“Dr Du Bois took the lead in making the United States and the world recognize that racial prejudice was not a mere matter of Negroes being persecuted but was a cancer which poisoned the whole civilization of the United States.”
(CLR James, speaking of WEB Du Bois in London, 1967)
“Racism is on the decline in the United States… Stokely [Carmichael] insists that what is taking place in American city after American city is black people fighting against the police.”
(CLR James, same 1967 address)
Around the time the Trinidadian James was giving his seminal lecture, ‘Black Power,’ quoted above, another Trinidadian, Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture), was being repeatedly interrupted by a black heckler as he spoke in the US on the same theme. Finally, Stokely stopped and glared at his tormentor. “Who are you?” he asked him. “What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a black professor at Harvard,” the gentleman called back.
“And,” Stokely demanded, “do you know what they call a Black professor from Harvard?”
He paused, then bellowed his own answer: “Nigger!”
This was something that last week, some forty years on, the black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr understood at once when he was harassed in his own home by a white policeman. Gates responded by cussing out the cop, accusing him of racial profiling and calling him a racist.
Now, you can’t blame him. Henry Louis Gates Jr isn’t just another ‘black Harvard professor’; he is a world-renowned authority on African-American literature and race relations. For many years he has been the go-to guy when the major American media want a comment on some incident involving African-Americans. And for many years Gates has lived in Cambridge, MA, one of the most racially laid back towns in the US. (Boston, across the river, is a different matter.)
Besides, Gates had just endured a gruellingly long flight home from China – only to find himself locked out of his own house. Add to that, he was sick with a bronchial infection. That white cop peering at him through the window of his own home and demanding that he come out and show identification had to have been the last straw.
Gates told the cop he was being “ridiculous,” and that “this happens to be my house.” He also told him it was “none of your business” when the cop demanded to know if anyone else was in the house. Finally, he demanded the sergeant’s name and badge number and told him he was going to file a complaint against him.
Whereupon the cop did what white American cops routinely do when faced with an uppity black man: he handcuffed Gates (in full view of curious pedestrians) and hustled him off to jail. You and I both know that if the circumstances had been a bit different – that if there hadn’t been witnesses, and if there’d been three or four white cops instead of one – they would doubtless have beat Gates first, before hauling him down to the lockup. We’ve all seen the videos, beginning with Rodney King: in America, a black suspect, no matter how tenuous the suspicion, is licence for the brutish sadism of racist white cops to exuberantly express itself, unconstrained by any fear of consequences. White cops beating black ‘suspects’: hey, that’s just part of American culture, right? Nothing ever happens to them. Not even when the ‘suspect’ dies.
The charge this particular white cop finally came up with was disorderly conduct. It’s the catch-all charge, of course. Only let a black man in America protest his unwarranted arrest and he’s accused of disorderly conduct. Black people should know their place.
Now, as Ann Woolner points out (on Bloomberg.com), there’s no crime under American law called ‘contempt of cop.’ Gates was in his own home, and in threatening his harasser with a lawsuit he was acting within the law, even if he raised his voice while doing so. But you wouldn’t know it from the reaction of the white cop in question, who refused to apologize for his behaviour, even though his fig leaf of a charge was quickly dropped. You wouldn’t know it from the Police Association, which actually demanded an apology from President Obama for saying that the cop had acted “stupidly.” And you wouldn’t know it from the blogs that erupted after the incident. With amazing, craven near-unanimity, most conceded that Gates hadn’t broken any law – then went on to chide him anyway for being impolitic and inflammatory.
Woolner, eg, would like us to remember “what Gates did to escalate the incident,” and referred to (and doesn’t this one just make your blood boil?) “the dangers police face trying to protect us and our homes.” In defence of the white sergeant, she (and others) pointed out that he has “for five years taught cadets… how not to racially profile.” This anomalous fact, to Woolner and her ilk, is exculpatory. They don’t see it for what it is: an almost comic indication of how deep racism runs among the great C-minus fraternity of white American law enforcement. No; Gates, according to Woolner, acted like a “self-important jerk.”
Think of that. Woolner’s implication is that anyone accosted by the police in America, especially any black man, has a civic duty to grovel. To act otherwise is to be “a self-important jerk.”
The CLR quotes at the top of this column come irresistibly to mind. I mean – forget the irredeemably corrupted police – do none of these bloggers understand that, in blaming Gates for his own illegal persecution, they’re championing totalitarianism?
The fact is, what happened to Gates was dime-a-dozen: something that happens to black men in America all the time. And it will be remembered – if at all – for President Barack Obama’s response (at the end of a long press conference about something else) that the white cop in question “acted stupidly.”
Now Obama, ever the moderate, especially in racial matters, no doubt thought he was choosing his words with care. He didn’t say the obvious: that the cop was acting out of racist venom and hubris. He said he had acted “stupidly.” That would seem about the mildest censure you can make of a cop who, investigating a possible burglary, is presented by the suspect with proof that he’s in his own home, and yet winds up dragging the homeowner off to jail in handcuffs.
Obama also made reference to “a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately,” and in that he was merely being consistent: while in the Illinois legislature, Obama had sponsored a bill requiring police to record the race of all drivers they stopped for traffic violations and for those records to be analyzed for evidence of racial profiling.
And yet the near consensus was that Obama’s comment was ‘inappropriate.’ Indeed, on Thursday, the good sergeant had the brass to say that he was “disappointed” that President Obama had anything to say about the case. So safe from any fear of punishment for wrongful arrest did that particular jerk understand himself to be.
Sometimes you have to despair of America.
