While Jonathan Capehart at the Washington Post seems genuinely surprised by the recasting of Henry Louis Gates’ arrest, I was always suspicious of the “bigoted cop” angle. Not because racial discrimination is extinct, but because, for all the hand wringing, no one—even Mr. Gates—sought to substantiate the accusation of racism. What’s to explain, right? White cop, black man, case closed. Despite scant details, the Gates arrest rapidly attained the properties of a “racial watershed,” garnering the attention of the national media and even President Obama.
For most Americans, even encounters with law enforcement that they solicit are tense experiences. From the outset, Mr. Gates’ circumstance provided plenty of reasons to suspect that things might turn out badly. Weary from a trip abroad, locked out of his home, Gates finally manages to break into his house when an officer appears at his door. Gates is exasperated – and the officer is on edge-hand on his weapon, fully prepared to respond to a burglary or worse. This is a powder keg, and well-worn racial narratives may make matters worse.
Whatever else actually transpired, Gates hasn’t disputed reports that he repeatedly insisted the officer was racist during their exchange. Gates went so far as to bad mouth the officer’s mother. Some frustration may be understandable, but I’m inclined to believe that Gates’ sense of race as identity led him to suppose that the officer’s appearance at his home (not to mention his eventual arrest) - was a function of racism.
In John McWhorter’s comments on the Gates affair, he provides an account of his own run-in with law enforcement (the emphasis is my own):
One night at about one in the morning I was walking to a convenience store. I was in jeans, sneakers and a short-sleeved button-down shirt open over a T-shirt. I had a few days’ worth of stubble. I crossed a two-lane street far from the traffic light or crosswalk, and when I saw a car coming at about 25 yards away I broke into a quick trot to get across before it got to where I was.
I hadn’t realized that the car was a police car, and the officer quickly turned on the siren, made a screeching U-turn and pulled up to me on the other side of the street. The window rolled down, revealing a white man who would have been played by Danny Aiello if it had been a movie. “You always cross streets whenever you feel like it like that?” he sneered. “I’m sorry, officer,” I said; “I wasn’t thinking.” “Even in front of a police car?” he growled threateningly. My stomach jumped, and I realized that at that moment, despite being a tenured professor at an elite university, to this man I was a black street thug, a “youth.”
I simply cannot imagine him stopping like this if a white man of the same age in the same clothes with the same stubble had done the exact same thing; he was trawling through a neighborhood which, unfortunately, does sometimes harbor a certain amount of questionable behavior by young black men on that street at that time of night, and to him, the color of my skin rendered me a suspect.
Here McWhorter makes an unsubstantiated leap. While he may not be able to imagine it being otherwise, it’s not obvious that the officers involved in his incident or Gates would have behaved differently had the citizens been of another shade. In which case, we may have arrogant cops, even bad cops, but not necessarily racists cops.
Did Gates’ arresting officer overact? Did Gates? The answer in both cases is almost certainly “yes.” Should Gates have been arrested? Probably not. Was the cop a racist? There is no strong indication that he was (unless of course we learn that he referred to Gates as “That One”).
The President initially chalked the entire affair up to the arresting officer’s stupidity, warning citizens to be mindful of the specter of racial profiling. Obama later apologized for distracting us with his poor choice of words. McWhorter suggest that Gates’ arrest demonstrates how far off post-racial America really is. I fear he may be right, but not for the reasons he supposes.
Calls to thoughtfully discuss race by well-intentioned people have not been lacking. Yet in nearly all cases the presupposition that racial identity is something worth preserving is seldom challenged. America’s prevailing racial paradigm has evolved from slavery and Jim Crow to a diversity fetish myopically obsessed with the color of each person’s skin. We go too far when we incorrectly suppose race is a legitimate mechanism for lumping individuals together. The consequences of this fallacy are far- reaching.
