Forbes Avenue » skip gates

Obama and Gates: Black men in big houses

griffn — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 14:07:31 +0000

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.

Obama’s conclusion on Gates arrest: Can’t we all just have a beer?

griffn — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 07:29:12 +0000

At the White House press briefing this morning, Obama made a surprise appearance to tamp down the controversy regarding the arrest of Professor Gates and to announce that he had invited both Gates and Crowley to the White House for a beer. So apparently the lesson is: arrest a hobbled elderly man in his own home on trumped up charges of disorderly conduct and get invited to the White House for a beer with the president. Awesome.

A few days ago, I wrote that if you have a serious conversation about race and you walk away feeling good about it, something got sugarcoated. Beers at the White House is presumably Obama’s way of getting everyone– the police, the media, the African-American community, the talk radio circuit– to walk away feeling good about this situation.

From a political standpoint, it’s a brilliant move. Obama needs us all to shift our attention away from the firestorm he went out of his way to throw gasoline on and back to health care reform. What better way to do that than a photo-op at the White House showing a power-abusing white cop and an angry black man drinking out of the same pitcher of beer with our biracial, post-racial president?

I don’t know, maybe I’m being too cynical. Maybe Obama, Crowley, and Gates will sit down not for a photo-op but for a serious discussion about what occurred and what next steps we can take to curb police abuse of power, whether race is a factor or not. But my sense is that the deference and benefit of the doubt that Obama is giving to Sgt. Crowley shows that he either doesn’t get it or is choosing not to get it for political reasons.

I don’t know whether Sgt. Crowley is “racist” or not. Honestly, I don’t care. I do care that he believes it’s okay to arrest anyone at any time for any reason. I do care that the police report– the one Crowley himself wrote– reads as though Crowley baited Gates into stepping outside his home so that he could be arrested for causing a public disturbance. I do care that the Cambridge Police Department and the local police union are vigorously defending Crowley’s right to detain, fingerprint, mug shot, and humiliate someone for the charge of hurting a police officer’s feelings. I do care that so many people believe that because the job of a police officer is hard and dangerous and heroic (and it is all those things), that we should look the other way– or worse, invite them to the White House for beers– when they occasionally abuse their power.

I didn’t see Obama’s press conference today, but I did read the transcript. Without getting too deep in the weeds, let me take issue with one thing Obama said:

I continue to believe, based on what I have heard, that there was an overreaction in pulling Professor Gates out of his home to the station. I also continue to believe, based on what I heard, that Professor Gates probably overreacted as well. My sense is you’ve got two good people in a circumstance in which neither of them were able to resolve the incident in the way that it should have been resolved and the way they would have liked it to be resolved.

The problem with this statement is that it puts the two people involved on equal footing. They are not. One of the people in that situation has a badge and a gun and the power to detain and kill you with minimal or no legal consequence. The other has the power to raise his voice and hurt your feelings. I think it’s safe to say the guy with the gun has significantly more power and should be held to a significantly higher standard of not overreacting. This isn’t about two good people who weren’t able to resolve the incident. This is about a police officer who is trained and paid to resolve incidents not resolving the incident (i.e. apologizing and walking away the minute it was clear that no burglary was in progress and Gates was the homeowner).

The fact that Obama thinks this situation is about two people with a misunderstanding rather than one person with vastly more power than the other using that power to shut the other guy up and teach him a lesson about sassing the police gives me little hope for what will be accomplished at that White House beer.

Collective v. Individual; Where Does Racism Lie

tigger500 — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 15:47:37 +0000

I work for a progressive organization in Washington, D.C., with a wonderful group of human beings. We work side by side on any issue you can think of and, mostly, we get along while we do it.

Two days ago, four colleagues and I were talking about the degree to which race played in the Skip Gates arrest controversy. I and a fellow Black colleague were pretty confident, given what we know from news reports about how the incident went down, that race played a role.

My other colleagues, you can imagine, were skeptical. They argued, rightfully, that someone made a call and the cop had an obligation to follow through and secure the home. They asked “what are the standard procedures” in situations like this? Also, not surprisingly, they wanted to make it about the cop’s ego, an idea that is picking up traction online, as if it couldn’t then be about race as well.

Later that night, two other Black friends told me similar stories that they had with White colleagues. Everything they told me was the same as what went down in the conversation I had with my colleagues, almost down to the language.

White folks are quite comfortable with this notion that there is a pattern of racist behavior in America. They are reluctant, however, to say that any individual instance is about race. So what happened to Skip Gates wasn’t racist. Neither was what happened to Shem Walker. Or Sean Bell. Or Oscar Grant. Or Officer Omar Edwards.

Every individual instance must be rationalized, but then at the end of the year when the stats are compiled we rant and rave against a pattern of behavior, against institutional racism.

Institutional racism is nothing more than a pattern of individual behavior that has become institutionalized. Redlining is just a lot of White folks deciding where non-whites can live. Poll taxes were nothing but a lot of White folks making it really hard for Black folks to vote.

They say the personal is political. Well the individual is the collective.

The goal here isn’t to call the cop a “dirty racist” and write him off. What I said to my colleagues was that acknowledging that what the cop did to Skip Gates was racist, doesn’t make him a bad person. This isn’t “i hate niggers” racism, but it is still racism.

The goal is to let him (and other non-Black cops) know that this kind of behavior is a problem. We need to have processes for training police for how to deal with different types of people. And we need processes to handle situations after they happen. We simply do not have this anywhere to the degree we should.

Behavior like this can be involuntary; a lot of White folks have tremendous guilt that they lock their car doors when they drive through a “bad neighborhood” and clutch their purses when they find themselves alone in an elevator with a Black man. But rather than live in the guilt, we gotta acknowledge it and then do something about it.

Until we do, we are going to keep seeing these individual instances and keep being surprised that the year-end statistics haven’t changed.