I wonder if the Henry Louis Gates incident will mark a sort of ‘Anita Hill’ moment when white folks finally begin to grasp what it is like to live in The Other’s (non-white) skin. Gates is the Harvard professor who got dragged away from his home by the cops Monday because they couldn’t believe that he actually owned the place and wasn’t a burglar.
Anita Hill used to work for Clarence Thomas and told the Senate committee that eventually made him a Supreme Court justice (incidentally, probably the worst one in 100 years) that the man was a serial sexual harasser and a major creep. I recall that the whole incident looked peculiar and odd to most men while women’s reaction was, Doh! Of course that’s how it is in the workplace.
The early coverage of the Gates arrest was couched in the sort of police-blotter language that cops always use to paint the skeery, fearsome black guy as an obstreperous, unruly wild man that they were just forced to cuff and take downtown. Gates was reported to have said ‘This is how black men are treated in America!’ and very likely he did.
But the first reports didn’t mention that he voluntarily followed the cops outside after showing them his identification with the street address of the house on it. Any officer not racially-impaired would have accepted the evidence and let the man alone in his home. Instead, they have a major racial incident on their hands, and about time, too.
The other completely amazing element of the story is that Gates’ own neighbor was the person who phoned in the alert. What a sorry commentary on our society where people cannot even recognize the guy next door. If these suburbanites ever got out of their electronic caves and sat on their porches with each other, they’d be less likely to succumb to this pathological paranoia.
Access to and freedom in one’s own home is still completely racialized in America. While the demented Republicans insist on encouraging even more gun-owning and -packing with the crazed Thune Amendment, let no non-white males think the new rights contemplated might actually apply to them. John White found out the hard way when he used a weapon to scare off a white gang who chased his son into the front yard of their Long Island home screaming racist threats.
White, roused from his domestic peace by what he described as a ‘lynch mob’, got out his gun and fired at the white kids, killing one. He’s doing 25 years for second-degree murder.
[Update] In his news conference last night, Obama not only fielded the question on the Gates arrest, he gave an extended reply. That has to mean that he was prepared for it and wanted to make a point.
The morning-after coverage has picked up on Obama’s comment that the Cambridge police ‘acted stupidly’ in arresting Gates after he showed them proof that he was in his own home. Strong language and no off-the-cuff accident either. Obama chose to slam police abuses in a remarkably unvarnished way given his whole demeanor in office so far.
I take the smackdown as Obama’s response to the scurrilous race-baiting of his Supreme Court nominee by the Cro-Magnon faction in the Senate. Sotomayor couldn’t fight back because she had to act ladylike and garner 51 votes, and the White House couldn’t throw any punches for the same reason. But since those votes are now in the bag, it’s party time.
I don’t notice any howls of outrage from the usual suspects in cable-land or Fox News on Obama’s remarks because busting a college professor for being in his own living room is pretty hard to defend even if you’re a U.S. senator from Alabama. It suggests that the soft-sell, make-nice Obama that makes some of us pull our hair out may be a better strategist than we give him credit for.
The Cambridge police department’s goofball action gave Obama the opening to lay out a different scenario about race in America than the endless abused-white-firefighter version ladled up by the right-wing squawk machine over the last month. In using it, he showed a killer instinct that I’d like to see more of.
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