July 25, 2009

• two articles on the “acting stupidly” incident

  Many of you seem to have your mind set on this issue but here are two opinion pieces I think you should read that might shed some light on the matter. Nothing is as simple as it seems. I copied both articles completely because I’m sure many will not read them if I don’t.

  First from the New York Times:  Henry Louis Gates: Déjà Vu All Over Again

  I’m Skip Gates’s friend, too. That’s probably the only thing I share with President Obama, so when he ended his press conference last Wednesday by answering a question about Gates’s arrest after he was seen trying to get into his own house, my ears perked up.

  As the story unfolded in the press and on the Internet, I flashed back 20 years or so to the time when Gates arrived in Durham, N.C., to take up the position I had offered him in my capacity as chairman of the English department of Duke University. One of the first things Gates did was buy the grandest house in town (owned previously by a movie director) and renovate it. During the renovation workers would often take Gates for a servant and ask to be pointed to the house’s owner. The drivers of delivery trucks made the same mistake.

  The message was unmistakable: What was a black man doing living in a place like this?

  At the university (which in a past not distant at all did not admit African-Americans ), Gates’s reception was in some ways no different. Doubts were expressed in letters written by senior professors about his scholarly credentials, which were vastly superior to those of his detractors. (He was already a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the so called “genius award.”) There were wild speculations (again in print) about his salary, which in fact was quite respectable but not inordinate; when a list of the highest-paid members of the Duke faculty was published, he was nowhere on it.

  The Associated Press Henry Louis Gates, Jr., during a book signing in 2006.

  The unkindest cut of all was delivered by some members of the black faculty who had made their peace with Duke traditions and did not want an over-visible newcomer and upstart to trouble waters that had long been still. (The great historian John Hope Franklin was an exception.) When an offer came from Harvard, there wasn’t much I could do. Gates accepted it, and when he left he was pursued by false reports about his tenure at what he had come to call “the plantation.” (I became aware of his feelings when he and I and his father watched the N.C.A.A. championship game between Duke and U.N.L.V. at my house; they were rooting for U.N.L.V.)

  Now, in 2009, it’s a version of the same story. Gates is once again regarded with suspicion because, as the cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson put it in an interview, he has committed the crime of being H.W.B., Housed While Black.

  He isn’t the only one thought to be guilty of that crime. TV commentators, laboring to explain the unusual candor and vigor of Obama’s initial comments on the Gates incident, speculated that he had probably been the victim of racial profiling himself. Speculation was unnecessary, for they didn’t have to look any further than the story they were reporting in another segment, the story of the “birthers” — the “wing-nuts,” in Chris Matthews’s phrase — who insist that Obama was born in Kenya and cite as “proof” his failure to come up with an authenticated birth certificate. For several nights running, Matthews displayed a copy of the birth certificate and asked, What do you guys want? How can you keep saying these things in the face of all evidence?

  He missed the point. No evidence would be sufficient, just as no evidence would have convinced some of my Duke colleagues that Gates was anything but a charlatan and a fraud. It isn’t the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate that’s the problem for the birthers. The problem is again the legitimacy of a black man living in a big house, especially when it’s the White House. Just as some in Durham and Cambridge couldn’t believe that Gates belonged in the neighborhood, so does a vocal minority find it hard to believe that an African-American could possibly be the real president of the United States.

  Gates and Obama are not only friends; they are in the same position, suspected of occupying a majestic residence under false pretenses. And Obama is a double offender. Not only is he guilty of being Housed While Black; he is the first in American history guilty of being P.W.B., President While Black.

  ---

  And second from Youth Radio:  Drinking Past Racial Profiling: Obama and the Gates Arrest

  Originally published on Youthradio.org, the premier source for youth generated news throughout the globe.

  By: King Anyi Howell

  Pundits lampooned President Obama for his comments about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., accusing him of perpetuating racial division. But as someone who has been a target of racial profiling several times, and was even arrested in front of my home and held in jail over the weekend for fitting the description of a burglar, I felt the president’s comments didn’t go far enough.

  The “post racial America” argument that Gates and others put forth after Obama’s inauguration wasn’t an idea I took seriously. It’s not as though Obama’s assumption of the presidency single-handedly banished racism from the United States, and the clash of egos between Sergeant Crowley of the Cambridge police, who happens to train fellow officers in cultural sensitivity, and Gates, one of this country’s most eminent black scholars, could be the superlative example that the race card is more than in the deck, and on the table.

  When President Obama famously criticized the Cambridge Police Department for “acting stupidly,” he also said that racial profiling is a “fact.” And I would add that it’s not just a fact, it’s abuse. When officers, sworn to serve and protect, racially profile innocent people, just as I have been many times, it leaves people like me feeling unnerved and powerless.

  People joke that I’m King Anyi Howell, the King of getting pulled over, and they suggest that because I drive a Cadillac, I’m more susceptible to racial profiling. But I can say with confidence that Cadillac designers never said to each other, “Yes! With this year’s model we focused on a scientifically advanced design that will get people of color pulled over and searched!”

  I’ve been pulled over in an assortment of vehicles, foreign and domestic, often searched and rarely ticketed. Heck, I’ve been “pulled over” while on a bike and even on foot, belittling the term DWB — driving while black. No it’s more like LWB, and getting a citation for living while black makes me feel like something less than a real citizen. And I certainly don’t feel served or protected.

  Sure regular racism and prejudice are out there, but I care most about racial profiling, because it’s one of the hollowest feelings I’ve ever felt. Most black men know that they can be searched, seized, and detained at anytime by a cop who might simultaneously be taking the “just doing my job” line too seriously and not seriously enough.

  Now that he has invited Gates and Crowley over for a beverage at the White House, and said that he wishes his words were more carefully calibrated, I worry that the president could squander an important opportunity.

  If President Obama is really interested in ushering in an era where racial issues and misunderstandings are understood and resolved, he needs to turn this mess into a teachable moment by organizing a task force to address our many racial divides. Anything less is merely lip service to a serious threat tearing at the unity of our nation.

  And as far as that pint of beer goes, I worry that it may take many shared kegs before we finally come together as a nation.

  ---

  Do you still think President Obama and Gates were just “acting stupidly”? If so explain to me why. Why is it that no one has a right to challenge the police’s behavior in this incident or any other? Why is it that Gates is not allowed to be upset when mistaken to be a burglar in his own home?  I just don’t get it.

  • 9:50 am
  • 10 Comments