Beer guts: The arrest of Henry Louis Gates could have led to a productive national discussion about racial profiling and the civil rights struggle. For the most part, that hasn't happened yet. (Photo: Pete Souza / White House.)
After barging into a black man's home and mistaking him for a burglar, a police officer arrests him on the basis that he was not sufficiently polite. In a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, only 7% of whites blamed the officer. I don't have access to particularly sophisticated scientific polls of my own, but reader response to the Gates arrest has been almost unanimously anti-Gates.
Last week, I took issue with the white so-called libertarians posting on this site who ostensibly have no problem with authoritarian police behavior when the victim of said behavior is a person of color. A commenter, Jeffersonish, replied with a post that reads to me like it's part admonition, part crisis of faith:
I don't know what "libertarians" you're referring to, but no libertarian I know would side with the cops on this one based on your description. Note: I haven't seen any other reports which supports your claim re: the dearth of coverage. I've been involved in Libertarian Party (LP) politics for about four years and I think I can safely say I haven't met anyone who would have sided with the cops in the LP.It upset me to write it.
I will say there are a lot of people calling themselves libertarians these days who are not. Note that even many members of the LP including myself aren't 100% libertarian since that would entail espousing complete anarchy. I prefer a minarchy where government is greatly reduced in size and power, leaving enough for criminal law enforcement and justice, national defense and one or two other functions.
At the heart of libertarianism is the mandate against uninitiated force or fraud. There isn't any caveat for race, gender, religion. I for one disassociate myself from anyone calling themselves a libertarian who condones what you described.
I'm tired, so if that rambled a little, just consider that I wouldn't even have written it but for the fact that this blog really upset me.
The temptation is to frame this as an issue of heroes and villains. Sgt. Crowley and the 93% are bad whites, and I get to feel better about myself because I'm part of the 7% that "gets it." Except that in practice, this doesn't mean squat. I will benefit from the same $19,000/year median income disparity, and 10-year median life expectancy disparity, that other whites benefit from. I will be just as unlikely to be arrested under circumstances similar to those of Dr. Gates.
And can we be honest here for a second? I'm not doing a very good job of changing the system. I'm sitting here writing about this situation on a blog, a blog that pays me for this, and I'll get a few pats on the back from some people and a few dirty looks from others but at the end of the day it won't matter much. Because it isn't about me, and it isn't about Sgt. Crowley, and it isn't about the 93% or the 7%. It's about what it means, to borrow a phrase from Dr. Gates, to be a black man in America.
Maybe I've put too much thought into the issue of how Sgt. Crowley should be punished, or how horrible it is to see this sort of thing happen in 2009, as if this sort of thing doesn't happen every day in 2009 to people without Dr. Gates' privilege or media access. As Gary Younge writes in The Nation:
... [A]ll such tales attempt to stage racism as a crude morality play, with individuals as absolute victims and absolute villains, rather than as a system of oppression that works primarily through institutions. The victim must have no priors and no drugs. And unless the perpetrator is photographed with a billy club in hand and uses racial slurs that are recorded on tape, we are supposed to give him the benefit of the doubt.For two consecutive years, strong segments of the U.S. Supreme Court have held that intent is the defining standard in discrimination suits. Justice Scalia's concurrence in the Crawford v. Marion County (2008) voter ID case would have legalized not only restrictive voter ID laws, but also (if followed to its logical conclusion) the old Jim Crow standards of poll taxes and literacy tests. And the Supreme Court's execrable majority opinion in this year's Ricci v. DeStefano hamstrings the decent efforts of municipalities and other local governments to address real racial disparities in their midst by holding them to the impossible standard of proving, in a court of law, that racial disparities are more intentional than the attempts to address them.
For an individual, that is fair. For a system, it is farcical. While it may be intriguing to speculate about what two people may or may not have been thinking, feeling and intending at any given moment, the proof of racism is in the odds. Black people in America fall foul of not just the law of the land but the law of probabilities as well. They are more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, convicted and executed ... The figures bear this out, and at the end of the day, nooses and burning crosses shouldn't be necessary to demonstrate racism's reach.
What both of these opinions have in common is that they say that intent defines discrimination--that discrimination is about the 93% and the 7%, about Sgt. Crowley and me, and not about the people who are actually affected by these policies. It is, in and of itself, a racist standard that denies the validity of the experiences of people of color.
A good analogy is Abu Ghraib. Media talking heads asked: was the torture and murder the result of "a few bad apples," or a systemic problem? And our criminal justice system convicted a few people, and gave themselves an answer. And the torture and murder continued.
It does not matter so much what Sgt. Crowley was thinking, or whether he is a good man; it matters that Dr. Gates was arrested, though it matters more that so many black men who do not have Dr. Gates' influence do not have their charges dropped, do not have the option of a lawsuit, do not have the media platform to respond. The average victim of racial profiling will never have a beer with the president. He would never be allowed to get that close.
It's not about you, James Crowley. It's not about me, Tom Head. It is not even about you, Henry Louis Gates. And with respect, President Obama, it is most certainly not about you, either. It is about the silenced. It is about the nameless. It is about this brief glimpse that this arrest has given the privileged into the factory. It is about this brief opportunity, this "teachable moment," we have been given to see how the sausage is made.
And if this is a "teachable moment," the beer summit is a valuable lesson: it tells us that this is not about good or bad apples, that it is a systemic problem, and--less encouragingly--it tells us part of the reason why nothing has really changed. Privileged people can and will ultimately sit down at the same table and have a beer together with no hard feelings. Why shouldn't they? But Henry Louis Gates, who seems to understand that this is very much not about him, is directing his brilliant mind towards the question of how to communicate the experience of racial profiling to whites and middle-class people of color who may not realize how pervasive it is, what it means, or how to solve it. I'm interested in seeing what he comes up with. I'm interested in seeing who listens. I'm interested in seeing if anything is done as a result.
Meanwhile, there are concrete things we can do right now. We can promote civilian review boards to oversee our local police departments and address outrageous cases of racial profiling. We can encourage the creation of community courts, to ensure that those minor offenses whose prosecution is so routinely skewed by racial profiling do not destroy the lives of their alleged perpetrators. We can lobby for more funding for public defenders so that the most vulnerable survivors of racial profiling can be given fair trials. We can advocate meaningful public education reform. We can promote universal access to health care.
We can all do good work. We can all promote a real, meaningful civil rights agenda. We can be real libertarians by addressing the real threat to personal liberty: the deadly machine of institutional oppression that limits, tarnishes, and prematurely ends so many lives. We can all work together to solve the real problem, if we have the will. Or we can remain silent in the name of respecting oppressive good intentions, answering the insignificant question of whether people like Sgt. Crowley "mean well"--and whether we'd still want to have a beer with them.
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Comments
Your first sentence tells it all–this article is totally biased. Gates WAS breaking into the house. A witness saw him and called 911. A Harvard ID does not contain a person’s address, is easily fakeable, and is not legal ID. Gates knew exactly what he was doing–he calculated that a tantrum and cries of racism would get him much further than cooperating with police. My friend, a white woman, was in a similar situation. She was at a relative’s home when the burglar alarm went off and the police were in the process of arresting her when the homeowners came home and vouched for her. Did she cry racism? No. But then, she hasn’t built a career on studying the nuances of every racist act in America. Gates would do good to spend the next half of his career studying what’s good about race relations in America. Too bad he won’t. And the glass will always be half empty.
Tom Head badly needs a dose of reality and common sense. What a ridiculous column. Sgt. Crowley was doing his job and Gates acted like a complete jerk. The same thing happened to me once – locked out of the house, trying to crawl through a window – a concerned neighbor called the cops. Instead of berating the responding officer and disrepecting him, I thanked him for looking out for my house and my safety. Gates couldn’t do that? That is why nobody, not even black cops in the Cambridge PD, would support Gates. Head sounds like an angry left winger who can’t even open his eyes to the facts. Get a grip buddy.
Judge Andrew Napolitano said on Fox News that
Crowley entered the house illegally. He also said the
D.C. charge was false arrest. That is why the charge was dropped .
He doesn’t mention that Crowley breaks the MA police id
card law by not handing over Police id card when Gates asked.Saying I’m Sgt Crowley is not legal
enough in MA.
Crowley should have stayed outside and waited for
backup.Lucia Whalen could have told what she told
the dispatcher. They had luggage and she thought
maybe they lived there.She never said she saw B and
E.
Lookup General Laws Of Ma. police Id card.
On that alone Crowley should be in trouble.
Watch the Fox judge video.The cop breaks 3 laws.
Gates does nothing illegal.The other cops agree
with Crowley. Good thing we don’t let cops run
the courts.
Crowley did have backup – a black officer who said Gates deserved to be arrested. It is the officer’s duty to investigate a possible break in and request an ID and make sure it is not an intruder just pretending to be the homeowner. Stop criticizing the cops for doing their job – they risk their safety to protect your dumb ass.
Why does this have to be about race?
What if this same thing happened and both participants had been white?
I will tell you – nothing. Absolutely nothing because everyone automatically assumes the police have this kind of power.
Change the first line of this article to …
“After barging into a MAN’s home and mistaking him for a burglar, a police officer arrests him on the basis that he was not sufficiently polite.”
Yes, that is what we should be outraged about. That police can arrest people for not being sufficiently polite to a state representative who has barged into your home.
How compliant everyone has become. How meek! When an agent of the state oversteps his legal authority it is the right, no make that the duty of the people to stand up and protect themselves from the intrusive power.
I suppose they don’t teach this part in government run schools. Nowadays if a person says no to an officer there is a presumed right on the part of the officer to be able to then take you by force and do whatever the cop thinks is right (no matter how much force that may be). When did this presumption begin? It sure wasn’t there when I grew up.
And you can forget about the fourth amendment. Most people here seem to have gladly turned that right over to the state. As long as the officer demands to walk into your homes, warrant or no, many seem to saying that it is dumb to try to stop him.
If this is true, then we are all doomed. Giving the state this much power is terribly dangerous. It is bad enough that the state is taking this much power, but many people are rolling over without a fight.
This is the discussion we should be having… What is the Constitution? What limits are there on government power? Why are those limits there? What can we do when the state steps over the boundaries? How can we protect ourselves? How can we teach others? Do we need stronger protections than the Constitution provides? Why? What can we do about that? Why is it so dangerous to give the state unfettered powers over the people?
I am not saying that racism doesn’t exist – of course it does. But having read incident after incident of the police acting like bullies to people of all races, I think this situation should be examined as just awful behavior of the police towards citizens.
Instead of speaking about racial rights, how about civil rights – civil rights of all? Then everyone gets covered.
Again, what if the facts were the same but it was a white man saying this to a white cop? Having seen videos of white grannies getting tasered by white cops for doing nothing more than not asking “how high” when told to jump, I believe the state has gotten out of control.
And oh, how compliant we have all become.
If this is the first time that people are learning that the police are out of control, then this incident may do some good. Search for videos on the topic. They are plentiful.
Andrea is right on.
This is not about race.
This is about police abusing their power.
Sure, Crowley should have checked out the reported possible b&e. Sure, Crowley should have checked out Gates’ ID to make sure he had a legitimate reason to be in that house. And then, having verified that, he should have left. Regardless of anything Gates may have been saying, or shouting.
If Crowley’s report is to be trusted, Gates was in fact acting like an ass. But so what? Being an ass is NOT a crime. Not even if you’re being an ass to a cop. Cops need to grow a pair, and deal with the fact that people will at times insult them and say nasty things to them while they’re doing their jobs, and just DEAL WITH IT, and stop being bullies with badges who can’t take some idiot spouting off.
And of course, since Crowley’s police report says that he spoke to the 911 caller (Lucia Whalen) before entering the house, and that Whalen told him about ‘two black men with backpacks’, while Whalen says that NO SUCH CONVERSATION EVER TOOK PLACE, I have to say that we need to take Crowley’s police report with at least a teaspoon or two of salt.
Don’t say that cops never lie – it just ain’t so.
This case is more like the cop who tasered the old woman for saying ‘just give me the f*ing ticket’. Nothing to do with race. Just another case of an egotistical cop arresting someone for failing to show the fawning obsequiousness that his fragile ego thinks he deserves.
N_J