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“[I]t
is sometimes necessary to remind ourselves of the distance from the
classroom to the streets.” — Henry Louis Gates Jr., 1989
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—This city, home of Harvard University and M.I.T., is widely known
as the “People’s Republic of Cambridge”—even a local bar bears
that name. Yet, the undeniably progressive nature of this majority
white city with a Black mayor is not the entire story. Less understood
is the fact that Cambridge is segregated. It is and
has been a city of ethnic and racial enclaves, a place where a
post-World War II Italian neighborhood eventually gives way to a West
Indian one.
Of
course, segregation by race is not legal, yet segregation by wealth and
income serve the same purpose. A bird’s eye view of the area would give
the appearance that the city was still governed by Jim Crow laws.
This
is the city that has drawn national attention after one of its more
prominent citizens was handcuffed in his front yard. Professor Henry
Louis Gates Jr. was arrested because he flagrantly violated the spirit
of Jim Crow, which dictates that, above all, Black people must know
their place. As a Black man in a well-off white neighborhood, his very
presence was suspect.
When
Gates vigorously criticized a police officer, he committed no
crime—except the unwritten one that demands deference to white
authority.
On
July 16, after a trip abroad, Gates returned to his home in the
exclusive area around Harvard Square. He was confronted by a
problem: His front door was stuck and would not open, requiring the use
of a crowbar. Finally, he was able to gain entry into his house. But
the door was not the only problem Gates would encounter that day.
According
to the Associated Press account (July 21): “When the officers arrived,
Gates was already inside and on the phone with the real estate company
that manages the property. He had come in through the back door and
shut off the alarm, he said.
“Police
said Gates was arrested after he yelled at an officer, accused him of
racial bias and refused to calm down after the officer demanded that
Gates show him identification to prove he lived in the home.
“Gates’s lawyer, fellow Harvard scholar Charles Ogletree, said his client showed his driver’s
license and Harvard ID—both with photos—and repeatedly asked for the
name and badge number of the officer, who refused. He followed
the officer onto the front porch as he left his house and was arrested
there.”
The
police account, by Sgt. James Crowley, the arresting officer, differs
on some key points. Crowley contends that Gates
initially refused to provide any identification, but then showed a
Harvard ID, which has no street address. In the police account, when
Gates finally did hand over his driver’s license, he demanded Crowley’s name and badge number.
Police claim Gates was belligerent and confrontational.
Further,
Crowley wrote that he told Gates to step out of the
house, and Gates shouted, “Yeah, I’ll speak with your mama
outside.” Gates supposedly continued shouting at Crowley, calling
him a racist who treated Gates unjustly because he is a Black man. In a
subsequent interview, Gates denied making these statements and said the
police report was “full of this man’s broad imagination.” Nonetheless,
Gates was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct.
Tapes
of the 911 call do, in fact, contradict the police report and the
initial news articles based on that report. The caller did not refer to
Black men entering the property, as the police claim. Nor did the
caller refer specifically to a breaking and entering taking place.
There
are, though, no tapes of the verbal clash between Gates and Crowley. It
is not possible to know exactly who said what—but the exact words are
not important.
For
the sake of argument, leave aside Gates’s
account and accept the police report. On that basis alone, it is clear
that a satisfactory solution could readily have been achieved. The
police needed to do no more than exercise proper professional judgment.
They could simply have walked away.
Even
without the benefit of hindsight, it should have been clear at the time
that no arrest was necessary. In fact, by Massachusetts law,
“disorderly conduct” means someone is disturbing the normal functioning
of the public or someone is trying to stir up the public to unlawful
behavior. Gates did none of these things. His real offense was that he
embarrassed a cop in front of a small crowd of on-lookers who had
gathered at the scene. That is precisely what the police could not
tolerate.
Local
news outlets broadcast an interview with Sgt. Crowley in which he said
that Gates acted “very peculiar—even more so now that I know how
educated he is.” Crowley’s tone of voice in the
interview suggests that he sincerely was confused by Gates’ behavior.
Decades
ago, Malcolm X noted that this confusion was in itself part of the
problem. What Malcolm said of whites in general applies especially well
to this one white cop: “The white man—give him his due—has an
extraordinary intelligence, an extraordinary cleverness. …
But
in the arena of dealing with human beings, the white man’s working
intelligence is hobbled. His intelligence will fail him altogether if
the humans happen to be non-white. The white man’s emotions superseded his
intelligence. He will commit against non-whites the most incredible
spontaneous emotional acts, so psyche-deep is his ‘white superiority’
complex” (“The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” p. 292).
That
crippling of intelligence also affected at least one Black cop, Sgt.
Leon Lashley, who was present during the
arrest. He has publicly come to Sgt. Crowley’s defense, saying that he
supported Crowley 100 percent, thus proving that when push comes to
shove, or when shouting leads to handcuffs, a blue uniform trumps Black
experience.
Yet,
in an implicit public rebuke of police behavior, the charges against
Gates were dropped several days later. In a rare exception to its usual
practice, Cambridge police officials called the
arrest “regrettable and unfortunate.”
But
Gates’ angry behavior was also an exception. Gates has never been a
militant radical. A graduate of Yale, he became a professor at Cornell
and Duke and was ultimately wooed by Harvard, where he has been the
W.E.B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities and
long-time chairman of the African-American Studies Department.
Opinion-making
publications like the New Yorker and The New York Review of
Books open their pages to Gates, and the Public Broadcasting System
(PBS) presented his “Frontline” report: “The Two Nations of Black
America” and the PBS series, “African American Lives.” The famous Mr.
Bartley’s Burger Cottage in Harvard Square has even named a hamburger
after him.
Professor
and political activist Adolph Reed has in the past commented critically
of Gates, writing that “he makes no pretense of being a conduit to some
sort of grassroots black authenticity … he is more actively concerned
with articulating the voice of … [a] self-consciously petit-bourgeois
centrism” (“What Are the Drums Saying, Booker?” in “Class Notes,” pp.
85-86).
Why,
then, would Gates behave so uncharacteristically and react so
vehemently? The police admit they could not understand, but there is no
riddle involved with this question. The answer is that Gates was
subjected to a frontal assault on his dignity and self respect. He
responded emotionally. He boiled over in a rage fueled by the
personal insults and injuries of a lifetime. As he remarked in the
introduction to one of his many books, “I’m not good at concealing my
feelings” (“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black
Man”).
Gates
truly learned what he certainly knew well from both intellectual and
personal experience. Despite advanced degrees and an elite social
position, Gates was still vulnerable because he was still Black. The
police could shake him down and put him in handcuffs any time they
wanted.
Once
again, Malcolm X explained these dynamics decades ago. Writing of a
debate with an unnamed Black associate professor, Malcolm recalled
demanding of him: “‘Do you know what white racists call black Ph.D’s?’ He said something like, ‘I believe
that I happen not to be aware of that’—you know, one of these
ultra-proper-talking Negroes. And I laid the word down on him, loud: ‘Nigger!’”
(“The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” p. 310).
Sgt.
Crowley did not use that word when he marched Professor Gates off to
jail, but, then, he did not need to. The arrest spoke for itself.
Throughout his ordeal, Gates knew just how he was being treated. In
fact, he was treated the way local police routinely deal with Black
males. Liberal Cambridge is no exception to the reality of racial
profiling. In this city, as in much of America, Blacks are watched,
stopped, harassed, and arrested more frequently than whites.
Police
hostility does not align to class as it does to race. Police treat
working-class whites with more respect, as full citizens, unlike their
Black counterparts. A Black man, of whatever class, is more like a
suspect who has not yet been apprehended.
A
New York Times/CBS News poll from July 2008 revealed that 66 percent of Black
men answered “yes” to the question: “Have you ever felt you were
stopped by the police just because of your race or ethnic background?”
This
is the reality that Gates encountered, a reality that, despite his
expansive knowledge, still caught him unawares: “There are 1 million
black men in the prison system, and on [July 16] I became one of them.
I would sooner have believed the sky was going to fall from the heavens
than I would have believed this could happen to me. It shouldn’t have
happened to me, and it shouldn’t happen to anyone.”
Of
course, the police and Sgt. Crowley claim that “race played no factor”
in the arrest. But who is to say that a middle-aged white man
challenging the cops would not have been treated with more understanding
and lenience?
Race
certainly did play a role for Gates. He strongly protested against
becoming one more statistic, one more victim, one more Black face with
no identity, or with an identity that the police imposed on him. Gates’
entire career and his numerous accomplishments were, at the moment of
the arrest, of no consequence. His social stature and personal sense of
self, forged throughout a lifetime, were wiped away on a policeman’s
whim. To the cops, he was just an obnoxious, uppity Black man. For
Gates the entire conflict was rooted in the history of race. How could
it not be?
Coincidentally,
on the day that Professor Gates was arrested, President Obama addressed the NAACP in a speech that stressed
his by now familiar themes of uplift and opportunity. Speaking
especially to the young, Obama said, “No one
has written your destiny for you. Your destiny is in your hands… No
excuses. No excuses. You get that education. All those hardships will
just make you stronger, better able to compete. Yes, we can.”
As
the president spoke these words, he did not know that despite being
educated at and teaching in the finest Ivy League institutions,
Professor Gates was languishing in the Cambridge city jail.
Before
long, news of the arrest reached the president. Obama
publicly addressed the issue in response to a reporter’s question at a
press conference. Obama’s first
comments on the case were words of understanding and empathy for his
“friend” Henry Gates and the realities of Black life in America: “…
there is a long history in this country of African Americans and
Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s
just a fact.” The president also placed blame on the police for “acting
stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they
were in their own home.”
Statements
this clear, simple, and honest could not stand. Shortly after Obama criticized the Cambridge cops, state and
local police unions held their own news conference and returned fire.
They demanded an apology from Obama and
faulted Gates, as well as the state’s African-American governor, who
had suggested there could be a racial element to Gates’ arrest.
News stations throughout the country carried footage of the remarks
made by the head of the police union: “The facts of this case suggest
that the president used the right adjective [stupid] but directed it to
the wrong party.”
Obama quickly backtracked and claimed the regrettable
incident was caused by “two good people,” “two decent people,” who both
overreacted. He hoped the outcome would be “a teachable moment” that
would result in greater understanding and unity.
Of
course, it is reasonable to suppose that in 2012 candidate Obama will seek the endorsement of police unions,
so he would want to erase what could become an embarrassing moment in a
Republican attack ad. Caution is considered smart politics, so it was
the president’s first response that was the most surprising.
Obama, in his initial comments, unintentionally broke the
bond he has labored to establish with white America. Obama’s
unspoken contract, based on his speeches and actions as candidate and
now as president, is to speak about race in terms that will soothe
whites. Characteristically, he will use a phrase like “our troubled
past” instead of “a legacy of slavery” or “a history of white racism.”
The difference is more significant than a simple “calibration of
words.”
Obama’s more specific criticisms are directed to the Black
community, stressing the need for more responsibility, better
self-conduct, and more persistent personal initiative. To appear
even-handed and thus soften the blow, these exhortations are coupled
with vague references to vestiges of inequality in America at large.
By
referring to racism in such nebulous terms, Obama
allows whites considerable leeway in their attitudes and behavior.
General and indefinite criticisms allow for specific rationalizations.
Those whites who favor racial profiling, for instance, can take comfort
in the thought that bigotry may exist, but surely it could not include
them. Instead, racism is somewhere “out there,” in “our troubled past,”
or in “society”—where no one is really at fault and where the police
are always “just doing their job.”
So,
to be consistent, Obama had to replace his
perceptive remarks with platitudinous ones. He was trying to dispel the
suspicions of white Americans who know that John McCain and Sarah Palin would have stood tall in defense of the
police. When the president of the United States is forced to backtrack
from saying what he knows to be true, that verbal retreat is no small
part of the “teachable moment” on race. The election of a Black
president, for all its importance, did not usher in a transformed America that put racism in the past
tense.
Professor
Henry Gates and Sgt. Crowley may enjoy a cold beer with the president
at a picnic table outside of the Oval Office. Such an event would not
take place unless a positive public-relations outcome was scripted in
advance. Larger outcomes—such as the future of Black people in America—are still to be determined.
The
attention drawn to Gates does highlight some essential points: despite
the victories of the civil rights movement, victories that helped to
create the Black elite who Prof. Gates represents, Blacks continue to
suffer for racial reasons, for being Black. Now, as before, the
struggle against racial discrimination continues as a necessary
component of the struggle against capitalism in America.
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