economically, socially, and politically. If health-care reform is derailed because the GOP effectively exploits racial fault lines, and allows the argument over health care to become one over how the president hates the police and doesn't want them to protect you from all the scary black men out there, it will prove that race still has the power to make Americans abandon their most immediate interests in the name of petty tribalism.
The GOP is counting on it.
-- A. Serwer
COMMENTS (13)
Racism, sexism, lack of health care, gross financial and status inequalities, all of these hurt our productivity and our society in ways many people fail to imagine, let alone grasp.
Maybe it is time to wipe us all out and start with a clean slate? I get frustrated when I find myself sometimes sucked into these types of bad behavior, and I can imagine how impossible it is for people who aren't even aware of their prejudices.
If you're a fish that has always lived in sewage, it is hard to figure out what clean water is like.
Posted by: Carol | July 23, 2009 11:04 AM
Great Post, Adam. Really nailed all my mixed feelings about this incident--at least as it applies to health care.
I'd like to add that I totally agree with Professor Gates' assertion that, whatever the origins of the incident, the fact is that all of us, regardless of our color, are at risk from out of control law officers who put ego above the law.
Perhaps professor Gates "overreacted" to the appearance of the police officer and the hostile questioning he endured as he tried to prove his ID. But it is equally true to say that hostility from the police officer would have been a problem in any interaction with any lawful citizen who is baselessly accused of wrongdoing at a sensitive and exhausted moment in time.
I've posted this elsewhere but I'm a cambridge resident and I have elderly parents here as well. If the police kindly investigated a burglary report at my mother's house and she got cranky with them because she's 78, can't figure out why they are there, got jerked out of the shower to answer their questions I would be very upset to find out they had arrested her for getting lippy with them.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out they did because the police department's abuse of power problem is actually bigger even than its racism problem. And that, ultimately, is professor Gates' point in the quote up above. We are all at risk because we are failing to explain, politely, to our police officers that when we entrust them with a badge we are also entrusting them not to abuse their power.
aimai
Posted by: aimai | July 23, 2009 11:08 AM
A little off topic but v. much about MA, thought to be such a liberal place. Men (and a few women) are routinely arrested and jailed for months at a time for inability to pay lifetime alimony, even after illness, job loss or retirement. A major exposé about the state's truly terrifying and draconian -- and secret, till now - system appears in BOSTON MAGAZINE this month. It comes down to lawyers liking current system bec. they make so much $$ from lifetime return visits to court. www.bostonmagazine.com/articles/till_death_do_us_pay/
Posted by: PlainJane | July 23, 2009 11:28 AM
Good Lord, Adam, grow a spine, will ya? Using the Gates incident to derail health care legislation is a non-sequitur. The only people who would bite on something like that are already so far gone that they aren't going to support health care reform anyway. The only appropriate response to racism is to openly challenge it.
Posted by: Marti Perez | July 23, 2009 11:32 AM
To those who believe that race *wasn't* a factor in this incident:
Several years ago I was taking care of a (white) friend's dogs while he was out of town for the weekend. I didn't stay at his house, just went over to feed and water. He had an alarm system, so we set it up so I could use my own number to disarm it.
First day I go over, I'm feeding the dogs, the police show up at the door. The alarm had gone off. I explained what I was doing, I think they may have talked to the security company, and they went away. When the same thing happened the next day, the security company and my friend and I over long-distance figured out the problem: by sheer bad luck, the number I had chosen was the number for triggering the alarm manually.
No matter. I am a white woman; at the time of this incident I was in my forties. Does anyone seriously think that day two would have happened if I had been a black man? No, I would have been in jail and my friend's dogs would have been hungry. I didn't show any ID and it wasn't my house, but the police walked away. Of course, I was innocent of any actual wrongdoing, but would a black man have been able to convince them of that?
I don't think so.
Posted by: greennotGreen | July 23, 2009 12:37 PM
To those who believe that race *wasn't* a factor in this incident:
Several years ago I ...
Fail.
Posted by: Anonymous | July 23, 2009 12:47 PM
I think you'll find that the populace is a lot more hostile towards the police than they were 20, or even 10, years ago.
I'm not sure this was really that racial, but I can understand why a black guy would assume it was. Cops have been treating people like this for far too long. first, they harass people for no reason. Then, if they can't find a reason to arrest you, they try to goade you into an altercation so that they can arrest you. Barring that, they just make shit up and pull a 'contempt of cop' arrest on you.
Posted by: soullite | July 23, 2009 1:05 PM
Anonymous, I don't understand your response. Are you saying my comment doesn't support the idea that racism *was* involved in the Gates arrest? I'm not trying to be argumentative; I just don't understand what you mean.
Posted by: greennotGreen | July 23, 2009 1:44 PM
I think trying to prove one set of circumstances true by providing an anecdote from another is faulty logic.
Posted by: Anonymous | July 23, 2009 1:58 PM
"I think trying to prove one set of circumstances true by providing an anecdote from another is faulty logic."
Uh, if you cannot compare different results from similar events...how the hell do you ever prove anything at all?
Mike
Posted by: MBunge | July 23, 2009 3:47 PM
Uh, if you cannot compare different results from similar events...how the hell do you ever prove anything at all?
Not at all what I said, but thanks for playing.
Posted by: Anonymous | July 23, 2009 4:03 PM
Anonymous, that's a valid point about *proof* using a single anecdote, though it doesn't change my opinion about the Gates incident.
BTW, what's up with Captcha? I've had to exit the website twice in order to get a Captcha screen I could read well enough to type.
Posted by: Anonymous | July 23, 2009 4:07 PM
I agree with everything Adam writes here, except...
I'm not so sure that things would have turned out any better if Obama had dodged the question or replied more neutrally. If he had, I think there's a good chance that the press would have covered it as "Obama realizes he's weak, and can't afford the political capital to come to Gates' defense." That lede might not affect casual newsreaders the way his actual comments might, but it would still give the press a process/baseball story to distract from the dull and difficult news stories of health care policy.
If this was a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't dilemna, I'm glad that Obama took an honest approach.
Posted by: plain | July 24, 2009 7:01 AM