Obama and Gates: Black men in big houses

in Politics by griffn — July 27, 2009 at 10:07 am | 0 comments

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Over the weekend, Stanley Fish, a former colleague of Professor Gates blogging for the New York Times, wrote the best explanation I’ve seen for the recent actions of Gates and Obama– two black men who live in big houses:

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?

My initial impression of the incident was that Gates had overreacted to the presence of Sgt. Crowley. But seen from this perspective, his reaction is understandable. He’s sitting in his house, minding his business, just home from a long trip, and suddenly there’s a police officer at the door telling him that some white lady on the street didn’t think he belonged there. If Gates overreacted, it wasn’t by much.

Fish then took a shot at why the story may have struck a nerve with Obama, ‘causing him to go– in most people’s estimation– wildly off script during his press conference on health care:

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.

…

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.

I think that analysis of the birthers is 100% correct. They don’t really care about the birth certificate. They’re simply frustrated racists who have spent the last two years trying desperately to convince the rest of the country that Obama is not one of “us.” If you did a survey of the birthers, I guarantee the vast majority of them are the same people who were arguing two years ago that Obama was a Muslim. And then when that didn’t work, a black supremacist. Then, last fall, a terrorist. Now he’s a Kenyan.

I don’t think it’s the birthers who set Obama off Wednesday night though. I doubt he gives them much thought, if any. But he has given a lot of thought to what it means to be a black man occupying a space people don’t think you belong in. For Obama and Gates and black men across America, the question is the same: “What is a black man doing living in a place like this? Show us proof you really belong here.” It doesn’t have to be the White House, just a big house.

Tags: Barack Obama Harvard racism Sgt. Crowley skip gates Stanley Fish