25th
Thoughts on Henry Louis Gates and Post-Racial America
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? White cop, black man, case closed. I wouldn’t accuse Gates of being a race baiter, but here he unnecessarily ‘racializes’ an unpleasant encounter with police. The rapid elevation of his arrest to racial watershed by everyone from Gates to President Obama highlights a pervasive racial fixation with unfortunate consequences.
For most Americans, even encounters with law enforcement of their own choosing are tense and unwelcome experiences. From the outset, Mr. Gates’ circumstances provide plenty of reasons to suspect things might turn out badly. Weary from a trip abroad, locked out of his home, Gates finally manages to break into his house and 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 if Gates already poses a well-worn racial narrative it 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. His frustration may be understandable, but only someone that shares Gates’ sense of race as personal identity would immediately suppose his arrest - or even the officer’s appearance at his home - was the consequence of either party’s shade.
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 the same sort of unsubstantiated leap. While he may not be able to imagine it being otherwise, it’s not immediately obvious that the officers involved in either incident would have behaved differently had the citizens been of another shade. In which case, we may have arrogant cops, even bad cops, but not racists.
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 we learn later that he referred to Gates as “That One”).
The President initially chalked the 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. The Capehart piece is among the more thoughtful I’ve read on the incident, but even it falls short of identifying the fundamental issue.
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 the real encumbrance. The racial paradigm in America has shifted from from slavery and Jim Crow to a diversity fetish myopically obsessed with the color of one another’s skin. We go to far when we incorrectly suppose race is a legitimate mechanism for lumping individuals together. The consequences of this fallacy are far reaching.
The outstanding racial dogma that need be confronted is not a prevailing notion of black inferiority or white supremacy – but the vibrant perception that race matters. This conclusion is more the consequence of supposition and social conditioning than any particular fact. Coding economic or health outcomes with contemporary racial markers supposes that either genetics or discrimination is responsible for any disparities. But race has no precise biological or genetic analogs, and historical realities – no matter how deplorable and awful – cannot discount the significance of individual actors. Further, outstanding disparities generally have sensible alternative explanations that don’t center on concentrations of melanin.
There is neither “black community” nor “black America”, only individuals that actively or passively accept those labels. Labels that superfluously divide and flatten an intensely diverse human family. In contemporary America, “white” and “black” people are on the whole more similar than they are different. It’s also true that American blacks are individually more different than they are similar. Race is a convenient fiction – but it’s an abstraction that taken too seriously generates strife. Attaining a post racial America is not a matter of professing pride in our racial diversity. It’s a matter of properly framing a historically significant, but hopelessly inaccurate method of relating to one another and ourselves.
