July 24, 2009
Henry Louis Gates: Déjà Vu All Over Again
Stanley Fish (NY Times Blog)
I’m Skip Gates’s friend, too. That’s probably the only thing I share with President Obama, so when he ended his press conference last Wednesday by answering a question about Gates’s arrest after he was seen trying to get into his own house, my ears perked up.
As the story unfolded in the press and on the Internet, I flashed back 20 years or so to the time when Gates arrived in Durham, N.C., to take up the position I had offered him in my capacity as chairman of the English department of Duke University. One of the first things Gates did was buy the grandest house in town (owned previously by a movie director) and renovate it. During the renovation workers would often take Gates for a servant and ask to be pointed to the house’s owner. The drivers of delivery trucks made the same mistake.
The message was unmistakable: What was a black man doing living in a place like this?
At the university (which in a past not distant at all did not admit African-Americans ), Gates’s reception was in some ways no different. Doubts were expressed in letters written by senior professors about his scholarly credentials, which were vastly superior to those of his detractors. (He was already a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the so called “genius award.”) There were wild speculations (again in print) about his salary, which in fact was quite respectable but not inordinate; when a list of the highest-paid members of the Duke faculty was published, he was nowhere on it.
The Associated Press Henry Louis Gates, Jr., during a book signing in 2006.
The unkindest cut of all was delivered by some members of the black faculty who had made their peace with Duke traditions and did not want an over-visible newcomer and upstart to trouble waters that had long been still. (The great historian John Hope Franklin was an exception.) When an offer came from Harvard, there wasn’t much I could do. Gates accepted it, and when he left he was pursued by false reports about his tenure at what he had come to call “the plantation.” (I became aware of his feelings when he and I and his father watched the N.C.A.A. championship game between Duke and U.N.L.V. at my house; they were rooting for U.N.L.V.)
Now, in 2009, it’s a version of the same story. Gates is once again regarded with suspicion because, as the cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson put it in an interview, he has committed the crime of being H.W.B., Housed While Black.
He isn’t the only one thought to be guilty of that crime. TV commentators, laboring to explain the unusual candor and vigor of Obama’s initial comments on the Gates incident, speculated that he had probably been the victim of racial profiling himself. Speculation was unnecessary, for they didn’t have to look any further than the story they were reporting in another segment, the story of the “birthers” — the “wing-nuts,” in Chris Matthews’s phrase — who insist that Obama was born in Kenya and cite as “proof” his failure to come up with an authenticated birth certificate. For several nights running, Matthews displayed a copy of the birth certificate and asked, What do you guys want? How can you keep saying these things in the face of all evidence?
He missed the point. No evidence would be sufficient, just as no evidence would have convinced some of my Duke colleagues that Gates was anything but a charlatan and a fraud. It isn’t the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate that’s the problem for the birthers. The problem is again the legitimacy of a black man living in a big house, especially when it’s the White House. Just as some in Durham and Cambridge couldn’t believe that Gates belonged in the neighborhood, so does a vocal minority find it hard to believe that an African-American could possibly be the real president of the United States.
Gates and Obama are not only friends; they are in the same position, suspected of occupying a majestic residence under false pretenses. And Obama is a double offender. Not only is he guilty of being Housed While Black; he is the first in American history guilty of being P.W.B., President While Black.
Showing posts with label arrest. Show all posts
Showing posts with label arrest. Show all posts
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Race in America (cont)
July 30th 2009
Two recent incidents that have come under public scrutiny are symptomatic of what many white Americans think but know better than to say on record:
Justin Barrett, a national guardsman in Boston referred to Professor Gates as "a banana-eating jungle monkey" in an email that came to light: “If I was the officer (Gates) verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC (pepper spray) deserving of his belligerent noncompliance,” the e-mail reads.
Boston Globe
Lee Landor, until recently deputy press secretary to Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer, posted comments on her personal Facebook page criticizing Henry Louis Gates and the President, and defending racial profiling"
I beleive Ms Landor speaks for many white people in America. Ms. Landor wrote in one post, “O-dumb-a, the situation got ‘out of hand’ because Gates is a racist, not because the officer was DOING HIS JOB!”
In response to one Facebook user who voiced disagreement, Ms. Landor referred to Professor Gates using a vulgarity and added: “And racial profiling does exist, but for good reason. Take a look at this country’s jails: who makes up the majority of inmates? Exactly.”
In another Facebook post, Ms. Landor wrote, “You know what, I am really getting SICK of hearing about how white people are evil racists.” She added: “I get it — white men have dominated for hundreds of years and there’s a lot of anger there. But HOW MUCH MORE can the white people do to correct past injustices of their ancestors?”
New York Times
Two recent incidents that have come under public scrutiny are symptomatic of what many white Americans think but know better than to say on record:
Justin Barrett, a national guardsman in Boston referred to Professor Gates as "a banana-eating jungle monkey" in an email that came to light: “If I was the officer (Gates) verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC (pepper spray) deserving of his belligerent noncompliance,” the e-mail reads.
Boston Globe
Lee Landor, until recently deputy press secretary to Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer, posted comments on her personal Facebook page criticizing Henry Louis Gates and the President, and defending racial profiling"
I beleive Ms Landor speaks for many white people in America. Ms. Landor wrote in one post, “O-dumb-a, the situation got ‘out of hand’ because Gates is a racist, not because the officer was DOING HIS JOB!”
In response to one Facebook user who voiced disagreement, Ms. Landor referred to Professor Gates using a vulgarity and added: “And racial profiling does exist, but for good reason. Take a look at this country’s jails: who makes up the majority of inmates? Exactly.”
In another Facebook post, Ms. Landor wrote, “You know what, I am really getting SICK of hearing about how white people are evil racists.” She added: “I get it — white men have dominated for hundreds of years and there’s a lot of anger there. But HOW MUCH MORE can the white people do to correct past injustices of their ancestors?”
New York Times
Monday, July 27, 2009
Race in America (cont)
Drama in the People's Republic of Cambridge: Boston Has Two Faces
July 22, 2009 0
Richard M. Benjamin
in the Huffington Post
Q: What do you call a black man with a PhD?
A: Nigger
Q: Where do liberal white people go to socially die?
A: Cambridge
These two jokes come to my mind when contemplating the horrific Skip Gates arrest. The Harvard scholar was handcuffed having been accused as a thief on his own property.
The first joke reveals an age-old truism: All the credentials in the world do not protect black men from police abuse.
The second joke, well -- that's the New York take on Cambridge. My friend Chester, a white, cutting-edge architect who had a cushy professorship at Harvard's graduate school, nevertheless fled Cambridge, since he feared he would die of either boredom or conformity. Chester complained that Cambridge's upscale, vanilla lifestyle would condemn him to a life-sentence of smug liberal orthodoxy. Chester noted that Cambridge is the most socially conservative politically liberal bastion in America: The town's p.c. doctrinaire ways of thinking and living -- oh, the dull dinner parties discussing The Nation -- exact a stifling, conservative effect.
"Cambridge is where fancy white people go to spiritually die," Chester likes to say.
Having lived in Cambridge for six months in the mid-1990s, and visited several times in later years, I have similar opinions of Cambridge.
Liberals in Cambridge, in my experience, like to make big statements about improving the status of black people. But they don't have much use for ordinary blacks themselves. Hands down, Cambridge is one of the most racially hostile places I've ever lived.
And I am not exactly imagining things.
Sudhir Venkatesh, the William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, and bestselling author of Gang Leader for a Day (Penguin Press), named Boston, in 2008, "America's Most Racist City."
"The city puzzled me. I knew about the strong liberal sentiment among the populace, but I didn't have to look far to see that racism was part of its historical core. For example, school integration was violently resisted by many of its white ethnic residents. In sports, the city has been home to some of the most extreme forms of racism -- check out Howard Bryant's terrific book, Shut Out, in which he explores the longstanding bigotry in the Red Sox baseball organization."
A paradox reigns: Next to the racism of theTom Yawkey Red Sox syndicate is the forward-thinking, inclusive racial legacy of Red Auerbach's Celtics.
Even sports expose the two faces of Boston.
Cambridge was ranked "The Most Liberal City in America" by a 2005 national study. Residents even call it "The People's Republic of Cambridge." Yet Skip Gates got reported by a neighbor and arrested by the police in an apparent bit of racial profiling.
Gates's arrest revives Cambridge's, and greater Boston's, two faces: the bastion of liberalism and the fortress of prejudice. After all, Cambridge's mayor, E. Denise Simmons, is a black woman who even grew up there. Before that, Cambridge was the first city to elect an openly gay black man as mayor, Kenneth Reeves. What gives?
Aggravating Boston's racial turmoil, of course, are class divides. The Cambridge police force that arrested Skip Gates is charged with keeping the upscale enclave "safe" from some decidedly downscale neighborhoods nearby. Wealthy communities abutting poor ones often produce a class anxiety that borders on paranoia. Gates' white neighbor who failed to recognize him works at Harvard magazine. This "neighbor" so evidently suffers from said class anxiety, at least as much as racism. Such community anxiety - every "outsider" is a suspect - often demands "tough" policing, which curdles into abusive policing.
Poor Skip Gates. He likely experienced racial profiling.
July 22, 2009 0
Richard M. Benjamin
in the Huffington Post
Q: What do you call a black man with a PhD?
A: Nigger
Q: Where do liberal white people go to socially die?
A: Cambridge
These two jokes come to my mind when contemplating the horrific Skip Gates arrest. The Harvard scholar was handcuffed having been accused as a thief on his own property.
The first joke reveals an age-old truism: All the credentials in the world do not protect black men from police abuse.
The second joke, well -- that's the New York take on Cambridge. My friend Chester, a white, cutting-edge architect who had a cushy professorship at Harvard's graduate school, nevertheless fled Cambridge, since he feared he would die of either boredom or conformity. Chester complained that Cambridge's upscale, vanilla lifestyle would condemn him to a life-sentence of smug liberal orthodoxy. Chester noted that Cambridge is the most socially conservative politically liberal bastion in America: The town's p.c. doctrinaire ways of thinking and living -- oh, the dull dinner parties discussing The Nation -- exact a stifling, conservative effect.
"Cambridge is where fancy white people go to spiritually die," Chester likes to say.
Having lived in Cambridge for six months in the mid-1990s, and visited several times in later years, I have similar opinions of Cambridge.
Liberals in Cambridge, in my experience, like to make big statements about improving the status of black people. But they don't have much use for ordinary blacks themselves. Hands down, Cambridge is one of the most racially hostile places I've ever lived.
And I am not exactly imagining things.
Sudhir Venkatesh, the William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, and bestselling author of Gang Leader for a Day (Penguin Press), named Boston, in 2008, "America's Most Racist City."
"The city puzzled me. I knew about the strong liberal sentiment among the populace, but I didn't have to look far to see that racism was part of its historical core. For example, school integration was violently resisted by many of its white ethnic residents. In sports, the city has been home to some of the most extreme forms of racism -- check out Howard Bryant's terrific book, Shut Out, in which he explores the longstanding bigotry in the Red Sox baseball organization."
A paradox reigns: Next to the racism of theTom Yawkey Red Sox syndicate is the forward-thinking, inclusive racial legacy of Red Auerbach's Celtics.
Even sports expose the two faces of Boston.
Cambridge was ranked "The Most Liberal City in America" by a 2005 national study. Residents even call it "The People's Republic of Cambridge." Yet Skip Gates got reported by a neighbor and arrested by the police in an apparent bit of racial profiling.
Gates's arrest revives Cambridge's, and greater Boston's, two faces: the bastion of liberalism and the fortress of prejudice. After all, Cambridge's mayor, E. Denise Simmons, is a black woman who even grew up there. Before that, Cambridge was the first city to elect an openly gay black man as mayor, Kenneth Reeves. What gives?
Aggravating Boston's racial turmoil, of course, are class divides. The Cambridge police force that arrested Skip Gates is charged with keeping the upscale enclave "safe" from some decidedly downscale neighborhoods nearby. Wealthy communities abutting poor ones often produce a class anxiety that borders on paranoia. Gates' white neighbor who failed to recognize him works at Harvard magazine. This "neighbor" so evidently suffers from said class anxiety, at least as much as racism. Such community anxiety - every "outsider" is a suspect - often demands "tough" policing, which curdles into abusive policing.
Poor Skip Gates. He likely experienced racial profiling.
Race in America
Are the Falsely Accused Required to be Polite to the Police?
Rich Rodgers
I hope we make the most of the national discussion and debate generated by the July 16th arrest of Harvard professor Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts by Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge police.
If you've been under a rock for the past 10 days, here's the quick version: Gates returned to his house at noon after an overnight flight from China, with his driver, to find he couldn't get into his house. His white neighbor called the police and reported that two men were trying to break into the home. Crowley responds, and the police report is here. Gates tells his side of the story here.
While so much of the debate pretends that the key question is what Gates said to Crowley, it's actually not illegal to yell at a police officer in Massachusetts:
In several cases, the courts in Massachusetts have considered whether a person is guilty of disorderly conduct for verbally abusing a police officer. In Commonwealth v. Lopiano, a 2004 decision, an appeals court held it was not disorderly conduct for a person who angrily yelled at an officer that his civil rights were being violated. In Commonwealth v. Mallahan, a decision rendered last year, an appeals court held that a person who launched into an angry, profanity-laced tirade against a police officer in front of spectators could not be convicted of disorderly conduct.
So Massachusetts law clearly provides that Gates did not commit disorderly conduct.
So Gates appears to have been guilty of nothing illegal, but is there any doubt that he is being judged in the court of public opinion for his alleged statements to the officer? You can bet that a large percentage of white Americans find it easy to believe in the falsehood that Gates's verbal challenges or resistance justified his arrest. This belief--that this black man or anyone else is obligated to be submissive to police officers in speech--should be called out and rejected.
It's human nature for an employee to consider taking a customer's behavior into account when deciding what kind of service to give to them. Professionals do a good job of ignoring insults or slights, but no one is immune from the temptation. For police, though, the bar has to be higher. Too much rides on the outcome. To begin to change the dynamics at the heart of racial profiling and the distrust that many minorities feel toward the police, the training that officers receive has to meaningfully recognize the negative experiences that most minorities in our country share.
In his recent column in the New York Times, Charles Blow cites a NYT/CBS poll from July 2008 that asked this question:
“Have you ever felt you were stopped by the police just because of your race or ethnic background?”
66 percent of black men said yes, compared to 9 percent of white men. That's a shocking statistic, but to really try to absorb what this means, you have to think about what really happens on some of these stops.
Blow tells the story of being stopped in Louisiana when he was 18, the president of his college freshmen class, in a car with his friend Andre:
Andre insisted on knowing why we had been stopped. The officer gave a reason. It wasn’t true. Then he said something I will never forget: that if he wanted to, he could make us lie down in the middle of the road and shoot us in the back of the head and no one would say anything about it. Then he walked to his car and drove away.
I was raised to treat police officers with respect, and have always figured it was in my interest to do so. I can think of three times when I was stopped for speeding and let go with a warning, and guessed that the 'yes sirs' and 'no sirs' didn't hurt my cause. But being deferential has never implied for me that I needed to swallow a sense of profound injustice. I've never thought for a second that I was or might be threatened, arrested or even shot just because I'm a white guy. Our experiences are so different, we might as well be living in different countries.
It's clear that the experience of prejudice at the hands of the police is all too common for black men and other minorities in the United States. It's asking too much to insist that someone show respect to an institution that has treated them unfairly. It's asking someone to accept a diminished or tarnished standing in the eyes of an entity that has the power to take away their freedom or even their life. For that respect to come, it's going to have to continue to be earned.
It seems certain that submission or deference is sometimes used by police officers as a litmus test for whether they will make an arrest or issue a citation, even when the expectation of submission goes beyond the legal obligations of a citizen in interacting with a police officer. This emphasis on submission and compliance no doubt has some of its roots in attempting to ensure the safety of our police officers, who must be prepared for any possibility. But when race and ego are injected into the mix, an expectation of "submission or consequences" is unacceptable as standard operating procedure for police officers-- even, or perhaps especially, when people are upset and saying so.
Rich Rodgers
I hope we make the most of the national discussion and debate generated by the July 16th arrest of Harvard professor Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts by Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge police.
If you've been under a rock for the past 10 days, here's the quick version: Gates returned to his house at noon after an overnight flight from China, with his driver, to find he couldn't get into his house. His white neighbor called the police and reported that two men were trying to break into the home. Crowley responds, and the police report is here. Gates tells his side of the story here.
While so much of the debate pretends that the key question is what Gates said to Crowley, it's actually not illegal to yell at a police officer in Massachusetts:
In several cases, the courts in Massachusetts have considered whether a person is guilty of disorderly conduct for verbally abusing a police officer. In Commonwealth v. Lopiano, a 2004 decision, an appeals court held it was not disorderly conduct for a person who angrily yelled at an officer that his civil rights were being violated. In Commonwealth v. Mallahan, a decision rendered last year, an appeals court held that a person who launched into an angry, profanity-laced tirade against a police officer in front of spectators could not be convicted of disorderly conduct.
So Massachusetts law clearly provides that Gates did not commit disorderly conduct.
So Gates appears to have been guilty of nothing illegal, but is there any doubt that he is being judged in the court of public opinion for his alleged statements to the officer? You can bet that a large percentage of white Americans find it easy to believe in the falsehood that Gates's verbal challenges or resistance justified his arrest. This belief--that this black man or anyone else is obligated to be submissive to police officers in speech--should be called out and rejected.
It's human nature for an employee to consider taking a customer's behavior into account when deciding what kind of service to give to them. Professionals do a good job of ignoring insults or slights, but no one is immune from the temptation. For police, though, the bar has to be higher. Too much rides on the outcome. To begin to change the dynamics at the heart of racial profiling and the distrust that many minorities feel toward the police, the training that officers receive has to meaningfully recognize the negative experiences that most minorities in our country share.
In his recent column in the New York Times, Charles Blow cites a NYT/CBS poll from July 2008 that asked this question:
“Have you ever felt you were stopped by the police just because of your race or ethnic background?”
66 percent of black men said yes, compared to 9 percent of white men. That's a shocking statistic, but to really try to absorb what this means, you have to think about what really happens on some of these stops.
Blow tells the story of being stopped in Louisiana when he was 18, the president of his college freshmen class, in a car with his friend Andre:
Andre insisted on knowing why we had been stopped. The officer gave a reason. It wasn’t true. Then he said something I will never forget: that if he wanted to, he could make us lie down in the middle of the road and shoot us in the back of the head and no one would say anything about it. Then he walked to his car and drove away.
I was raised to treat police officers with respect, and have always figured it was in my interest to do so. I can think of three times when I was stopped for speeding and let go with a warning, and guessed that the 'yes sirs' and 'no sirs' didn't hurt my cause. But being deferential has never implied for me that I needed to swallow a sense of profound injustice. I've never thought for a second that I was or might be threatened, arrested or even shot just because I'm a white guy. Our experiences are so different, we might as well be living in different countries.
It's clear that the experience of prejudice at the hands of the police is all too common for black men and other minorities in the United States. It's asking too much to insist that someone show respect to an institution that has treated them unfairly. It's asking someone to accept a diminished or tarnished standing in the eyes of an entity that has the power to take away their freedom or even their life. For that respect to come, it's going to have to continue to be earned.
It seems certain that submission or deference is sometimes used by police officers as a litmus test for whether they will make an arrest or issue a citation, even when the expectation of submission goes beyond the legal obligations of a citizen in interacting with a police officer. This emphasis on submission and compliance no doubt has some of its roots in attempting to ensure the safety of our police officers, who must be prepared for any possibility. But when race and ego are injected into the mix, an expectation of "submission or consequences" is unacceptable as standard operating procedure for police officers-- even, or perhaps especially, when people are upset and saying so.
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