Stuck on “Stupid”?: The Gates to Post-Racial America
This is what made Professor Henry Louis Gates angry
Given the national discussion, talk-show tumult, and arm-chair refereeing we have been embroiled in as a result of the July 16, 2009 arrest of Professor Gates in his Cambridge home, America has learned, much to its dismay, that the garden gate is stuck wide open in non-post-racial America. Before acknowledging that his statement that the police had “acted stupidly” may have “ratcheted” up the divisions increasingly evident not just between these two men but the national factions they increasingly represented, President Barack Obama made the conciliatory outreach for which he is known.
But before talking solutions, let’s discuss why Professor Gates was angry (which also goes a fair ways towards explaining the President’s initial response).
There is a promise held out all children in the United States of America. It is this: if you work hard, you can become whatever you want to be. It is a promise that has had a certain fervency and occasionally bitter poignancy for African American children: if you are an excellent student, work hard at your job, stay out of legal trouble, and create right networks, you can be anything, including – though some have never believed it until now – the President of the United States. Having lived into that dream,
Dr. Gates is a literary critic, writer, editor and public intellectual, often referred to as the nation's most famous black scholar. He is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, where he is Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. These are singular accomplishments, all of which he has earned through his hard work and scholarship.
It is a shock then to find your dream of America – and of who you are in it – trampled on inside the safety of your own home. Or shackled in handcuffs on your porch, which being outside your home, allows your arrest.
Every black person in the country can certainly attest to having been profiled. It is our responses to the profiling – often – that makes the critical difference. My first profiling experience was as a 12 year old uniformed private school student leaving mid-term exams. I stumbled into an anti-war protest and was grabbed by a police officer who ignored white rabble rousers to bean me with his billy club and give me a face full of tear gas. Wrong, yes. Maddening, absolutely. Internationally, I apparently look like a terrorist. I have been seriously profiled in all of its diasporic forms. But never in my own house. Nor you, most likely, in yours.
Dr. Gates statement, “Don’t you know I am?” has been roundly criticized by the political right as arrogant and hubristic. Perhaps it was. But his feelings were also hurt. The whole affair is a tragedy of misunderstandings. Gates had done everything he had been told to do to make it to the top rung. He had just returned, exhausted, from a trip to China on which he had be treated as an honored expert. Yet upon his return home, he found a police officer at his door asking him to prove that it was his home. Because his front door was jammed, Gates had his driver help him force it open. A passerby had called, identifying him and his driver as black burglars. It is curious that Gates was not recognized. This possibly represents a consistent and race-based misunderstanding, though Gates was actually grateful for the vigilance of the passerby. Gates is a small man who limps and requires a cane to walk. He is quite an unlikely thief. He knew this. He said that he showed his identification but asked Crowley to show his and that Crowley refused. After a lifetime of doing exactly the right thing, perhaps this conversation with this officer in his house was a bit too much to bear.
This is what made Sergeant James Crowley angry
Sergeant James Crowley became angry because he knew that he was, as President Obama later informed the nation, “an outstanding police officer and a good man.” Crowley knew that he had previously been selected to teach a course on racial profiling for a police training academy.
Crowley was answering a Cambridge neighborhood call about an in-progress breaking and entering by two black men made by a passerby. Crowley knew that seven homes in the neighborhood had been burgled the previous week.
Apparently, when Professor Gates answered his door, Crowley was unsure if Gates was safe, thinking perhaps that two dangerous men were hiding in the house. It seems from what we have heard about the interchange between the men that concern about Gates’ safety may not have been adequately communicated.
According to Sergeant Crowley, a 911 call came from a passerby reporting that two men were attempting to force open the door at Professor Gates' Harvard Square home. The rest of the story is the same if the word alleged precedes them – travel, jammed door, home owner. By Crowley’s account, Gates refused to show his ID when asked, behaving in a “belligerent and tumultuous” manner. Sergeant Crowley told the press that he then arrested Gates for disorderly conduct after the professor followed him outside. Crowley additionally stated that, though warned, Gates continued his verbal tirade against the officer in spite of several warnings.
Though Professor Gates has consistently denied that he was verbally abusive to Sergeant Crowley, the police report is replete with insults, including the low blow, “I’ll talk to your mama outside.” If Gates indeed said this, it’s not nice. But it begs the question of why he was asked to go outside. Was Gates being asked outside to be arrested? The charges were later dropped.
Looking at the other side
The old debate trick is to know the other side well. Would an equally successful white man, having identified himself as the home owner have been arrested in the same circumstances? Does the color of the officer matter?
And what is the lesson to young people watching? That they can mouth off at the police officers and expect no consequences? The most important form of authority that police officers have is not their guns by their moral authority. Sergeant Crowley certainly believed his to have been breached; while officers around the country seem equally split on how they would have responded, it is discretionary procedure for many to regain authority in volatile situations by making an arrest. A crowd was at this point watching. Crowley may have wanted to ensure that a lesson was learned.
The other truth is that urban policing (although Cambridge is does not fit this definition) is simply going to be hard work because citizens of color, given a challenging history, are not necessarily going to be pleased to see the police. The training that Sergeant Crowley had provided at the police academy should have made him exquisitely sensitive to this. Even if this case did not fit the police definition of profiling, the report was of two black men. Professor Gates clearly felt profiled (“What, because I’m a black man in America?”). Exceptional patience will be required to create good community relationships. Any number of cities around the country have done an exceptional job of turning these relationships around.
What’s stupid here?
Perception is not 20/20 vision. It changes based on a range of biopsychosocial factors. We don’t know what these men were thinking on the day that they met. I found myself wondering, though, if class, confounded by race, figured into their interaction. Dr. Gates is upper class, the police sergeant blue collar. Both are proud men. Both know how to behave. We often don’t deal with wrongs perceived through cultural and emotional lenses in a rational manner. These responses go back generations. Centuries. Eons. They are housed in our limbic systems in two sections of our brains: the archipallium or primitive (reptilian) brain that manages self-preservation through aggressive actions or the more advanced palaeopallium or intermediate brain, tasked with managing emotions. But when they felt insulted by the other, are they each thinking, automatically, “How dare you?” Then race and class and primitive brains took over. Except that it should not have for Sergeant Crowley. Whether or not he had trained other officers about the dangers inherent in racial profiling, he has been conditioned to take abuse from members of the public. It is not a pleasant part of the job to be sure. But if Professor Gates was being abusive while on his own property, for the Sergeant to have escalated the situation by arresting him was an abuse of his discretion. He could have left and cursed him on the ride back to the stationhouse.
Some back story is that Cambridge is (mostly) Harvard and everyone knows it. It annoys some of those not in the circle. For Harvard, the banks stay open late. The Post Office in Harvard Square is open every day. Harvard at 400 years of age is a city inside Cambridge, and stating one’s relationship to it either impresses or angers.
President Obama has been loathe to talk about race and this incident makes it clear why. At the 100th anniversary of the NAACP, a black audience, he says, no excuses can be allowed for living into the dream that can become the achievement of his and Dr. Gates’ lives. There is no special formula, no genius in it. Just hard work and a leveling of the playing field that can start with parental attention and community support. When Obama spoke to a national audience about his personal response to a friend’s pain, Rush Limbaugh stated that the President only comes alive with talking about “racism” and, once the President softened his language, crowed that the Obama had thrown Gates “under the bus.”
It is important to try to understand that every issue has more than two sides. This one has race (white cop black man; white neighborhood, black homeowner), class (white/blue collar), egos unwilling to budge, exhaustion, connections to important friends, two men each at the top of their perches, and a crowd gathering outside. Is it fair to say that white people just don’t get it? That they don’t run the risks incurred for DWB (driving while black)? Police have often acted without equanimity against black people. Remember Abner Louima? Is it fair to say that some black people have a chip on their shoulders and are too easily offended? Both happen. Some collision happened here. Only these two men know the truth. Both of their stories, taken are wholes, could not have happened.
If anyone had time to waste a few years ago, there was a fairly forgettable Samuel L. Jackson movie called Amos and Andrew that has overtones to the Gates affair. In it, African American professional Andrew Sterling moved into an all-white New England town, whose neighbors, sure that he was breaking and entering called the police who, sure that no black man would summer there, overreacted and surrounded the house with guns, created a standoff. As Andrew attempts to protect himself from the police with a firearm, one officer, Amos, realizes that the police have made a terrible error and saves Andrew. While it is important that the police did not kill Andrew, we know that this happens. And it did not miss my attention that Andrew could not save himself.
The Gates situation had a better outcome, certainly. But what do we know now? Here are two men with large egos both unwilling to admit any wrongdoing, their positions now wedded to the national support they have received from separate quarters. And the corners they sit in fit their primitive brains – this is what people do when their feelings are terribly hurt. Above all, this incident may prove that good people, pushed by anger, hurt feelings, and the ghosts of a past tinged with race, can be jerks. A President, affected by the same feelings can forget for a moment that as the leader of the free world, he is supposed to keep his feelings in closer check – his super cool persona is, after all, essential to his power to persuade. No cooler heads prevailed anywhere here. Until President Obama took the high road and apologized for misspeaking.
Where do were go from here?
This unfortunate and uncomfortable incident can be used to help America heal some of its racial wounds. Since we are talking, we should be constructive in our approach. The next steps are several.
As President Obama has offered, the Professor and the Officer, both of whom are now claiming credit for the idea of having a beer with the President, should actually engage the chill provided by cool brew. Sergeant Crowley will have to trust that President Obama, as a fair man, will facilitate a reasonable discussion between the two men, in spite of his friendship with Dr. Gates. The President has already said that he thinks that both men overreacted and that dealing with race in America is part of his “portfolio.” And we, too, should determine whether we have relationships that require healing.
• National Forum
These two men should go on Oprah or Dr. Phil to engage a discussion about how to heal racial wounds, especially when it is most challenging.
• Enact the End Racial Profiling Act of 2008
The NAACP is urging swift action on legislation that will end the insidious practice of racial profiling by a) creating a federal prohibition against it, b) funding retraining opportunities for law enforcement officers, and c) holding law enforcement officers who continue to use racial profiling accountable.
•
Police Retraining
. Clearly, if the trainer does not get it right, and he did not entirely, the handbook needs some updating. There will always be situations that training does not cover. But teaching officers to be flexible enough to use good judgment and tactics that deescalate rather than those that enflame tensions (or are perceived as enflaming them) will aid race relations from Harvard Yard to Hartford.
• Self-Assessments
All of us get stuck in our reptile brains from time to time. Travel if you can afford it for exposure to the rest of the world. If that is not possible, meet new people, eat new foods, do new things. Always be willing to ask yourself what your experiences have taught you and what you might now have seen because of the limits of your experiences to date? Have good friends who are willing to tell you the truth.
Life is a long journey and our mistakes make us human. The nation did not manage to talk about race in spite of President Clinton’s attempts to address it through institution of a presidential commission. And America is not good at apologies for some of its most grievous misdeeds. The
Civil Liberties Act of 1988 provided redress for Japanese interment, though African slavery and harms to indigenous populations have not yet been redressed. Because it is less threatening than the Rev. Wright episode, which deserved more responsible discussion than it received, it just may be that the Incident of the Professor and the Officer may give America an opportunity to get back to conversations about how we are to live into the creed that all men are truly created equal.
That America has a black President, a black female media mogul, a black public intellectual (Gates) and will soon have its first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice, means that we have come a tremendously long way from the days of
Jim Crow- But that all other things being (perhaps equal?), the bad tempers of two good men can still lead to arresting the black one on his own property means that we live in an America where race impedes us less but still defines us.