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‘Post-race’ America? Gates and Obama learn a hard lesson
It was Professor Gates who promoted the idea that blacks are largely responsible for their own problems - before he lost it with a white cop
In retrospect we can see what a lucky fellow Barack Obama was to have had, during his run for the presidency last year, a radical black pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, as his opponent in an argument about race and racism in America.
Obama scored big with whites for his measured put-down of Wright as the embittered voice from an angry past, now being thankfully overtaken by a mellower and more sensible age of racial reason. And in an added irony, the most supportive black voice for this hopeful posture was that of the Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates, who shot into the headlines last month after being arrested by a white Cambridge cop, Sergeant James Crowley, for allegedly abusing Crowley for racist conduct.
In an amazing lapse in his usual steely self-control, Obama said in a press conference that he thought the cops had acted "stupidly" in this incident which began when a neighbour called the police saying two men were trying to break into the house. Actually this was Gates and his driver trying to recoup from that familiar misfortune, the missing front door key of Gates's own home.
The irony stems from the fact that Gates had become the darling of white liberals for putting down blacks in exactly the manner Obama adopted with Wright. In the New Yorker and kindred outlets, Gates would serve up anodyne pottage about race being "a social construct" and would whack deadbeat black dads, cuing Obama to the same sort of grandstanding, all of which fell like music upon the ears of white opinion-formers always receptive to black people prepared to utter "difficult truths" - viz, that African Americans had and have only themselves to blame for most if not all of their problems.
White America is never more vividly and comically racist than when trying to excuse impromptu racist utterance
The presiding deity over this 'post-race' nonsense for many years was the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who won hundreds of admiring editorials in the New York Times for his supposed courage and intellectual integrity in serving up "difficult truths" to white Americans eager for scholarly reassurance that they had nothing to apologise for.
Then suddenly here were Gates and Obama both catching a torrent of abuse from whites for shouting at white cops and calling them racists and stupid.
We can safely stipulate here that a very large number of white cops are violence-prone racists, both by upbringing and by assigned role, since they are the whites' first line of defence, furnished with awesome firepower, complicit prosecutors, indulgent forensic laboratories, mostly white juries and a mostly white press in the endless battle to keep the dangerous classes generally - and the blacks specifically - in their place.
If the job requires you to be "stupid" – by over-reacting to the level of shooting an elderly black woman holding a cellphone on the grounds you thought she was armed and about to shoot to kill – then so be it.
Crowley became the overnight darling of the right-wing ralk radio and roundtable TV hosts, just as Joe the Plumber did last fall. Obama's senior aides, aghast as the uproar took the big battle over health insurance off the front pages, successfully urged Obama to say that Gates might have acted unreasonably and to recapture the high ground by inviting Gates and Crowley to the White House for a manly beer and constructive chat, duly hailed in its aftermath last week by the President as "friendly, thoughtful and positive". It would have required Gates and Crowley to be carried out on stretchers after bloody combat for Obama to have said anything else.
The entire event was positive only for Crowley. Cops are notorious liars in the accounts they give to prosecutors, juries or the press of their conduct as guardians of the peace, and Crowley's account of what happened chez Gates had plenty of improbabilities in it, such as his claim that Gates uttered a slur about his, Crowley's, mother. Boston and Cambridge have been suffused with acrid racist divisions for decades, and the cops there have ugly reputations, as vividly evoked by the Boston cop, Justin Barrett, who was fired by the city's mayor for calling Prof Gates "a banana-eating jungle monkey".
Barrett and his lawyer are suing the city and the mayor for damages for causing him "pain and suffering, mental anguish, emotional distress, post-traumatic stress, sleeplessness, indignities and embarrassment, degradation, injury to reputation and restriction on his personal freedom". Barrett's lawyer says "banana-eating" and "jungle monkey" were terms used by his client to evoke Gates's words, not his African American essence. Barrett told CNN's Larry King he doesn't know what made him say that.
White America is never more vividly and comically racist than when trying to excuse impromptu racist utterance or deny the racism of American society, which is manifest in every number, every graph and scatterplot in the annual Statistical Abstract of the United States.
It was a former governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, regarded as an impeccable progressive in matters of race, who denied any racist motive for launching his final presidential drive in 1988 by appearing at the Neshoba county fair in Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in the 1960s and where Ronald Reagan had wooed the white south in 1980.
The great and courageous black attorney, JL Chestnut, one of two black people in the huge audience, recalled Reagan crying that "the South will rise again and this time remain master of everybody and everything within its dominion". Said Chestnut: "The square came to life, the Klu Kluxers were shouting, jeering and in obvious ecstasy. God bless America."
So eight years later Dukakis visited the fair, to give the white voters a tacit message. It didn't do him any good. His campaign blew up amid race-baiting first by his Democratic rival Al Gore, who denounced Dukakis for giving a weekend furlough from prison to a black criminal called Willie Horton, and then by George Bush Sr who soundly whacked Dukakis using the same charge.
White progressives have been cheering Obama's "tough love" homilies to delinquent black dads, though not to white or Spanish ones. Maybe the support for Sgt Crowley and the vilification of Obama and Gates will come as a wake-up call, though I doubt it.
Bill Clinton was probably the most disastrous president for blacks in postwar history, in terms of criminal justice policies, removal of social safety nets and systematic attacks on young black mothers for having babies (at an optimal time for the babies' care and survival). Yet if you call Bill worse as an effective racist than Reagan they'll quack with incredulous raillery and remind you that it was a black writer, Toni Morrison, who called Clinton our first black president. So? It was Gen Colin Powell who stepped up to criticise Gates and thus endorse Crowley.
Can we hope Gates has learned a lesson? Nope. He's back at his crowd-pleasing antics, pledging more beers with Crowley and saying he'll see what he can do about getting the cop's kids into Harvard. As the black writer Ishmael Reed asked caustically, "Maybe the officer who killed a black man in Oakland the other night should send in her children's application to Gates. Is Gates a candidate for the Stockholm Syndrome?”
Scarcely a candidate, Ishmael. Stockholm Syndrome captured Prof Gates long, long ago and did his career no end of good. ·
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Let's back up to look at some of the causes and contributing factors of the problems currently plaguing the black community:
What destroyed the black family? Couldn't possibly be Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and a welfare system that paid black mothers more per child, but only if the black father went away...
Inner city violence and Gangs? Lack of positive male role models or discipline in the home couldn't possibly be a factor there....
Crime? Disarm the decent law abiding citizens so they can't protect themselves or their families...nah, that couldn't be involved.
Educational failure? The fact that the majority of the adult population of inner city Detroit is functionally illiterate couldn't be linked to the leftist National Education Association, teachers unions that reward incompetence, and the corrupt/ignorant individuals the black community repeatedly re-elects to the overwhelmingly black Democrat city government and school boards, or the systemic emphasis on Ebonics, or a dozen other "black culture" programs that convince young folks they are way too cool for school...
The bottom line is that the leftist line has step by sorry step made these people entirely dependent on a government that can't support them...because the tax base (both income and property taxes) is gone. I don't blame the problems of the black community entirely on blacks...a lot of white Democrats and leftists have worked hard to help them fall and keep them down and dependent and voting Democrat.
I respect the copyright of the paper. Here it is only the piece, to show what we and where we are. Irrespective the foul language is justified at these times as was.
On and on it goes. As the bailouts of the bankers recently proved, even Barack Obama, who descended to earth from Chicago with 10 gilded seraphim holding up his balls, doesn't screw with the corporate money changers. Or the banking corporations, or the insurance corporations, or the medical corporations, or the defense corporations ... Corporations are now, for all practical purposes, the only way anything can get done, made or distributed, or even imagined as a way of anything coming into being (except babies). Look around you. Is there anything, from the food in the fridge to the fridge itself, from the furniture to the very varnish on the floors or the clothes we wear that was not delivered unto us by corporations. Corporate reality is all permeating. Air tight, too. Each part so perfectly reinforces all of its other parts as to be seamless. Inescapable. In that sense, we are prisoners for life. The corporate-government-media complex that manufactures our mass consciousness (hereinafter referred to as "the bastards" for clarity purposes) is simultaneously unknowable, yet easy to believe in. With its millions of moving parts, seen and unseen -- financial, media, manufacturing, technological, material -- no one, not even its most elevated masters, can conceive of the system's entirety, or even in the same way. This great loom of ideation, with its many spindles, flycocks and shuttles, can weave any fantasy one desires and certainly sustain any individual's commodity or identity fetish. At the same time, the sheer magnitude of corporatism's crushing drain upon humanity -- for the benefit of an elite global few -- is all but invisible to most Western peoples participating in its sustaining rituals. Corporatism's rituals are as reverentially and unquestionably observed in daily behavior as those of ancient Egypt's theocracy or the blood sacrifice of the Aztecs. The Aztecs thoroughly believed their world would end if the gods were not fed enough still-beating human hearts. The masses pause to listen, then ask inside their heads, "Will my job, my only source of family sustenance, disappear? I must try harder."
By Joe Bageant, AlterNet
I thank you
Firozali A Mulla
Your ideas on race in something euphemistically known as post-racial USA are thoroughly British. Let me demonstrate. The retired Rev.Jeremiah Wright was not "a radical black pastor"( a term equivalently used by a columnist at the Guardian,UK, before Barack was elected; and although I called him on it, he did not acknowledge his mistake). But fairly early in the election,the plethora of Right-wing Republican media stooges contributed their part to hopefully give us young upbeat Sarah Palin and old John McCain. A little video re-editing would hopefully do the trick. It did not.
Jerry Wright goes on with his vocation and I doubt he even misses the Honorary Degree he was to receive from Northwestern University when they reneged on that. "They"? Yes, the same people who have made a home for the reconstructed Mrs. William Ayres, the notorious Bernadine Dohrn:
Leader of the domestic terrorist group Weatherman
Participated in the bombings of New York City police headquarters in 1970, the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972
Delighted in Charles Manson's infamous murders
Director of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University
Professor at Northwestern University Law School
Personally, I think that makes Rev. Wright's quotes of American Ambassador Edward Peck pale by comparison. You need some perspective.
Especially when you next mention former Ambassador and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan whose seminal work,In 1965, Moynihan wrote "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," was written for the Lyndon Johnson administration but is often confused with this earlier work: Gunnar Myrdal's 1944 study, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, which influenced the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education to outlaw racial segregation in public schools. Myrdal was also a signatory of the 1950 UNESCO statement The Race Question, which also influenced the Brown v. Board of Education decision.(I'm sure that I read the latter as a young woman in the 1950s and not in the original Swedish.)
As a result, Moynihan went on to India as Ambassador during the Nixon and Ford administrations;the latter which suffers the after-the-fact revelations of Kissinger's escorting Ford on an educational tour to Indonesia which, upon their departure, bombed the Christians of East Timor(as a test-run of new weapons that had been supplied by American taxpayers during the Nixon administration). Whether Moynihan looked on aghast, I have not yet read his words on the subject but he was certainly in position to have opinions and observe reactions as he served in India during the complaints re:The Congress Party, and at the time of Indira Gandhi's assassination.
How's that for post-racialism? So if Professor Gates lost it, after he promoted the idea that blacks are largely responsible for their own problems, he got that under the influence from Myrdal's and Moynihan's best efforts. Granted Gates' work at Harvard for the W.E.B. Du Bois program, and the department of African and African-American studies, I wouldn't worry too much as he is getting on in years and had a weak moment of post-jet-fatigue; Elizabeth Alexander, the poet who read at Obama's Inauguration, reputedly will be taking over some of that burden at Harvard.
Crowley can fend for himself you know, as a high-school student of the Cambridge area Latin School when his mother was employed there. In the US, we are now more concerned about destroying the over empowered trip of the Police state attitudes that was the Bush legacy when he folded FEMA into Homeland Security; because we now have Republican businessmen that were given the right to carry concealed weapons and use them "indiscriminately" to enforce Homeland Security when ever they seem to sense it is threatened by somebody they haven't met socially.
One last word, now that you have brought up the woman police officer in Berkeley/Oakland, whose children would be willingly shot by the home cadre of Homeland Security as it stands, let me assure you perhaps you had better read over Toni Morrison's comments about the Big Dog. I was pleased to live in the Princeton community when she arrived following her Nobel prize. Her comments, which you quote, were delivered "tongue in cheek", a casual way of practicing the art of doing the Dozens without recourse to anything too obscene or "calling out yo Mama". I was going to mention Tony Blair's avarice and his dream the recoup of Empire's blessing at W.'s offer to share Afghanistan which has lost you so many men; but you get the picture, which is what thefirstpost is for isn't it?
This is such crap. If a white guy mouthed off to the cops the way this Prof did, the same thing would have happened. People like Gates think they are above the law because they have reached a certain place in society, and can chat anyway they please.
It has nothing to do with race.
For the Prof it was a way to mask his crappy loudmouthed behaviour. I am sure when the cops came he started the usual
'you only coming here cause I'm black' instead of acting normal.
Gates behaviour proves the point, you run up your mouth to police, you get arrested.
The comment's as interesting as the op-ed. Thanks.
A very thought provoking article for me by Alexander Cockburn as I happen to share the view that African Americans, despite the deeply embedded racism they have suffered over the past 500 years, should be doing better and in greater numbers. Others of African descent manage to succeed in the US. Yes, it is not easy, but it is possible. If President Obama and Louis Gates criticise African American fathers and parents for irresponsibility towards their children it is because these have been identified as particularly damaging factors for the race as a whole. It is of concern to ALL of us who wish to see our race do better. We cannot and indeed should not deny it.It has little to do with it being sweet music to the ears of certain white groups. On the other hand, if 'whites' are going to react in such a simplistic way every time President Obama says something with which they disagree, too bad. If they are going to see everything in black and white just because he is the president, tough. Many people who voted for him did so because they were heartily sick of America's racial divide. They realise that it, possibly more than the economy even, has the potential to sink their country. I somehow cannot imagine Bush being asked his views on Gates' arrest if the incident had occured when he was in power. He was allowed to make the most damaging of mistakes and largely got away with it. There were certainly not 30 death threats on his life daily. I agree that Bill Clinton was the worst president in recent history when it came to helping African Americans advance their cause. George Bush was far better from a practical aspect, his many faults notwithstanding. Yet even bright intelligent African Americans did not recognise this. Many supported Hillary Clinton in the primary because they 'liked the Clintons', and the Clintons 'liked black people'
Intelligent people of whichever race will judge President Obama on his merits and not set him a different yardstick from that used for any other president. Only time will tell whether the 'greatest country in the world' is made up of people with the greatest intellect or the greatest number of bigots.