Obama's accidental gift on race

[DarrinS]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...-gift-on-race/

Less than a month after being confirmed as the nation's attorney General, Eric H. Holder Jr. called out the American people as "essentially a nation of cowards" for refusing to talk openly about race.

So, thank you, professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and President Obama, for starting the long-awaited national discussion on black and white iden y - while averting our attention from the amamie scheme to nationalize health care.

And kudos to the professor and the president for choosing Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department as the representative of the Caucasian-American side of this difficult and much-needed historic debate.

Poetry was at work as the archetypal racist white cop who, according to the admittedly fact-challenged president, "stupidly" arrested his "friend." Sgt. Crowley waged a swift and effective public relations campaign that quashed the racism meme that Mr. Gates was recklessly pushing.

Sgt. Crowley, as it happens, is the Cambridge police force's hand-picked racial profiling expert and was selected by a former black police commissioner. He also performed CPR on black basketball star Reggie Lewis, whose widow praised the public servant for doing everything he could to save her husband. Sgt. Crowley's own police department immediately jumped to his defense in a picture-perfect multiracial photo op and press conference.

Even though Mr. Gates and Sgt. Crowley are poised to put their individual grievances to rest - over a beer negotiated by the president of the United States - the scope of the problem that brought them international attention lingers, underscoring the need for continued robust public dialogue.

We're finally talking, Mr. Holder and Mr. Obama. Why stop now?

Of course, the attorney general is essentially right in his assessment. Much of America is petrified to bring up race, especially in public forums - the media, in particular. But for exactly the opposite reasons Mr. Holder, the Obama administration and the brain trust of modern liberalism assert.

Americans, especially nonblacks, are deeply fearful that the dynamic is predicated on an un-American premise: presumed guilt. Innocence, under the extra-cons utional reign of political correctness, liberalism's brand of soft Shariah law, must be proved ex post facto.

Think not? Ask the Duke lacrosse team, which had 88 of the school's professors sign a pe ion that presumed their guilt before their side of the story was known. Even though the white athletes were exonerated and the liberal district attorney who pushed the case was dethroned, disbarred and disgraced, the professoriate that assigned guilt to its own students still refuses to apologize.

Those signatories cons uted 90 percent of Duke's African and African-American Studies Department, the subject-matter domain of Mr. Gates, Michael Eric Dyson, Cornel West and other tenure-wielding, highfalutin, iambic-pentameter-filibustering race baiters, and 60 percent of Duke's women's studies department, another hotbed of victimology posing as intellectualism.

While the media was front and center in preparing for the public executions of the three Duke lacrosse players, they scurried away when they were proved innocent. The Democratic Media Complex, in its pursuit of Orwellian hate-crime legislation, reparations and sundry non-ameliorative resolutions to America's troubled racial past, pursues its victims with blood lust. But it cannot act in good faith to redeem those it has destroyed in countless rushes to judgment. (Richard Jewell, R.I.P.)

The mainstream media choose to flaunt story lines that make white America appear guilty of continued ins utional racism, while black racism against whites is ignored as an acceptable disposition given our nation's history. This double standard provides a game board on which the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton can thrive in perpetuity and ensures racial progress is slowed.

And that is why the Case of Sergeant Crowley vs. Professor Gates is so important. As is expected from professional race baiters, Mr. Gates instigated a public brouhaha over race. And Mr. Obama, a man who attended the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's racist sermons for 20 years, used the bully pulpit to grant his friend a national platform to condemn a man for doing his job.

Sgt. Crowley, a proud and defiant public professional, played the moment perfectly and stopped his own assassination by media. Talk about a postmodern hero. Whether he likes it or not, Sgt. Crowley is a potent symbol of how the union has managed to become more perfect, a Rosa Parks of rush-to-judgment "reverse racism."

Now that the facts of the case show that his friend the professor was the man doing the racial profiling, the president wants to end the discussion.

Now we see what the attorney general meant when he spoke of cowards.

[rjv]

ah yes, the suffered anglo man. he will find his place amongst slavery, lynching, segregation and hate crimes.

[101A]

ah yes, the suffered anglo man. he will find his place amongst slavery, lynching, segregation and hate crimes.

Nice use of elitist cliche.

Bravo.

[Nbadan]

.....white mans burden...

[Viva Las Espuelas]

self oppression is a .

[Gummi Clutch]

stupid negros

[Nbadan]

Looking but not seeing
By LEONARD PITTS JR.
[email protected]

Please take a good look at Dr. Henry Louis Gates.

He is five feet, seven inches, weighs 150 pounds, wears glasses and uses a cane. His legs are of unequal length, his mustache and goatee are gray. He is 58 years old and looks it.

It's important to see Gates -- scholar, author, do entarian, Harvard University professor and African-American man -- because that's what Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge, Mass. police department apparently did not do in the July 16 confrontation that has ignited debate about racial bias in the U.S. ``justice'' system. For the three of you who do not know: the incident began when Gates, returning home from a trip to China, found his front door jammed. When he and his driver tried to force it, a neighbor, thinking it a burglary in progress, did the right thing and called police. Crowley responded, finding the driver gone and Gates inside. There are two versions of what happened next.

Police say Gates refused to comply with Crowley's order to step outside, initially would not identify himself and became belligerent, yelling that Crowley, who is white, is a racist, that he didn't know who he was messing with and that this was only happening because Gates is black.

Gates says he promptly produced his driver's license and Harvard ID, that the officer refused to provide his name and badge number and that he could not have yelled anything because he has a severe bronchial infection.

This much is not in dispute: Gates was arrested after providing proof he was lawfully occupying his own home. The police report says he was ``exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior in a public place.'' That being his own front porch.

Small wonder the charge has been dropped.

And here, Sgt. Crowley's defenders would want you to know he is not some Central Casting redneck, but an experienced officer who has led diversity workshops.

On the other hand, Gates is hardly Sister Souljah himself. Rather, he is a man who did the things African Americans are always advised to do -- work hard, get a good education, better yourself, only to discover that in the end, none of it saved him.

In the end, he still winds up standing on his front porch with his wrists shackled, just like any drug dealer or carjacker anywhere.

Because sometimes, they just don't see you. It's one of the most frustrating verities of African American life. Sometimes you simply know: They are looking your way but seeing their fears, their preconceptions, their stereotypes, that other black guy who did them wrong -- everything except the one and only you.

By definition, racism denies individuality, and preconceptions leave us blind, making it possible for even a man who leads diversity training to look at a small, graying scholar and see a menace to society. If Gates was loud and agitated, common sense says Crowley should've simply removed the source of the agitation -- himself.

Problem solved.

Instead, he called for backup(!) and took Gates into custody. And if Gates looked like a lawbreaker to James Crowley, well, to me he looks like former Lakers star Jamaal Wilkes, pulled over because the tags on his car were ``about to'' expire, like clean-shaven 6'4'' businessman Earl Graves Jr. detained by police searching for a mustachioed 5'10'' suspect, like Amadou Diallo, executed while reaching for his wallet.

And like me, with hands up and a rifle trained on my chest by an officer who later claimed he stopped me in that predominantly-white neighborhood for a traffic violation.

Because I look like Henry Louis Gates, he looks like Jamaal Wilkes, and we all look like some dangerous, predatory black man intent on mayhem. So there is no shock here -- only a sobering reminder that the old canard is, at some level, true.

[rjv]

Nice use of elitist cliche.

Bravo.

thanks, and the bourgeois condescencion is appreciated as well.

[Nbadan]

on race-baiting...

[DarrinS]

I'm curious why prof. Gates' height and weight are always mentioned. Ok, he's short and skinny.

And...?

[clambake]

I'm curious why prof. Gates' height and weight are always mentioned. Ok, he's short and skinny.

And...?

and......if only he'd been white.

[DarrinS]

on race-baiting...

Yeah, that was pretty stupid. This case has nothing to do with OJ. Or Rodney King.

[ChumpDumper]

I'm curious why prof. Gates' height and weight are always mentioned. Ok, he's short and skinny.

And...?

I don't know if it's always mentioned. The same passage was quoted twice on this board. It reinforces the contention that he was a threat to no one, as the police never said he was a threat at all.

[Crookshanks]

Leonard Pitts Jr. is part of the problem, not the solution.

[Nbadan]

lying by police is part of the problem

"She went on to tell me that she observed what appeared to be two black males with backpacks on the porch of Ware Street," the report says. "She told me that her su ions were aroused when she observed one of the men wedging his shoulder into the door as if he was trying to force entry."

[DarrinS]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...lumn?track=rss

About the only thing as disappointing as the frivolous arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was the loud, almost gleeful chorus of "I told you so's" coming from his defenders. You've heard of schadenfreude -- taking pleasure in the suffering of others? Well, this was the peculiar political version. It's not that commentators were happy that Gates had allegedly been mistreated. But they seemed inordinately pleased that some aggrieved yet righteous person had come along to help them prove a point they've been hankering to make since Barack Obama clinched the presidency last November:

"Racism is alive and well in the United States," one woman wrote in the comments section of the Root, the black-oriented online magazine that Gates edits. "It does not matter that we have an African American in the White House."

"We can put all that kumbaya, we're post-racial crap in the toilet," wrote one contributor to the Daily Beast. And according to Gates' friend and fellow tenured Harvard professor, Lawrence Bobo, the arrest proves that there "ain't nothing post-racial about the United States of America."

But the breathlessness and outsized outrage of some of the comments make me think not only that these critics are protesting too much but that they have much more at stake than Gates' four hours in the Cambridge clink.

Once upon a time, well-intentioned people liked to think that we should judge the relative fairness of our society by how the weakest among us are treated. But if reaction to Gates' arrest says anything, it's that elites are suddenly the canaries in the coal mine of racial justice. The logic works like this: If a Harvard professor can be treated that way, imagine how someone without Ivy League credentials is being treated!

But is it the non-Harvards that these commentators care about? Or is this a case of a segment of the chattering class protecting its interests by refortifying an iden y issue that's been challenged by the election of the first African American president?

Just listen to the classist -- or is it just plain elitist? -- overtones of the Gates outrage, all those mentions of "brilliant," Harvard and the New Yorker. At issue is not the overall treatment of an entire race but the apparent public devaluation of a highly decorated particular member of that race. And this from commentators who have, or want, similar notches on their resume belts. Would there be such a fuss if the black gentleman arrestee taught at Boise State and wrote for, say, Sal er Sportsman magazine?

Let me be clear. I think the police officer overstepped. I'm also guessing that he was trying to show a condescending Harvard professor who asked for his name and badge number a lesson in humility, or at least he was behaving in the I'm-a-cop-and-you're-not mode. But to deduce from this incident that the election of Obama isn't really a product or a precursor of racial progress is patently absurd.

The fact is, we are not and may never be (or even want to be) a totally post-racial society, in which race has no significance whatsoever. But the color line is murky now, and black commentators' using Gates' arrest to argue against the historical significance of Obama's electoral victory suggests that they haven't come to grips with how far it has faded.

That need to match at ude to reality isn't unique to black folks. I know upper-middle-class Mexican Americans who drive Jaguars but still see exploited farmworkers when they look in the mirror. I know wildly successful, Ivy League-educated Jews who still see WASP anti-Semites and worse around every corner.

Older minorities who have spent their lives defining themselves by the discrimination they have faced can sometimes have a hard time acknowledging that the world has changed, even as they enjoy those changes. Being discriminated against is one way they see their relationship to the world, and they're unclear how to navigate if they concede its absence. That is what makes Obama's election so unsettling to some blacks. Even as they rejoice in his victory, it requires them to recalibrate their view of the world and their place within it.

Professor Gates should not have been led away in handcuffs. But at the end of the day, he still earns more money, has more privileges, access, influence and, ultimately, much more power than the man who arrested him. How many of you can depend on the president of the United States coming to your defense when you have a run-in with the law?

Gates may be a momentary victim, but here's a flash: By most measures, he's actually one of the victors. Times have changed. It's a good thing.

[clambake]

Professor Gates should not have been led away in handcuffs. But at the end of the day, he still earns more money, has more privileges, access, influence and, ultimately, much more power than the man who arrested him.

and he was told by this lesser man to "tell it to the judge".

[SonOfAGun]

self oppression is a .

[Viva Las Espuelas]

and he was told by this lesser man to "tell it to the judge".

so will you rely on the "lesser man" if you're involved in a hit and run, mugging, or any ill will brought to you and/or your family, or will you call your local loud-mouthed professor?

[clambake]

so will you rely on the "lesser man" if you're involved in a hit and run, mugging, or any ill will brought to you and/or your family, or will you call your local loud-mouthed professor?

i won't have any problem, V. I'm very white.

[ChumpDumper]

so will you rely on the "lesser man" if you're involved in a hit and run, mugging, or any ill will brought to you and/or your family, or will you call your local loud-mouthed professor?

Will he throw me in jail if I yell from my porch?

[hope4dopes]

Will he throw me in jail if I yell from my porch?

Yeah... very well could happen. you need to get out of suburbia and see a little of the world.

[ploto]

The election of Obama says absolutely nothing about any improvement in the perception of race with regards to the people who would not even consider voting for him because of his race. Actually, some of these people are even more anti-African American because he won.

[ChumpDumper]

Yeah... very well could happen. you need to get out of suburbia and see a little of the world.

Where everyone gets arrested from yelling from his porch?

Which America do you live in, dope?

[ChumpDumper]

The election of Obama says absolutely nothing about any improvement in the perception of race with regards to the people who would not even consider voting for him because of his race. Actually, some of these people are even more anti-African American because he won.

The Klan voted Obama into office. Whottt said so.