Earlier this week, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested for ‘tumultuous’ behaviour by a police officer responding to a neighbour’s 911 call about a break and enter attempt that was allegedly in progress. According to a statement released by his lawyer, Gates had just returned from China and had been driven to his house by a taxi. Unable to open his front door, he entered his house through the back door, switched off his alarm, then returned to his front porch to force the door open so the taxi driver could take in his luggage.
When a policeman arrived in response to the 911 call, Gates chose not to step outside of his house but showed his Harvard faculty identification and Massachusetts driver’s licence as proof that he lived on the premises. The matter might have ended there, but when Gates asked the policeman to identify himself he was ignored – the official police report disputes this claim. Gates refused to let the matter drop and continued to press for the officer’s badge number. When he followed the officer onto his porch Gates was then, depending on your point of view, either justifiably arrested for ‘tumultous’ behaviour by a police officer trying to do his job, or he became yet another victim of the institutional racism which lies at the heart of American criminal justice. (The charges against Gates were dropped four hours after his arrest.)
Within hours news of the arrest had spread across newspaper websites and blogs. It even appeared on CNN. The story was given a second life by President Obama’s observation that the police officers had acted “stupidly” given that Prof Gates had already identified himself and cleared himself of any suspicion that he was trying to break and enter. Predictably, the news coverage that followed was filled with deeply polarized views of whether Prof Gates had over-reacted, or had been legitimately angry at what seems to have been an instance of racial profiling.
As a leading scholar of African-American history and one of the country’s most respected commentators on black life in the US, Gates could hardly have been surprised by the officer’s skepticism, yet he seems to have been wholly unprepared for his brusque treatment. Recounting the incident for the online daily ‘The Root,’ Gates remarked on the officer’s rudeness: “He didn’t say, ‘Excuse me, sir, is there a disturbance here, is this your house?’—he demanded that I step out on the porch, and I don’t think he would have done that if I was a white person.” Once on the porch, of course, Gates could be more easily arrested for breaking and entering. Gates also told the Washington Post that although he knew “every incident in the history of racism from slavery to Jim Crow segregation. I haven’t even come close to being arrested. I would have said it was impossible.”
Last year, when it became clear that Barack Obama was a serious presidential candidate, there was a lot of talk about his success signalling the dawn of ‘post-racial’ America. Few white pundits believed that by itself Obama’s election could rectify America’s longstanding race relations problems, but there was a general hope that a new dialogue between black and white America might begin. Black commentators were noticeably less hopeful. In a speech to the Commonwealth Club of California last month, Michael Eric Dyson pointedly asked “What does it mean to be post-racial? It doesn’t mean to be post-white. White Americans have never been thought to think of themselves as a specific ethnic formation in the broader context of American ethnicity or race.” Dyson then went on to describe ‘blackness’ as “the disturbing, formidable presence of a negative that cannot be totally eradicated.”
Gates himself has called the idea of post-racial America laughable and made the telling observation that despite the election of a black president, “[t]here haven’t been fundamental structural changes in America. There’s been a very important symbolic change and that is the election of Barack Obama. But the only black people who truly live in a post-racial world in America all live in a very nice house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”
Perhaps Gates and Dyson are right to be so skeptical; after all it is an undeniable fact that African-Americans are disproportionately targeted by the criminal justice system. Also, after Katrina there can be no pretense that black poverty and distress stir the national consciousness in the same way that white suffering does. Given the relative paucity of black CEOs, senators and congressmen, Obama seems more like one of Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘outliers’ than a sign of things to come. Nevertheless, it may be worth noting that after Gates was arrested he received “thousands of e-mails and Facebook messages.” A tabloid newspaper also published a story in which the arresting officer strenuously denied being motivated by racism, even going so far as to point out that he “once gave black basketball star Reggie Lewis mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.” Straws in the wind, perhaps, but also just possibly signs that while the national ‘conversation on race’ may not be as full-voiced as it ought to be in the age of Obama, it is still very much in progress. America’s long overdue reckoning with racism, past and present, will not happen overnight, but now that the conversation can move beyond the confines of the usual stultifying stereotypes – Rodney King, rap music, drug dealers, welfare queens, ghettoes and drug dealers – to include the racial profiling of a top-flight academic at Harvard University, Prof Gates’ arrest may yet, despite his skepticism, help to bring the ideal of a post-racial America a little closer to reality.
