http://blackagendareport.com/?q=content/%E2%80%9Cskip%E2%80%9D-gates-curious-martyr-struggle-against-racism
“Skip” Gates: A Curious Martyr in the Struggle Against Racism
By Paul Street
07/27/2009
President Obama’s “friend” Dr. Henry Louis Gates has been richly rewarded for arguing “that poor African-Americans are largely to blame for the fact that blacks stand at the bottom of the nation’s steep socioeconomic pyramid.” Presumably, and by the same logic, Gates must now blame himself for getting arrested in his own home by a Cambridge policeman. Actually, Gates’ first impulse was to cash in on the experience with a “PBS special” on Blacks and the criminal justice system – a subject that never previously crossed his mind.
“Gates is thinking of doing 'a PBS special' about his confrontation.”
Threatening to Do “Another PBS Special”
The black-bourgeois Harvard professor and Cambridge, Massachusetts resident Henry Louis “Skip” Gates (who is certainly far into the six figure salary stratosphere at the nation’s top university) is a curious martyr in the struggle against racism. He recently claimed that his now nationally sensationalized experience of being arrested in his own home – after being seen forcing his way (along with his cabdriver) into his residence upon returning from China (an action that elicited a neighbor’s call to the police) and then launching into a tirade against the Cambridge police sent to investigate – has reminded him of the oppression that poor blacks face in the U.S. He is thinking, he says, of doing “a PBS special” about his confrontation with a “rogue racist police officer” in affluent, leafy Cambridge and how that experience connects him to the truly oppressed people down in Roxbury, Dorchester, Bedford Stuyvesant, South Central Los Angeles, Benton Harbor (Michigan), and the West Side of Chicago.
He’s in the national spotlight thanks in no small part to President Barack Obama’s politically ill-advised statement – made at the heavily distracting end of a prime-time press conference in which he was attempting to sell his watered-down, corporate-friendly “health care reform” – that Gates’ arrest was a “stupid” action on the part of the Cambridge police. The president referred to Gates as a personal friend and admitted to not being particularly knowledgeable about the specifics involved in the Gates-Cambridge incident.
Gates “Deciding, Deciding”...to Blame the Black and Poor Victim in his Last PBS Special
Another “PBS special” from Henry Louis Gates? White supremacists can be forgiven if they are not shaking in their boots. Five and a half years ago, the bourgeois professor fouled Black History Month by narrating an ambitious, four-part, and British-directed Public Broadcasting System television series titled "America Beyond the Color Line." Purportedly dedicated to providing a provocative new take on race, class, and black experience in the U.S., Gates’ documentary spent an inordinate amount of time beating up on impoverished blacks for not having any, well, class. Accepting the dominant privilege-friendly and Euro-bourgeois notion that success, empowerment, and freedom are essentially available to all who exhibit proper individual initiative and "personal responsibility," Gates argued that poor African-Americans are largely to blame for the fact that blacks stand at the bottom of the nation’s steep socioeconomic pyramid. In “America Beyond the Color Line,” Gates did not understand class in the radical way that the term has been used by leading black intellectuals and activists like W.E.B. DuBois, CLR James, Martin Luther King and Manning Marable: as an oppression structure that is intimately and inseparably (dare I say dialectically) bound up with race (today we must of course add gender) in the construction and preservation of American inequality. [1] He used “class” rather in the bourgeois and accommodationist Booker T. Washington [2] sense, arguing that lower-class blacks needed to work harder and smarter to acquire the middle- and upper-class skills, education, habits and values possessed in greater degree by black elites. One of those elites Gates held up as a role model in “America Beyond the Color” was the leading imperialist figurehead Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, featured as an example of what blacks can accomplish when they work hard, study, save and behave decently.
“Gates’ documentary spent an inordinate amount of time beating up on impoverished blacks for not having any, well, class.”
"Unless there is a moral revolution and a revolution in attitude among our people,” Gates told Chicago Tribune reporter Steve Johnson as “America Beyond the Color Line” hit the airwaves, “unless [poor blacks] decide to stay in school, learn the ABCs, not to get pregnant when you're 16, not to run drugs, not to sell drugs...we're doomed to have a relatively small black middle class and huge underclass and never the twain shall meet. The only way we can succeed in society," "is mastering the ABCs, staying in school, working hard, deferred gratification. What's happened to these values?" asked Gates. "My father always said, and it's true, if we studied calculus like we studied basketball, we'd be running MIT. It's true and there's no excuse.” [3]
This was the key theme in a previous PBS special narrated by Gates. In that documentary, titled "Two Nations," Gates proclaimed that black poverty was pretty much about poor decisions: "deciding to get pregnant or not to have protected sex. Deciding to do drugs. Deciding not to study. Deciding, deciding, deciding..." [4]
"A Wake-Up Call ...More Especially to Black America"
Gates told the Chicago Tribune that "America Beyond" was "meant to be a wake-up call to America, but more especially to black America, saying ‘are we crazy? What are we doing here? We can't just keep saying,'" Gates argues, "‘the white man made me do it.'"
The Tribune’s Johnson reporter found that "America Beyond's" "most striking" aspect was "the degree to which it pushes the idea of personal responsibility as the best solution to the black community's problems," which, the reporter says, "is perhaps not something you expect to hear from a man who identifies himself as politically ‘center-left.'" While knowing full well that larger, interrelated forces of capitalism and racism play a role in the creation of deep and disproportionate black poverty, (he is not stupid), Gates decided (perhaps I should say “decided, decided, decided”) in “America Beyond” and in “Two Nation” to skip past structural-racism and get to the meat of the matter: the personal responsibility of poor blacks.
“Gates proclaimed that black poverty was pretty much about poor decisions.”
It was a comforting message, no doubt, for much of white America, most of which has embraced the convenient notion that racism (structural or otherwise) no longer poses serious problems for blacks and that the real barriers to black success and equality are located in the African-American community itself. "As white America sees it," noted Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown in their excellent study By The Color of Their Skin: the Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race (New York: Plume, 2000), "every effort has been to welcome blacks into the American mainstream and now they're on their own."
Predominant white attitudes at the turn of the millennium are well summarized by the comments of a white respondent to a survey conducted by Essence magazine. "No place that I'm aware of," wrote the respondent, "makes [black] people ride on the back of the bus or use a different restroom in this day and age. We got the message; we made the corrections - get on with it."
The election of Gates’ friend, Harvard graduate Barack Obama, to the White House, has of course pretty much closed the door on the chance that many American whites will understand that the “corrections” (an interesting word choice in a time when black prisoners account for nearly half of “freedom”-loving America’s globally unmatched incarceration rate!) are only minimally underway if at all.
Racial Snitching: “Is it the System, the Man, Racism…Capitalism?”
Presented through the quintessentially Caucasian venue of the PBS documentary, much of "America Beyond" seemed like racially treasonous snitching. In one scene from Chicago's predominantly black South Side, Gates looked incredulous as a young woman offered him no rational reason for having a large number of children out of wedlock during her late teens and 20s. Another South Side scene in the special had Gates talking to a group of young black women who were enrolled in a program designed to help them escape ghetto life. Gates asked one young lady who or what she blamed for the desperate situation of so many of the city's African-Americans. "Is it the system, the man, racism," Gates asked her, "is it capitalism?" Failing to cite Marx, DuBois or Malcom X or the latest left-sociological research on the racially disparate impact of capitalist de-industrialization [5], the woman earned Gates' approval by emphasizing the poor choices made by ghetto residents she knew!
During one telling sequence in "America Beyond," Gates sat across from a black inmate at a notorious and giant racist holding pen – Chicago’s Cook County Jail. After telling the inmate how much he himself loved attending school as a youth, Gates looked disturbed as his interview subject recalled alienation from the inadequate public school to which he was assigned by virtue of his boyhood address in a dangerous, poverty-ridden Chicago neighborhood. As the dialogue between the Harvard professor and the jail inmate concluded, both agreed on the basic wisdom of an uncontroversial conclusion: America's nearly one million black prison and jail inmates would be better off if they had hit the books and not joined gangs during their youth.
The point was shared in “America Beyond” by U.S. Secretary of State Powell, who told Gates that young blacks needed to...make better choices in life. (Gates did not ask Powell to elaborate on the moral character of the Secretary's choice to support the bloody, illegal, unjust, and thoroughly unnecessary invasion of Iraq by collaborating in the manufacture of spectacular high-state deceptions regarding the threat posed by the feeble regime of Saddam Hussein. There was no discussion of a younger Powell's role in the Pentagon's early attempts to cover-up the 1968 My Lai massacres.)
Critical Omissions in the Call for Better Choices
There was nothing in “America Beyond the Color Line” about the need to make a "wake-up call" to the more structurally empowered and predominantly white business and government decision-makers who negatively affect black experience by "deciding, deciding, deciding" to, for example:
* deny blacks equal access to the nation's highest opportunity communities through a panoply of well-documented discriminatory real-estate, home-lending, and zoning practices and policies.
* target blacks for historically and globally unmatched mass incarceration and felony marking, thereby richly exacerbating the already deep socioeconomic and political disadvantage of lower-class African-Americans.
* maintain strict lines of racial segregation between predominantly black and under-funded inner city schools and predominantly white, affluent, and well-funded suburban school districts.
* divert hundreds of billions of dollars from social programs needed to assist the victims of domestic U.S. structural racism to pay for economically dysfunctional tax cuts that benefit the disproportionately white opulent few and to pay for an objectively racist foreign policy that pays its primary dividends to wealthy whites.
* disinvest in communities of color, helping create the barren material underpinning for neighborhoods where adult males with felony records and prison histories are more numerous than livable wage jobs.
* sponsor and protect various overseas drug lords who happen to serve America's imperial objectives while conducting a massive domestic anti-narcotics campaign that is significantly less effective and much more expensive than treatment when it comes to mitigating the ravages of substance abuse and generates the critical raw material (black bodies) for the nation's remarkable, globally unmatched and white-run prison industrial complex.
* permeate severely disadvantaged black neighborhoods with predatory financial institutions that exploit ghetto residents' limited economic choices.
* go easy with affluent white corporate and high-state criminals who devastate untold lives and communities with fraudulent practices and schemes while consigning hundreds of thousands of poor blacks to hard time in violent mass incarceration facilities for small-time narcotics transgressions that are deemed unworthy of imprisonment in every other nation in the democratic world.
* subvert the meaning and significance of American democracy by constructing a preposterously expensive, big-money and big-media-dominated "winner-take-all" election system that makes it absurdly difficult for racial, ethnic, and ideological minorities to translate their vital needs and perspectives into policy.
* attack "affirmative action" college admissions practices that try to marginally compensate a minority of blacks for centuries of structural racism while maintaining silence over "legacy" admissions practices that reward predominantly white applicants (i.e., Harvard and Yale graduate George W. Bush) for being born into a family that attended the same school in the past.
There was no call in "America Beyond" for a new "personal responsibility" on the part of the very predominantly white agents and beneficiaries of the above, bullet-pointed bad decisions (a small share of the poor and dangerous choices that can be observed in the corridors of Caucasian power and privilege)? There was no demand that these perpetrators "wake up" to their need to make better decisions more consistent with the supposed noble American Values of hard work, honesty, saving, deferred gratification, and non-reliance on public assistance - critical omissions!
Booker T. Obama
Obama’s initial, off-the-cuff defense of his Harvard friend Gates’ position on what(ever) recently happened in Cambridge is also somewhat ironic and yet appropriate. “America Beyond” portrayed racial inequality and its causes in much the same Booker T. Washingtonian terms as those used by Barack Obama on the rare occasions when he feels compelled to explicitly address the problem of race. The capitalism- and Wall Street-friendly/-captive and “black but not like Jesse” president has made a career – a rather spectacularly successful one to date – out of militant race-neutralism. Taking his cue from the movie “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967), he has consistently respected majority-white race fears and denial by distancing himself from the supposedly obsolete and dysfunctional notion that racism still poses serious barriers to black advancement and racial equality in the U.S. He has spent a significant amount of time and energy lecturing lower- and working-class blacks – most recently at the 100th anniversary dinner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) – on their need to take personal and cultural responsibility for their own position in a supposedly opportunity-filled and “magical place called America.” As Obama “explained” in his instantly famous Race Speech in Philadelphia in March of 2008, black rage at white racial oppression made sense in the post-Word War II America in which his former spiritual mentor Reverend Jeremiah Wright (thrown under the bus by the Obama campaign because of the pastor’s nasty habit of telling basic truths about living U.S. racism and imperialism) came of age. Such rage does not make quite so much sense in contemporary America, however, the president-to-be felt – not in a nation where blacks had come (as Obama explained to Civil Rights Movement veterans in Selma, Alabama in March of 2007) “nine-tenths of the way” to equality (a rather curious statement in a country where black unemployment and poverty rates are double those of whites and where black median household net worth comes to seven cents on the white dollar!). [6]
“The president has made a career out of militant race-neutralism.”
Likes Gates, Obama is far from stupid. He knows full well (as is clear from his recent NACCP address [7]) that structural discrimination and racial bias continue to be major factors in black experience and racial inequality. He has decided (and “decided and decided”), however – for reasons that make political sense in a nation whose white-majority electorate is in deep “post-Civil Rights” denial about how powerfully white supremacy has (in historian David Roediger’s phrase) “survived U.S. history” – to take the Booker T. Washingtonian road and to place primary emphasis on sending a “wake up call” to black America, not to white America. We can expect (I am writing on the morning of Friday, July 24th) him and his handlers to backtrack from his support for Gates [8], which was foolishly and somewhat uncharacteristically issued prior to a thorough review of the facts involved in the specific case. Those facts and, far more importantly for the Obama/Axelrod administration, the public opinion data (reflecting the incident’s likely reinforcement of white racism-denial) simply do not recommend a pro-Gates position. Ironically enough, being seen as allied with Gates works against Obama’s carefully constructed “post-racial” image in this particular case. In the meantime, consistent with the master class’s longstanding use of race to divide and divert, the corporate media and the right have seized on the Gates-Cambridge-Obama story in ways that are helping distract attention from the health care issue.
Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com)is the author of many articles, chapters, speeches, and books, including Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), Segregated School: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); and Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008).
SELECTED NOTES
1. For a recent brilliant and radical take on race and class in the American experience, see David Roediger. How Race Survived U.S. History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon (New York: Verso, 2008).
2. Booker T. Washington was a leading black spokesperson before, during, and after the turn of the 20th century. Rejecting the idealistic and confrontational approach of the great black leader Frederick Douglass and the later Civil Rights Movement, Washington preached quiet adaptation to the existing white supremacist and capitalist order. Disavowing racial protest, he called for blacks to “cast down their buckets” where they were and to silently but diligently acquire mildly remunerative skills that would permit them to move up a step or two within the segregationist Jim Crow order,
3. Steve Johnson, “Behind Gates: How the Harvard Scholar is Using His ‘Color-Line’ PBS as a Wake-Up Call,” Chicago Tribune, February 3, 2004, section 5, page 1.
4. Frontline (“P”BS), “The Two Nations of Black America: A Conversation With Henry Louis Gates,” (no date, remarkably enough), read at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/race/interviews/gates4.html
5. For my own efforts on that topic, please see Paul Street, Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black History (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), pp. 196-202.
6. Paul Street Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008), Chapter 3, titled “How ‘Black’ is Obama? Color, Class, Generation, and the Perverse Racial Politics of the Post-Civil Rights Era” (pp. 73-121); Paul Street, “Race Cowardice From the Top Down,” Black Agenda Report (April 22, 2009) read at http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/race-cowardice-top-down; Glen Ford, “Obama Stumbles on His Own Contradictions: Pop Goes the Race-Neutral Campaign!,” Black Agenda Report (April 30, 2008); Barack Obama, “Remarks to the NAACP Centennial Convention,” Hilton, New York (July 17, 2009), read online at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-to-the-NAACP-Centennial-Convention-07/16/2009/ ; Tom Eley, “Obama’s Speech to the NAACP,” World Socialist Web Site (July 18, 2009), read at http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/pers-j18.shtml
7. See Obama’ “Remarks to the NAACP,” paragraphs 10 to 14.
8. My expectation was born out. See Nancy Benac, “Obama Moves to Dampen Uproar Over Comment on Race,” Associated Press (July 25, 2009), read online at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090725/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_obama_harvard_scholar
Showing posts with label Henry Louis Gates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Henry Louis Gates. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Glenn Beck ‘has a deep-seated hatred for logic’
http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/07/30/colbert-beck-has-a-deep-seated-hatred-for-logic/
Colbert: Glenn Beck ‘has a deep-seated hatred for logic’
By David Edwards and Ron Brynaert
July 30, 2009
President Barack Obama is set to meet with Professor Henry Louis Gates and Sergeant James Crowley early Thursday evening to discuss how the black scholar’s arrest can be a “teaching moment.” Wednesday night, Stephen Colbert used his “The Word” segment to explain how racism is like farts and neither should be discussed.
“Nation, as you know, I don’t see race,” Colbert said. “People tell me I’m white and I believe them because my fridge is full of drinkable yogurt.”
Colbert blasted President Obama, because “six months after racism officially ended, he fanned the flames of prejudice by taking sides in the Gates arrest controversy.”
Obama’s use of the word “stupidly” divided “Americans into two groups: those outraged over Gates’ arrest and those outraged at the other group’s outrage.”
As for the mama crack that the police report described but that Gates denied making. Colbert said he believed Gates really said, “Yo mama so fat when she wears red the police say ‘hey Kool Aid Man’…and then falsely arrest her.”
Colbert then noted that his “crazy eyes” nemesis Glenn Beck called Obama a racist (Video at this link) a few days ago.
Beck told the hosts of Fox & Friends that “this president has exposed himself, I think, as a guy — over and over and over again — who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”
Moments later, Beck added, “I’m not saying he [Obama] doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.”
“Right,” Colbert agreed, “that’s not saying [Obama] dislikes white people. He’s saying that he has a deep-seated hatred for them.”
Colbert continued, “Like how Beck likes arguing but has a deep-seated hatred for logic.”
Later, Colbert played clips of former Bush brain Karl Rove saying how “Americans don’t like to talk about race” and Fox’s Bill O’Reilly saying, “I’m just not gonna talk about race with black people unless I know them very, very well.”
Regarding O’Reilly’s comment, Colbert quipped, “In other words, he’s not gonna talk about race.”
Colbert: Glenn Beck ‘has a deep-seated hatred for logic’
By David Edwards and Ron Brynaert
July 30, 2009
President Barack Obama is set to meet with Professor Henry Louis Gates and Sergeant James Crowley early Thursday evening to discuss how the black scholar’s arrest can be a “teaching moment.” Wednesday night, Stephen Colbert used his “The Word” segment to explain how racism is like farts and neither should be discussed.
“Nation, as you know, I don’t see race,” Colbert said. “People tell me I’m white and I believe them because my fridge is full of drinkable yogurt.”
Colbert blasted President Obama, because “six months after racism officially ended, he fanned the flames of prejudice by taking sides in the Gates arrest controversy.”
Obama’s use of the word “stupidly” divided “Americans into two groups: those outraged over Gates’ arrest and those outraged at the other group’s outrage.”
As for the mama crack that the police report described but that Gates denied making. Colbert said he believed Gates really said, “Yo mama so fat when she wears red the police say ‘hey Kool Aid Man’…and then falsely arrest her.”
Colbert then noted that his “crazy eyes” nemesis Glenn Beck called Obama a racist (Video at this link) a few days ago.
Beck told the hosts of Fox & Friends that “this president has exposed himself, I think, as a guy — over and over and over again — who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”
Moments later, Beck added, “I’m not saying he [Obama] doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.”
“Right,” Colbert agreed, “that’s not saying [Obama] dislikes white people. He’s saying that he has a deep-seated hatred for them.”
Colbert continued, “Like how Beck likes arguing but has a deep-seated hatred for logic.”
Later, Colbert played clips of former Bush brain Karl Rove saying how “Americans don’t like to talk about race” and Fox’s Bill O’Reilly saying, “I’m just not gonna talk about race with black people unless I know them very, very well.”
Regarding O’Reilly’s comment, Colbert quipped, “In other words, he’s not gonna talk about race.”
Cop Accidentally Arrests Henry Louis Gates Again
http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/cambridge_cop_accidentally
Cambridge Cop Accidentally Arrests Henry Louis Gates Again During White House Meeting
July 31, 2009 Issue 45•31
WASHINGTON — Upon arriving late to his meeting with President Barack Obama and famed African-American intellectual Henry Louis Gates, Cambridge police officer James Crowley once again detained the distinguished Harvard scholar after failing to recognize the man he had arrested just two weeks earlier, White House sources reported Thursday. "When I entered the Oval Office, I observed an unidentified black male sitting near Mr. Obama, and in the interest of the president's safety, I attempted to ascertain the individual's business at the White House," Crowley said in a sworn statement following the arrest. “The suspect then became uncooperative and verbally abusive. I had no choice but to apprehend him at the scene for disorderly conduct.” Witnesses said that Sgt. Crowley, failing to recognize Gates on their flight to Logan Airport, arrested the tenured professor in midair, once again at the baggage claim, and twice during their shared cab ride back to Cambridge.
Cambridge Cop Accidentally Arrests Henry Louis Gates Again During White House Meeting
July 31, 2009 Issue 45•31
WASHINGTON — Upon arriving late to his meeting with President Barack Obama and famed African-American intellectual Henry Louis Gates, Cambridge police officer James Crowley once again detained the distinguished Harvard scholar after failing to recognize the man he had arrested just two weeks earlier, White House sources reported Thursday. "When I entered the Oval Office, I observed an unidentified black male sitting near Mr. Obama, and in the interest of the president's safety, I attempted to ascertain the individual's business at the White House," Crowley said in a sworn statement following the arrest. “The suspect then became uncooperative and verbally abusive. I had no choice but to apprehend him at the scene for disorderly conduct.” Witnesses said that Sgt. Crowley, failing to recognize Gates on their flight to Logan Airport, arrested the tenured professor in midair, once again at the baggage claim, and twice during their shared cab ride back to Cambridge.
Banana-Eating Jungle Monkey
http://reason.com/blog/show/135142.html
Why Does This Banana-Eating Jungle Monkey Have to Make Everything About Race?
Jacob Sullum
July 30, 2009
A Boston cop who was suspended for calling Henry Louis Gates a "banana-eating jungle monkey" in a mass email insists, "I didn't mean it in a racist way." Officer Justin Barrett, who sent the message to a bunch of his buddies in the National Guard as well as The Boston Globe, says "the words were being used to characterize behavior, not describe anyone." He allows that it was a "poor choice of words" but says, "I did not mean to offend anyone." His main point, he says, is that people are inappropriately injecting race into the debate over Gates' arrest.
Why Does This Banana-Eating Jungle Monkey Have to Make Everything About Race?
Jacob Sullum
July 30, 2009
A Boston cop who was suspended for calling Henry Louis Gates a "banana-eating jungle monkey" in a mass email insists, "I didn't mean it in a racist way." Officer Justin Barrett, who sent the message to a bunch of his buddies in the National Guard as well as The Boston Globe, says "the words were being used to characterize behavior, not describe anyone." He allows that it was a "poor choice of words" but says, "I did not mean to offend anyone." His main point, he says, is that people are inappropriately injecting race into the debate over Gates' arrest.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Gates arrest and the “national conversation on race"
http://wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/gate-j28.shtml
The Gates arrest and the “national conversation on race”
By Tom Eley
28 July 2009
The controversy stemming from the arrest of prominent African American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his home on July 16 has dominated the media for a week. It has afforded another opportunity to pose race as the decisive social division and to obscure basic class realities, including the unprecedented assault on the living conditions of the working class being carried out by the Obama administration.
The details of the case, which have been endlessly parsed by the media, are by now well known. As a legal matter, Gates should not have been arrested. But far more revealing is the utilization of this incident to promote what President Barack Obama, whose unfortunate intervention in the matter catapulted it to the top of the news, refers to as a “teachable moment” on race.
The media, Obama, and other politicians have used the controversy surrounding the Gates arrest—which they themselves inflated into a major story—to argue once again that race is the one and only social division in contemporary America that really counts. The incident, they contend, demonstrates that the nation has not moved beyond its racial past, in spite of the election of the first African American president. They insist that what is needed, and what the Gates arrest might initiate, is a new “national conversation on race.”
This extraordinarily pompous formulation, implying that the nation is in the midst of some great intellectual discussion, is nonsense. No such conversation is taking place, on race or any other matter.
The “national conversation,” such as it is, raises the concept of race to an independent social category, outside and apart from class and the very economic structure of society—a viewpoint promoted for decades by layers of the academic elite, for whom race is a fixation. The proposition that such a bankrupt perspective can provide the basis for serious intellectual discussion only demonstrates the astounding retrogression in American social thought over the past few decades.
Enormous resources have been invested in an effort to declare race the central question in America, while minimizing, and virtually suppressing, any discussion of social inequality. The “conversation” is very much determined by powerful interests, who promote it in politics, media, and the universities.
The effort to abstract race from class inequality came to the fore in the 1970s only after the ebb tide of the Civil Rights movement had set in. Right through the 1960s, it was broadly accepted that what was once called the “negro question” could not be addressed outside of a recognition that the exploitation and the repression of black workers were ultimately class issues bound up with the social structure both in the South and the urban areas of the North. In other words, exploitation, discrimination and repression were understood as racial expressions of an underlying social and economic reality. It followed that no major advance on the race question could be made without challenging this economic and social order.
This was the perspective that underlay Martin Luther King Jr.’s launching of the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968. King sought to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor.” He had determined that the struggle for economic equality was the second, and decisive phase of the Civil Rights movement. A month before the Poor People’s Campaign was to march on Washington, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had traveled to support a strike of city sanitation workers.
Malcolm X, the other famous proponent of the black struggle for equality in the 1960s, had begun to be influenced by the ideas of socialism shortly before his assassination in 1965. “Show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a racist,” he was known to say. King’s and Malcolm X’s thinking was in fact being changed by the social aspirations and the mass movement of black workers in both the South and the North, a movement increasingly focused on economic grievances.
The understanding that race is not independent of the social order, but a product of it, has still deeper roots. W.E.B. Du Bois, who had been a founding member of the NAACP, was, like a great many black workers and intellectuals, electrified by the Russian Revolution of 1917. “Russia was trying to put into the hands of those people who do the world’s work the power to guide and rule the state for the best welfare of the masses,” he concluded. And the social rootedness of race infused the politics and prose of the great African American authors from the 1920s through the 1940s, among them Richard Wright, Zora Neal Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay.
This history is, of course, excluded from the “national conversation on race,” which first developed in the early 1970s. This new outlook on race corresponded to a definite shift in the ruling class’s policy toward minorities. Previously barred from elite colleges and universities, by custom if not by law, beginning in the early 1970s African American youth were recruited and promoted at Ivy League schools and other top institutions. With degrees from the best schools, this new minority elite was then taken in hand and, once again through affirmative action policies, placed into leading positions in academia, the corporate world, government, and the military.
The two developments—the relentless promotion of race as the decisive social category, and the cultivation of a new black elite—were not incidental. The new minority elite found themselves worlds apart from the masses of poor and working class minorities, whose objective social interests were shared by white workers. The promotion of race and “identity politics” was the antidote to this reality, proffering that racial identity was more crucial than class reality.
Obama’s entire career, from his days at Columbia University, is the consummate expression of this process; it was ultimately by virtue of his ethnic identity that Obama was promoted to the presidency as “change” personified. In office, he has prosecuted the most ferocious class offensive against the jobs and living standards of the working class—black, white, and immigrant—in US history.
Obama and the black elite view themselves as the pinnacle of the Civil Rights movement. From their perspective, there is nothing left to achieve for black workers. Obama spelled this out in a recent speech before the NAACP, the erstwhile civil rights organization. “Because Jim Crow laws were overturned, black CEOs today run Fortune 500 companies,” he said. “Because civil rights laws were passed, black mayors, black governors, and members of Congress served in places where they might once have been able [sic] not just to vote but even take a sip of water. And because ordinary people did such extraordinary things ... that has led me to be here tonight as the 44th President of the United States of America.”
The “national conversation on race” is framed in a manner that serves the interests of the political establishment, while focusing on this small section of African Americans who have been promoted to the upper echelons of government and big business. Their individual successes have occurred against a backdrop of ever more devastating poverty and oppression for masses of African American workers and youth.
It is safe to say that in one week there has been more coverage given to the Gates arrest and its supposed racial meaning than the media has produced over the past several months on the devastating social impact upon black workers of the shutdown of auto plants in the Detroit area.
Indeed, in the same speech before the NAACP, Obama said that black working class youth were responsible for their own fate— the enormous unemployment and social misery unleashed by the crisis of capitalism notwithstanding.
“That’s not a reason to get bad grades, that’s not a reason to cut class, that’s not a reason to drop out of school,” the president said. “We’ve got to say to our children ...Your destiny is in your hands ... No excuses ... all those hardships will just make you stronger, better able to compete.”
Among the conditions that Obama dismisses as an “excuse” for “bad grades” is the enormous presence of the police and the criminal justice system in the lives of the youth. Police “racial profiling” of African American, Latino, and immigrant workers is very real. This is because these populations constitute the most impoverished and oppressed sections of the working class. Doubtless Gates’ rage stemmed from the fact that, in spite of his considerable wealth and prestige, he was subjected to the sort of treatment that African American workers and youth in particular face on a daily basis.
Obama’s reaction to the Gates affair stands in sharp contrast to his indifference toward the acquittal of the police in the brutal murder of a young black worker in New York City, Shawn Bell, the night before his wedding, as a perceptive opinion piece in the New York Times recently noted. To that case, then-candidate Obama responded that “the most important thing for people who are concerned about that shooting is to figure out how do we come together and assure those kinds of tragedies don’t happen again.”
But police harassment, heavy-handedness, and violence are facts of life for working class youth, regardless of race. Beatings and “taserings” of young men occur every day; these incidents become news only when they are videotaped, or the victim dies as a result. Police killings take place regularly and are seldom punished.
Young men are constantly cycling in and out of the nation’s massive prison system. The US has only five percent of the world’s population, but 23.6 percent of its prison population. According to a recent survey, one of every 18 men in the US is in prison or on probation or parole. Among black men between the ages of 20 and 34, one in nine is behind bars. The prison population has quadrupled since 1980, the start of the last major class offensive against American workers.
These conditions confronting workers and youth were clearly not Obama’s concern when he waded into the Gates affair. Nor will they be the focus of the latest “national conversation on race,” whose very aim is to obscure this grim social reality as well as its source in the profit system.
The Gates arrest and the “national conversation on race”
By Tom Eley
28 July 2009
The controversy stemming from the arrest of prominent African American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his home on July 16 has dominated the media for a week. It has afforded another opportunity to pose race as the decisive social division and to obscure basic class realities, including the unprecedented assault on the living conditions of the working class being carried out by the Obama administration.
The details of the case, which have been endlessly parsed by the media, are by now well known. As a legal matter, Gates should not have been arrested. But far more revealing is the utilization of this incident to promote what President Barack Obama, whose unfortunate intervention in the matter catapulted it to the top of the news, refers to as a “teachable moment” on race.
The media, Obama, and other politicians have used the controversy surrounding the Gates arrest—which they themselves inflated into a major story—to argue once again that race is the one and only social division in contemporary America that really counts. The incident, they contend, demonstrates that the nation has not moved beyond its racial past, in spite of the election of the first African American president. They insist that what is needed, and what the Gates arrest might initiate, is a new “national conversation on race.”
This extraordinarily pompous formulation, implying that the nation is in the midst of some great intellectual discussion, is nonsense. No such conversation is taking place, on race or any other matter.
The “national conversation,” such as it is, raises the concept of race to an independent social category, outside and apart from class and the very economic structure of society—a viewpoint promoted for decades by layers of the academic elite, for whom race is a fixation. The proposition that such a bankrupt perspective can provide the basis for serious intellectual discussion only demonstrates the astounding retrogression in American social thought over the past few decades.
Enormous resources have been invested in an effort to declare race the central question in America, while minimizing, and virtually suppressing, any discussion of social inequality. The “conversation” is very much determined by powerful interests, who promote it in politics, media, and the universities.
The effort to abstract race from class inequality came to the fore in the 1970s only after the ebb tide of the Civil Rights movement had set in. Right through the 1960s, it was broadly accepted that what was once called the “negro question” could not be addressed outside of a recognition that the exploitation and the repression of black workers were ultimately class issues bound up with the social structure both in the South and the urban areas of the North. In other words, exploitation, discrimination and repression were understood as racial expressions of an underlying social and economic reality. It followed that no major advance on the race question could be made without challenging this economic and social order.
This was the perspective that underlay Martin Luther King Jr.’s launching of the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968. King sought to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor.” He had determined that the struggle for economic equality was the second, and decisive phase of the Civil Rights movement. A month before the Poor People’s Campaign was to march on Washington, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had traveled to support a strike of city sanitation workers.
Malcolm X, the other famous proponent of the black struggle for equality in the 1960s, had begun to be influenced by the ideas of socialism shortly before his assassination in 1965. “Show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a racist,” he was known to say. King’s and Malcolm X’s thinking was in fact being changed by the social aspirations and the mass movement of black workers in both the South and the North, a movement increasingly focused on economic grievances.
The understanding that race is not independent of the social order, but a product of it, has still deeper roots. W.E.B. Du Bois, who had been a founding member of the NAACP, was, like a great many black workers and intellectuals, electrified by the Russian Revolution of 1917. “Russia was trying to put into the hands of those people who do the world’s work the power to guide and rule the state for the best welfare of the masses,” he concluded. And the social rootedness of race infused the politics and prose of the great African American authors from the 1920s through the 1940s, among them Richard Wright, Zora Neal Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay.
This history is, of course, excluded from the “national conversation on race,” which first developed in the early 1970s. This new outlook on race corresponded to a definite shift in the ruling class’s policy toward minorities. Previously barred from elite colleges and universities, by custom if not by law, beginning in the early 1970s African American youth were recruited and promoted at Ivy League schools and other top institutions. With degrees from the best schools, this new minority elite was then taken in hand and, once again through affirmative action policies, placed into leading positions in academia, the corporate world, government, and the military.
The two developments—the relentless promotion of race as the decisive social category, and the cultivation of a new black elite—were not incidental. The new minority elite found themselves worlds apart from the masses of poor and working class minorities, whose objective social interests were shared by white workers. The promotion of race and “identity politics” was the antidote to this reality, proffering that racial identity was more crucial than class reality.
Obama’s entire career, from his days at Columbia University, is the consummate expression of this process; it was ultimately by virtue of his ethnic identity that Obama was promoted to the presidency as “change” personified. In office, he has prosecuted the most ferocious class offensive against the jobs and living standards of the working class—black, white, and immigrant—in US history.
Obama and the black elite view themselves as the pinnacle of the Civil Rights movement. From their perspective, there is nothing left to achieve for black workers. Obama spelled this out in a recent speech before the NAACP, the erstwhile civil rights organization. “Because Jim Crow laws were overturned, black CEOs today run Fortune 500 companies,” he said. “Because civil rights laws were passed, black mayors, black governors, and members of Congress served in places where they might once have been able [sic] not just to vote but even take a sip of water. And because ordinary people did such extraordinary things ... that has led me to be here tonight as the 44th President of the United States of America.”
The “national conversation on race” is framed in a manner that serves the interests of the political establishment, while focusing on this small section of African Americans who have been promoted to the upper echelons of government and big business. Their individual successes have occurred against a backdrop of ever more devastating poverty and oppression for masses of African American workers and youth.
It is safe to say that in one week there has been more coverage given to the Gates arrest and its supposed racial meaning than the media has produced over the past several months on the devastating social impact upon black workers of the shutdown of auto plants in the Detroit area.
Indeed, in the same speech before the NAACP, Obama said that black working class youth were responsible for their own fate— the enormous unemployment and social misery unleashed by the crisis of capitalism notwithstanding.
“That’s not a reason to get bad grades, that’s not a reason to cut class, that’s not a reason to drop out of school,” the president said. “We’ve got to say to our children ...Your destiny is in your hands ... No excuses ... all those hardships will just make you stronger, better able to compete.”
Among the conditions that Obama dismisses as an “excuse” for “bad grades” is the enormous presence of the police and the criminal justice system in the lives of the youth. Police “racial profiling” of African American, Latino, and immigrant workers is very real. This is because these populations constitute the most impoverished and oppressed sections of the working class. Doubtless Gates’ rage stemmed from the fact that, in spite of his considerable wealth and prestige, he was subjected to the sort of treatment that African American workers and youth in particular face on a daily basis.
Obama’s reaction to the Gates affair stands in sharp contrast to his indifference toward the acquittal of the police in the brutal murder of a young black worker in New York City, Shawn Bell, the night before his wedding, as a perceptive opinion piece in the New York Times recently noted. To that case, then-candidate Obama responded that “the most important thing for people who are concerned about that shooting is to figure out how do we come together and assure those kinds of tragedies don’t happen again.”
But police harassment, heavy-handedness, and violence are facts of life for working class youth, regardless of race. Beatings and “taserings” of young men occur every day; these incidents become news only when they are videotaped, or the victim dies as a result. Police killings take place regularly and are seldom punished.
Young men are constantly cycling in and out of the nation’s massive prison system. The US has only five percent of the world’s population, but 23.6 percent of its prison population. According to a recent survey, one of every 18 men in the US is in prison or on probation or parole. Among black men between the ages of 20 and 34, one in nine is behind bars. The prison population has quadrupled since 1980, the start of the last major class offensive against American workers.
These conditions confronting workers and youth were clearly not Obama’s concern when he waded into the Gates affair. Nor will they be the focus of the latest “national conversation on race,” whose very aim is to obscure this grim social reality as well as its source in the profit system.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
White Men Can't Judge
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/keith-boykin/white-men-cant-judge_b_244358.html
Keith Boykin is a CNBC contributor and editor of The Daily Voice.
July 24, 2009
White Men Can't Judge
The most disturbing aspect of the news coverage about Henry Louis Gates' arrest has been the running commentary by white men about appropriate decorum for black men.
Of course, it was no surprise that blowhards like Rush Limbaugh would jump in to defend the white police officer and impugn Professor Gates. Nor that the conservative radio talk show host would turn his attack to President Obama after the president labeled the Cambridge Police Department behavior "stupid."
Limbaugh's an easy case. More troubling is the commentary from Sergeant James Crowley himself, an "expert" on racial profiling who still doesn't understand why a black man would be upset to be accused of breaking into his own house.
"From the time he opened the door it seemed that [Gates] was very upset, very put off that I was there in the first place," Sergeant Crowley told Boston sports radio station WEEI this week. "Not just what he said, but the tone in which he said it, just seemed very peculiar -- even more so now that I know how educated he is."
So educated people can't get upset?
I'm a Harvard graduate, and I reacted angrily just a few days ago when a New York City police officer stopped me Sunday inside a Manhattan subway station and accused me of jumping the turnstiles, which I clearly had not done. I made a scene, much like Professor Gates probably did, because I felt I was being unfairly singled out.
After I proved that I had entered the station legally, an unknown black woman standing nearby came to my defense. "Do you know who he is? He worked in the White House," she said, much to my surprise.
In fact, it's the "educated" and "successful" black men who are most likely to become indignant in racial profiling situations. Many younger black men I know suffer through random police stops on a regular basis and have grown accustomed to the procedure. But older, middle-class and upper-income blacks are often shocked when the police come for them, too. Yet in the eyes of the police, a black Harvard professor is just another potential suspect.
The officer in the Gates case wrote in his police report that the professor exhibited "loud and tumultuous behavior, in a public place." Actually, the professor was in a private place until the officer -- who admitted in the report that Gates "appeared to be a resident" -- asked him to step outside. But even in public, why can't a black man be loud when he's angry about real or perceived police harassment?
And why wouldn't an expert in racial profiling understand the long history of police abuse of African American men and consider that in evaluating Gates' response to the situation? After everything black men have been through in this country, from slavery to segregation to racial denialism, it's a wonder that well-educated black men like Gates and Obama are usually so controlled.
That's what CNN anchor Lou Dobbs seemed to miss Thursday night on his show when he asked CNN contributor Roland Martin to calm down in responding to the ridiculous charges about Barack Obama's citizenship. "You're yelling and you're getting awful excited about something that doesn't require this level of remarks," Dobbs scolded Martin.
Dobbs had just finished expressing his doubts about Professor Gates in a segment with CNN's Soledad O'Brien when he expressed sympathy with those who questioned the authenticity of Obama's birth certificate. So let me get this straight. We're supposed to believe a lone white police officer in Massachusetts but not believe the entire state of Hawaii about Obama's birth?
Yes, in our society, white men are considered believable and those pesky people of color (Hawaiians or African Americans) are not. That's why all the evening news anchors on every news network (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS, NBC) are white, and nearly all of those are men. And that's why a 42-year-old cop is more credible than a distinguished 58-year-old Harvard professor.
No matter how much progress we've made, black men still don't have the right to get upset and indignant, even in their own homes. Crotchety old white guys like Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs can foam at the mouth on radio and television all day about immigrants and blacks, but a black male public figure can't complain too loudly. That would be ungrateful and undignified.
And it doesn't matter what your status if you're a black man. A black TV personality can't get upset with a white guy on CNN. A black White House veteran can't get upset with the NYPD on the subway. A black Harvard professor can't get upset with the Cambridge Police in his house. And apparently a black president can't get upset in his house either.
She won't say it, but Judge Sonia Sotomayor was right when she spoke about a wise Latina judge often reaching a better decision than a wise white man. Many white men still can't judge these situations fairly because they don't understand what it means to be black in America.
Whether you're a pundit, a professor or the president, if you're a black man you better know your place.
Follow Keith Boykin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/keithboykin
Keith Boykin is a CNBC contributor and editor of The Daily Voice.
July 24, 2009
White Men Can't Judge
The most disturbing aspect of the news coverage about Henry Louis Gates' arrest has been the running commentary by white men about appropriate decorum for black men.
Of course, it was no surprise that blowhards like Rush Limbaugh would jump in to defend the white police officer and impugn Professor Gates. Nor that the conservative radio talk show host would turn his attack to President Obama after the president labeled the Cambridge Police Department behavior "stupid."
Limbaugh's an easy case. More troubling is the commentary from Sergeant James Crowley himself, an "expert" on racial profiling who still doesn't understand why a black man would be upset to be accused of breaking into his own house.
"From the time he opened the door it seemed that [Gates] was very upset, very put off that I was there in the first place," Sergeant Crowley told Boston sports radio station WEEI this week. "Not just what he said, but the tone in which he said it, just seemed very peculiar -- even more so now that I know how educated he is."
So educated people can't get upset?
I'm a Harvard graduate, and I reacted angrily just a few days ago when a New York City police officer stopped me Sunday inside a Manhattan subway station and accused me of jumping the turnstiles, which I clearly had not done. I made a scene, much like Professor Gates probably did, because I felt I was being unfairly singled out.
After I proved that I had entered the station legally, an unknown black woman standing nearby came to my defense. "Do you know who he is? He worked in the White House," she said, much to my surprise.
In fact, it's the "educated" and "successful" black men who are most likely to become indignant in racial profiling situations. Many younger black men I know suffer through random police stops on a regular basis and have grown accustomed to the procedure. But older, middle-class and upper-income blacks are often shocked when the police come for them, too. Yet in the eyes of the police, a black Harvard professor is just another potential suspect.
The officer in the Gates case wrote in his police report that the professor exhibited "loud and tumultuous behavior, in a public place." Actually, the professor was in a private place until the officer -- who admitted in the report that Gates "appeared to be a resident" -- asked him to step outside. But even in public, why can't a black man be loud when he's angry about real or perceived police harassment?
And why wouldn't an expert in racial profiling understand the long history of police abuse of African American men and consider that in evaluating Gates' response to the situation? After everything black men have been through in this country, from slavery to segregation to racial denialism, it's a wonder that well-educated black men like Gates and Obama are usually so controlled.
That's what CNN anchor Lou Dobbs seemed to miss Thursday night on his show when he asked CNN contributor Roland Martin to calm down in responding to the ridiculous charges about Barack Obama's citizenship. "You're yelling and you're getting awful excited about something that doesn't require this level of remarks," Dobbs scolded Martin.
Dobbs had just finished expressing his doubts about Professor Gates in a segment with CNN's Soledad O'Brien when he expressed sympathy with those who questioned the authenticity of Obama's birth certificate. So let me get this straight. We're supposed to believe a lone white police officer in Massachusetts but not believe the entire state of Hawaii about Obama's birth?
Yes, in our society, white men are considered believable and those pesky people of color (Hawaiians or African Americans) are not. That's why all the evening news anchors on every news network (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS, NBC) are white, and nearly all of those are men. And that's why a 42-year-old cop is more credible than a distinguished 58-year-old Harvard professor.
No matter how much progress we've made, black men still don't have the right to get upset and indignant, even in their own homes. Crotchety old white guys like Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs can foam at the mouth on radio and television all day about immigrants and blacks, but a black male public figure can't complain too loudly. That would be ungrateful and undignified.
And it doesn't matter what your status if you're a black man. A black TV personality can't get upset with a white guy on CNN. A black White House veteran can't get upset with the NYPD on the subway. A black Harvard professor can't get upset with the Cambridge Police in his house. And apparently a black president can't get upset in his house either.
She won't say it, but Judge Sonia Sotomayor was right when she spoke about a wise Latina judge often reaching a better decision than a wise white man. Many white men still can't judge these situations fairly because they don't understand what it means to be black in America.
Whether you're a pundit, a professor or the president, if you're a black man you better know your place.
Follow Keith Boykin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/keithboykin
Statement on the Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr.
http://www.theroot.com/views/lawyers-statement-arrest-henry-louis-gates-jr
Lawyer's Statement on the Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Charles Ogletree gives Gates' side of the story in controversial arrest of The Root's editor-in-chief.
July 20, 2009
This brief statement is being submitted on behalf of my client, friend, and colleague, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. This is a statement concerning the arrest of Professor Gates. On July 16, 2009, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 58, the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor of Harvard University, was headed from Logan airport to his home [in] Cambridge after spending a week in China, where he was filming his new PBS documentary entitled “Faces of America.” Professor Gates was driven to his home by a driver for a local car company. Professor Gates attempted to enter his front door, but the door was damaged. Professor Gates then entered his rear door with his key, turned off his alarm, and again attempted to open the front door. With the help of his driver they were able to force the front door open, and then the driver carried Professor Gates’ luggage into his home.
Professor Gates immediately called the Harvard Real Estate office to report the damage to his door and requested that it be repaired immediately. As he was talking to the Harvard Real Estate office on his portable phone in his house, he observed a uniformed officer on his front porch. When Professor Gates opened the door, the officer immediately asked him to step outside. Professor Gates remained inside his home and asked the officer why he was there. The officer indicated that he was responding to a 911 call about a breaking and entering in progress at this address. Professor Gates informed the officer that he lived there and was a faculty member at Harvard University. The officer then asked Professor Gates whether he could prove that he lived there and taught at Harvard. Professor Gates said that he could, and turned to walk into his kitchen, where he had left his wallet. The officer followed him. Professor Gates handed both his Harvard University identification and his valid Massachusetts driver’s license to the officer. Both include Professor Gates’ photograph, and the license includes his address.
Professor Gates then asked the police officer if he would give him his name and his badge number. He made this request several times. The officer did not produce any identification nor did he respond to Professor Gates’ request for this information. After an additional request by Professor Gates for the officer’s name and badge number, the officer then turned and left the kitchen of Professor Gates’ home without ever acknowledging who he was or if there were charges against Professor Gates. As Professor Gates followed the officer to his own front door, he was astonished to see several police officers gathered on his front porch. Professor Gates asked the officer’s colleagues for his name and badge number. As Professor Gates stepped onto his front porch, the officer who had been inside and who had examined his identification, said to him, “Thank you for accommodating my earlier request,” and then placed Professor Gates under arrest. He was handcuffed on his own front porch.
Professor Gates was taken to the Cambridge Police Station where he remained for approximately 4 hours before being released that evening. Professor Gates’ counsel has been cooperating with the Middlesex District Attorneys Office, and the City of Cambridge, and is hopeful that this matter will be resolved promptly. Professor Gates will not be making any other statements concerning this matter at this time.
Lawyer's Statement on the Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Charles Ogletree gives Gates' side of the story in controversial arrest of The Root's editor-in-chief.
July 20, 2009
This brief statement is being submitted on behalf of my client, friend, and colleague, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. This is a statement concerning the arrest of Professor Gates. On July 16, 2009, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 58, the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor of Harvard University, was headed from Logan airport to his home [in] Cambridge after spending a week in China, where he was filming his new PBS documentary entitled “Faces of America.” Professor Gates was driven to his home by a driver for a local car company. Professor Gates attempted to enter his front door, but the door was damaged. Professor Gates then entered his rear door with his key, turned off his alarm, and again attempted to open the front door. With the help of his driver they were able to force the front door open, and then the driver carried Professor Gates’ luggage into his home.
Professor Gates immediately called the Harvard Real Estate office to report the damage to his door and requested that it be repaired immediately. As he was talking to the Harvard Real Estate office on his portable phone in his house, he observed a uniformed officer on his front porch. When Professor Gates opened the door, the officer immediately asked him to step outside. Professor Gates remained inside his home and asked the officer why he was there. The officer indicated that he was responding to a 911 call about a breaking and entering in progress at this address. Professor Gates informed the officer that he lived there and was a faculty member at Harvard University. The officer then asked Professor Gates whether he could prove that he lived there and taught at Harvard. Professor Gates said that he could, and turned to walk into his kitchen, where he had left his wallet. The officer followed him. Professor Gates handed both his Harvard University identification and his valid Massachusetts driver’s license to the officer. Both include Professor Gates’ photograph, and the license includes his address.
Professor Gates then asked the police officer if he would give him his name and his badge number. He made this request several times. The officer did not produce any identification nor did he respond to Professor Gates’ request for this information. After an additional request by Professor Gates for the officer’s name and badge number, the officer then turned and left the kitchen of Professor Gates’ home without ever acknowledging who he was or if there were charges against Professor Gates. As Professor Gates followed the officer to his own front door, he was astonished to see several police officers gathered on his front porch. Professor Gates asked the officer’s colleagues for his name and badge number. As Professor Gates stepped onto his front porch, the officer who had been inside and who had examined his identification, said to him, “Thank you for accommodating my earlier request,” and then placed Professor Gates under arrest. He was handcuffed on his own front porch.
Professor Gates was taken to the Cambridge Police Station where he remained for approximately 4 hours before being released that evening. Professor Gates’ counsel has been cooperating with the Middlesex District Attorneys Office, and the City of Cambridge, and is hopeful that this matter will be resolved promptly. Professor Gates will not be making any other statements concerning this matter at this time.
How Cambridge police stared down a president
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0725/p02s01-usgn.html
How Cambridge police stared down a president
The police union's combative press conference Friday was an example of how the profession closes ranks in times of trouble.
By Patrik Jonsson Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the July 25, 2009 edition
Mere hours after the police union of Cambridge, Mass., brazenly demanded an apology from the president of the United States, it – in essence – got it.
While President Obama's unscheduled appearance at a routine White House press conference was not an explicit apology, Mr. Obama acknowledged that he now regretted his choice of words in a Wednesday night press conference. He had said that Sgt. James Crowley "acted stupidly" for arresting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. on his own front porch.
With his comments Friday – including his promise to bring Crowley and Professor Gates to the White House for an informal get-together – Obama went some way toward removing the damage his earlier comment made. Many police officers and experts said the comment had driven a wedge into what had been a collegial relationship between the White House and police.
But the union's hard line – successfully staring down a president – is a window into the so-called Thin Blue Line – the "Band of Brothers" mentality that draws police departments closer in times of crisis.
It is a product of the nature of policing, with officers relying on each other, in some cases, to protect their own lives. But, to some experts, the attitude also highlights a "bunker mentality" that can stymie community relations and even hinder fair investigations.
"When an individual police officer is attacked and his motives impugned, the force will close ranks. It doesn't matter if it's a man of the cloth, an elderly grandmother, or the president of the United States, the union is going to respond," says Norm Stamper, the former police chief of Seattle.
In a combative news conference Friday, the president of the Cambridge Police Superior Officers Association, Dennis O'Connor, said suggestions that race played a role in Crowley's actions were unwarranted and need correction.
"Whatever may be the history, we deeply resent the implications and reject any suggestion that in this case or any other case that they've allowed a person's race to direct their activities. However, we hope they will reflect upon their past comments and apologize to the men and women of the Cambridge Police Department," said Mr. O'Connor.
In his surprise appearance later Friday, Obama did not back down from his opinion that Crowley's decision to arrest Gates for disorderly conduct was an "overreaction." But he added that he unintentionally contributed to "ratcheting up" the situation. "In my choice of words, I unfortunately gave the impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sergeant Crowley specifically, and I could've calibrated those words differently," he said.
Police officers agree. "One of the things that was so impressive to me about the president's statement is that he said bluntly what was on his mind and in his heart [as the first black president]," says Mr. Stamper. "What did trouble me, though, was the use of the term 'stupid.' "
In the end, that word acted to motivate and unify one of the most tightly knit professions in the country.
The entire dust-up exemplifies "that everybody behind the badge is on the same team and everybody else is on the other team," says Radley Balko, a commentator at Reason Magazine who has written widely on the growing "militarization" of American police. "It's a classic bunker mentality."
But Obama took strides toward easing tensions Friday. "The president has gone a long way of undoing the harm that was done by the original comment," says Jim Pasco, director of the Fraternal Order of Police's legislative division in Washington.
How Cambridge police stared down a president
The police union's combative press conference Friday was an example of how the profession closes ranks in times of trouble.
By Patrik Jonsson Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the July 25, 2009 edition
Mere hours after the police union of Cambridge, Mass., brazenly demanded an apology from the president of the United States, it – in essence – got it.
While President Obama's unscheduled appearance at a routine White House press conference was not an explicit apology, Mr. Obama acknowledged that he now regretted his choice of words in a Wednesday night press conference. He had said that Sgt. James Crowley "acted stupidly" for arresting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. on his own front porch.
With his comments Friday – including his promise to bring Crowley and Professor Gates to the White House for an informal get-together – Obama went some way toward removing the damage his earlier comment made. Many police officers and experts said the comment had driven a wedge into what had been a collegial relationship between the White House and police.
But the union's hard line – successfully staring down a president – is a window into the so-called Thin Blue Line – the "Band of Brothers" mentality that draws police departments closer in times of crisis.
It is a product of the nature of policing, with officers relying on each other, in some cases, to protect their own lives. But, to some experts, the attitude also highlights a "bunker mentality" that can stymie community relations and even hinder fair investigations.
"When an individual police officer is attacked and his motives impugned, the force will close ranks. It doesn't matter if it's a man of the cloth, an elderly grandmother, or the president of the United States, the union is going to respond," says Norm Stamper, the former police chief of Seattle.
In a combative news conference Friday, the president of the Cambridge Police Superior Officers Association, Dennis O'Connor, said suggestions that race played a role in Crowley's actions were unwarranted and need correction.
"Whatever may be the history, we deeply resent the implications and reject any suggestion that in this case or any other case that they've allowed a person's race to direct their activities. However, we hope they will reflect upon their past comments and apologize to the men and women of the Cambridge Police Department," said Mr. O'Connor.
In his surprise appearance later Friday, Obama did not back down from his opinion that Crowley's decision to arrest Gates for disorderly conduct was an "overreaction." But he added that he unintentionally contributed to "ratcheting up" the situation. "In my choice of words, I unfortunately gave the impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sergeant Crowley specifically, and I could've calibrated those words differently," he said.
Police officers agree. "One of the things that was so impressive to me about the president's statement is that he said bluntly what was on his mind and in his heart [as the first black president]," says Mr. Stamper. "What did trouble me, though, was the use of the term 'stupid.' "
In the end, that word acted to motivate and unify one of the most tightly knit professions in the country.
The entire dust-up exemplifies "that everybody behind the badge is on the same team and everybody else is on the other team," says Radley Balko, a commentator at Reason Magazine who has written widely on the growing "militarization" of American police. "It's a classic bunker mentality."
But Obama took strides toward easing tensions Friday. "The president has gone a long way of undoing the harm that was done by the original comment," says Jim Pasco, director of the Fraternal Order of Police's legislative division in Washington.
Boston Cops Believe Your Home is Their Castle
http://www.mathaba.net/news/?x=621202
Boston Cops Believe Your Home is Their Castle
2009/07/27
By Christopher Hansen,
Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his home Thursday, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for being discourteous to police officers that falsely accused him of breaking into his own home.
Professor Gates before the arrest.
Professor Gates following the arrest.
Police told this reporter that, “This uppity Black dude” had obviously broken into this nice house in a white neighborhood and replaced all the pictures of the family that actually lived there, with pictures of black people, in an attempt to fool officers.
When officers discovered that Professor Gates actually owned the home they were so surprised that they arrested Gates anyway for not using a proper tone and showing them the respect they believed they deserved because they are obvious heroes that protect the rights of Americans every day.
“Remember,” said one officer that wanted to remain anonymous, “Officers have to risk their lives dealing with obnoxious Harvard professors and other undesirables that may or may not be in their own kitchens everyday. We must be able to come into their kitchens without being invited and without a warrant to check their government issued IDs, ensure their are no outstanding arrest warrants or unpaid taxes or late library fees and most importantly that there are no white women in the house. Then if all of that checks out and these obvious anti-American Arab pro-terrorist Obama supporters treat us with proper respect then we can let them go without arresting them. But that was not the case here as this guy had the nerve to complain about his treatment.”
The Cambridge Police Chief said he would look into it but since Professor Gates had obviously raised his voice to the officers and because his officers said Gates did indeed raise his voice to them he felt that Gates would probably do a bit of time and that it would be well deserved.
The Cambridge Police Chief told this reporter, “Police must be treated like the heroes they are. Americans that do not remember this may be beaten without due process and they had better just get used to it. We must ensure that our number one priority is that officers must come home safe every night and without their egos being bruised while on duty. Police, after all, are the only people we are required to protect and serve.”
Naturally this article was written tongue in cheek… or was it?
As a victim of police trampling the Constitution, law and procedure in my own front yard after we called them, nothing I have written here is in the least improbable.
So call the police at your own risk and EXPECT them to lie.
Read more from Christopher Hansen at Independent American News.
Boston Cops Believe Your Home is Their Castle
2009/07/27
By Christopher Hansen,
Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his home Thursday, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for being discourteous to police officers that falsely accused him of breaking into his own home.
Professor Gates before the arrest.
Professor Gates following the arrest.Police told this reporter that, “This uppity Black dude” had obviously broken into this nice house in a white neighborhood and replaced all the pictures of the family that actually lived there, with pictures of black people, in an attempt to fool officers.
When officers discovered that Professor Gates actually owned the home they were so surprised that they arrested Gates anyway for not using a proper tone and showing them the respect they believed they deserved because they are obvious heroes that protect the rights of Americans every day.
“Remember,” said one officer that wanted to remain anonymous, “Officers have to risk their lives dealing with obnoxious Harvard professors and other undesirables that may or may not be in their own kitchens everyday. We must be able to come into their kitchens without being invited and without a warrant to check their government issued IDs, ensure their are no outstanding arrest warrants or unpaid taxes or late library fees and most importantly that there are no white women in the house. Then if all of that checks out and these obvious anti-American Arab pro-terrorist Obama supporters treat us with proper respect then we can let them go without arresting them. But that was not the case here as this guy had the nerve to complain about his treatment.”
The Cambridge Police Chief said he would look into it but since Professor Gates had obviously raised his voice to the officers and because his officers said Gates did indeed raise his voice to them he felt that Gates would probably do a bit of time and that it would be well deserved.
The Cambridge Police Chief told this reporter, “Police must be treated like the heroes they are. Americans that do not remember this may be beaten without due process and they had better just get used to it. We must ensure that our number one priority is that officers must come home safe every night and without their egos being bruised while on duty. Police, after all, are the only people we are required to protect and serve.”
Naturally this article was written tongue in cheek… or was it?
As a victim of police trampling the Constitution, law and procedure in my own front yard after we called them, nothing I have written here is in the least improbable.
So call the police at your own risk and EXPECT them to lie.
Read more from Christopher Hansen at Independent American News.
Racial profiling or 'tempest in a teapot'?
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0722/p02s01-usju.html
Gates arrest: racial profiling or 'tempest in a teapot'?
The city of Cambridge, Mass., has dropped its charges against a Harvard professor who alleges he was arrested for breaking into his own house only because he is black.
By Patrik Jonsson Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the July 21, 2009 edition
Prosecutors in Cambridge, Mass., on Tuesday dropped disorderly conduct charges against Henry Louis Gates, a prominent professor at Harvard University and author of multiple books about the black experience in America.
But Mr. Gates' arrest on the front porch of his own home last week became a moment of national reflection, with Gates insisting that the incident was evidence of the persistence of racial profiling – even in one of America's most liberal cities.
Gates has told The Washington Post that he now intends to do a documentary on racial profiling – an idea that had "never crossed his mind" before now. The "criminal justice system is rotten," he said.
Gates was returning from filming a TV project called "Faces of America" in China last Thursday. According to the police report, police received a call that two men black were trying to break into Gates's house. In fact, the two men were Gates and his driver, who were trying to open the front door, which was jammed.
Both sides have suggested that the other was argumentative. The police report says Gates eventually became verbally abusive, accusing the officer of suspecting him simply because he was black. He was arrested soon after and placed in jail for four hours.
Cambridge police officials claim that the incident was an unfortunate escalation of wills. "I think what went wrong is that you had two human beings that were reacting ... and cooler heads did not prevail," said Cambridge police spokeswoman Kelly Downes. "It wasn't Professor Gates's best moment, and it was not the Cambridge Police Department's best moment."
Law enforcement analysts are inclined to agree, suggesting that the incident may have been only a "tempest in a teapot."
"The best motto for a police officer is that sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me," says George Kirkham, a former police officer and now a professor of criminology at Florida State University. "People wind up venting, and you have to let them vent."
Moreover, police officers should be particularly aware of historical injustices suffered by African Americans, he adds: "Blacks have had experiences with bullhorns and dogs in the South, and those wounds go deep – they're more sensitive and we need to realize that."
Commentators have taken both sides. Garrard McClendon, a black Chicago talk show host, called Gates's cries of racism "weak." But David Bernstein of the legal blog, the Volokh Conspiracy, writes: "Yelling at a cop isn't a crime."
Twenty-three states, including Massachusetts, have enacted legislation banning racial profiling. But such practices – stopping suspects on the basis of what they look like – are still prevalent, some say. A recent study showed that 89 percent of traffic stops in New York City involved non-whites.
"We are a country founded on Jeffersonian ideals, and people don't like government in their lives," says Professor Kirkham. "[Police] need to be aware of that."
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Gates chastises officer after authorities drop charge
http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/07/charges_to_be_d.html
Gates chastises officer after authorities agree to drop criminal charge
July 21, 2009
Police led Henry Louis Gates Jr. away in handcuffs after his arrest on Thursday at his home in Cambridge.
By Tracy Jan, Globe Staff
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. chastised a Cambridge police officer today and demanded an apology after authorities agreed to drop a disorderly conduct charge against the renowned African-American scholar.
Gates accused the officer who arrested him at his Cambridge home of having a "broad imagination" when he summarized last Thursday's confrontation in police reports, and he denied making several inflammatory remarks.
“I believe the police officer should apologize to me for what he knows he did that was wrong,” Gates said in a phone interview from his other home in Martha’s Vineyard. “If he apologizes sincerely, I am willing to forgive him. And if he admits his error, I am willing to educate him about the history of racism in America and the issue of racial profiling … That’s what I do for a living.”
Gates, 58, was handcuffed and booked last Thursday following a police investigation into a suspected burglary at his Ware Street home near Harvard Square. A passerby spotted Gates and his driver, who had dropped him off from the airport, trying to push the front door open and called the police. The door had been jammed. Police responded and arrested Gates after they said he became belligerent.
Earlier today, the Middlesex district attorney's office announced plans to drop criminal charges against Gates. The City of Cambridge and the police department recommended today that prosecutors not pursue charges in a joint statement from authorities and Gates that called the confrontation "regrettable and unfortunate."
"This incident should not be viewed as one that demeans the character and reputation of professor Gates or the character of the Cambridge Police Department," the statement said. "All parties agree that this is a just resolution to an unfortunate set of circumstances."
Cambridge Mayor E. Denise Simmons said in a statement that the controversy illustrated "that Cambridge must continue finding ways to address matters of race and class in a frank, honest, and productive manner."
The imbroglio elicited reactions from across the country about race relations and profiling. Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, said today on MSNBC that even though "we've elected an African-American president … these kinds of profiling do, in fact, take place."
"We're a long way from putting this issue behind us," said Clyburn, a Democrat and former chairman of Congressional Black Caucus.
This afternoon in an interview, Gates said he never yelled at the officer other than to demand his name and badge number, which he said the officer refused to give. The officer, Sergeant James Crowley, said in the police report that he did state his name. He also said Gates unleashed a verbal tirade, calling him racist, telling him that he did not know who he was messing with, and threatening to speak to his “mama” outside.
“The police report is full of this man’s broad imagination,” Gates said in response to a question on whether he had said any of the quotes in the report. “I said, ‘Are you not giving me your name and badge number because I’m a black man in America?’ . . . He treated my request with scorn. . . I was suffering from a bronchial infection. I couldn’t have yelled. . . I don’t walk around calling white people racist.”
Gates continued, “I’m outraged. I shouldn’t have been treated this way but it makes me so keenly aware of how many people every day experience abuses in the criminal justice system ... No citizen should tolerate that kind of poor behavior by an officer of the law. . . This is really about justice for the least amongst us.”
Because of his arrest, Gates said he plans to make racial profiling and prison reform central intellectual and political issues he wants to explore. He’s also considering a new documentary on racial profiling.
“Because of the capricious whim of one disturbed person . . . I am now a black man with a prison record,” Gates said. “You can look at my mug shot on the Internet.”
Gates chastises officer after authorities agree to drop criminal charge
July 21, 2009
Police led Henry Louis Gates Jr. away in handcuffs after his arrest on Thursday at his home in Cambridge.
By Tracy Jan, Globe Staff
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. chastised a Cambridge police officer today and demanded an apology after authorities agreed to drop a disorderly conduct charge against the renowned African-American scholar.
Gates accused the officer who arrested him at his Cambridge home of having a "broad imagination" when he summarized last Thursday's confrontation in police reports, and he denied making several inflammatory remarks.
“I believe the police officer should apologize to me for what he knows he did that was wrong,” Gates said in a phone interview from his other home in Martha’s Vineyard. “If he apologizes sincerely, I am willing to forgive him. And if he admits his error, I am willing to educate him about the history of racism in America and the issue of racial profiling … That’s what I do for a living.”
Gates, 58, was handcuffed and booked last Thursday following a police investigation into a suspected burglary at his Ware Street home near Harvard Square. A passerby spotted Gates and his driver, who had dropped him off from the airport, trying to push the front door open and called the police. The door had been jammed. Police responded and arrested Gates after they said he became belligerent.
Earlier today, the Middlesex district attorney's office announced plans to drop criminal charges against Gates. The City of Cambridge and the police department recommended today that prosecutors not pursue charges in a joint statement from authorities and Gates that called the confrontation "regrettable and unfortunate."
"This incident should not be viewed as one that demeans the character and reputation of professor Gates or the character of the Cambridge Police Department," the statement said. "All parties agree that this is a just resolution to an unfortunate set of circumstances."
Cambridge Mayor E. Denise Simmons said in a statement that the controversy illustrated "that Cambridge must continue finding ways to address matters of race and class in a frank, honest, and productive manner."
The imbroglio elicited reactions from across the country about race relations and profiling. Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, said today on MSNBC that even though "we've elected an African-American president … these kinds of profiling do, in fact, take place."
"We're a long way from putting this issue behind us," said Clyburn, a Democrat and former chairman of Congressional Black Caucus.
This afternoon in an interview, Gates said he never yelled at the officer other than to demand his name and badge number, which he said the officer refused to give. The officer, Sergeant James Crowley, said in the police report that he did state his name. He also said Gates unleashed a verbal tirade, calling him racist, telling him that he did not know who he was messing with, and threatening to speak to his “mama” outside.
“The police report is full of this man’s broad imagination,” Gates said in response to a question on whether he had said any of the quotes in the report. “I said, ‘Are you not giving me your name and badge number because I’m a black man in America?’ . . . He treated my request with scorn. . . I was suffering from a bronchial infection. I couldn’t have yelled. . . I don’t walk around calling white people racist.”
Gates continued, “I’m outraged. I shouldn’t have been treated this way but it makes me so keenly aware of how many people every day experience abuses in the criminal justice system ... No citizen should tolerate that kind of poor behavior by an officer of the law. . . This is really about justice for the least amongst us.”
Because of his arrest, Gates said he plans to make racial profiling and prison reform central intellectual and political issues he wants to explore. He’s also considering a new documentary on racial profiling.
“Because of the capricious whim of one disturbed person . . . I am now a black man with a prison record,” Gates said. “You can look at my mug shot on the Internet.”
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