What's Been Missing from Obama's Response to the Arrest of Henry Louis Gates
My reluctance to support Obama stemmed from what I believed was the Senator’s reluctance to honestly confront issues of race. I was as excited as many about Obama after witnessing his stirring keynote address at the 2004 DNC convention. I believed a run for the presidency might not be a far-fetched idea. But I later became disillusioned during the Katrina crisis as Obama, in an effort to diffuse racial tensions, stated that the shortcomings in response to that horrific event were a matter of class. Race had nothing to do with it.
I believed Obama’s response to be cowardly and dishonest. Anyone who knows the history of New Orleans knows that race cannot be separated from the events before and after Katrina. It was astonishing to watch a Black politician engage in such blatant denial for his own political gain. Black candidates and elected officials seeking state and national office know they must scale the racial mountain to assure their white constituents that they are not in it to advance the “Black cause.” In doing so, Black politicians all too often campaign or govern at the expense of their black constituents, downplaying racially charged issues so as not to offend whites. But Obama well knows that race and class are not mutually exclusive and are often intersecting factors. Racial inequality is real and often has life and death consequences as we witnessed during and after Katrina. For those of us at the bottom of the racial food chain, achieving racial equality is just as important as health care, the economy, and education as race determines access and quality of access. Obama’s willfulness to obscure these complexities in the midst of such human suffering gave me pause. I honestly did not think I could support a candidate who, to use the words of Kanye West, “doesn’t care about Black people.” Despite my misgivings, however, I eventually came around when some of my colleagues, namely a white middle aged female friend, urged me to listen to Obama’s stump speeches. After listening to both Clinton and Obama, I was convinced that Obama was the better candidate. By December 2007 I was well on my way to becoming an Obama supporter and took the full leap, as many others did, after the Iowa Caucus.
While Obama tried his best throughout the primary election to appear race neutral, fanning the flames of unrest whenever racial animosities attempted to hijack his campaign, the Jeremiah Wright controversy brought race front and center. Hence, Obama was faced with having to do something he had long tried to avoid: address the issue of race head on. Like many Obama supporters, I was nervous about what he would say in the “race” speech he reluctantly delivered in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008 . Not only was I nervous because of what this could mean to him politically, I was also nervous because of what this could mean for Blacks all over the country. In addition to his Katrina comments, I had read Obama’s The Audacity of Hope (2006) and frankly was unimpressed with his chapter on race. While he addresses issues of institutional and structural racism, unfortunately, the chapter quickly descends into a discourse on so called Black pathology. His memoir Dreams From My Father (1995) dealt far more honestly with the issue of race. But that was written before he became a politician. And so I sat nervously in front of the TV waiting for the speech. Would Obama yield to the status quo and simply say what was necessary to appease white anxieties? Or would he truly give voice to the reality of continued racial inequality in America? The speech was indeed as anchor Chris Matthews stated, “brilliant . . . one worthy of Lincoln.” Obama, nevertheless, managed to let whiteness off the hook by, in the words of novelist Adam Mansback, “ fudg[ing] the difference between institutional racism and white bitterness.” Despite this shortcoming, I felt Obama had done what was necessary to keep his campaign afloat while at the same time not throwing Blacks under the bus.
My disillusionment with Obama would return again as his visits to various Black churches during the general election yielded didactic speeches of personal responsibility, a message many felt condescending and only designed to garner white votes (i.e. the controversial Father’s Day speech). As appalled as I was at Rev. Jesse Jackson’s remarks that such condescension made him want “to cut his [Obama’s] nuts off,” I could identify with Rev. Jackson’s frustration. Why is it that Obama and others resort to scolding Black parents for not doing their part to insure their children’s success, but never acknowledge that there are Black parents who are actively engaged in their children’s lives? Yes, there are fathers who need to “step up,” but what about acknowledging those who have indeed steeped up and are taking care of their parental responsibilities? Such people are not an exception, but rather the rule in Black communities all over the country.
For this reason I was apprehensive about listening to the President’s recent speech at the NAACP centennial anniversary for fear that he would once again get on his personal responsibility soap box. Such rhetoric plays well in the media. As expected, his “no excuses” sound bite was the only part of the speech that made the news cycle and was played ad nauseam. While I agree that we need to teach our children that racism is no excuse for poor school performance, I also believe that academic and professional achievement does not immunize anyone from racism, which has indeed stifled the potential of countless young people in this country. How one successfully navigates a system which automatically assumes he or she is intellectually inferior or is an affirmative action baby undeserving of his or her achievements (i.e. Geraldine Ferraro’s comments about Obama during the primary election) is a lesson parents must provide young people as well. But once again Obama’s gross generalizations about Black parenting and Black underachievement lent credence to the time worn assertion that Black anti-intellectualism and the dysfunctional Black family lay at the root of what ails Black communities.
Therefore, I was not a little shocked by the President’s pointed response on July 21, 2009 to a question posed by Chicago journalist Lynn Sweet regarding the recent arrest of renowned Harvard scholar Dr. Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr. While on the one hand I thought some of his remarks crossed the line, on the other hand I thought, “Finally, he provides an unambiguous response to a question on the dilemma of race in this country.” While Obama rightfully stated that he did not know if race played a part in the Gates controversy, his exposé on the reality of racial profiling and the disproportionate targeting of Blacks and Latinos by law enforcement made him the advocate, however unintentional, for those at the bottom of the racial food chain. By doing so, Obama transgressed polite politics before a majority white audience as he gave voice to the current dilemma of the abuse of police authority in minority communities. As one writer quipped, “Finally, Obama sounded like a Black Man.” Witnessing such a rare occurrence caused me to proclaim with glee, “Indeed change has truly come to America.”
But that was then.
Obama stated in his book The Audacity of Hope that he learned very early on how not to make white people feel their whiteness so as to avoid white backlash (p. 247). In his subsequent remarks at an impromptu White House press conference on July 24, 2009, the President once again demonstrated his mastery of appeasing white anxieties for political gain. Unfortunately, his effort to tamp down racial tensions generated from his earlier remarks came at the expense of those at the bottom who are most vulnerable to aggressive policing. To state that Black people are sensitive to racial issues because of a history of past wrongs without acknowledging that we have legitimate concerns about the present state of racial inequality in this country relegated such concerns to the category of Black paranoia. While he maintained that Gates was wrongfully arrested, Obama also stated that both Gates and Crowley, the arresting officer, no doubt overreacted. Then Obama provided a possible explanation for Gates’s alleged over-the-top behavior. He attributed it to a misunderstanding between Blacks and officers which often happens during law enforcement encounters with communities of color (though Ware Street where Gates resides can hardly be defined as a minority community). He never provided an explanation for why Crowley may have overacted. But what was most astonishing was that Obama invited the arresting officer along with Gates to the White House for a beer and conversation as though such a gesture were a panacea for police misconduct.
My first reaction was, please excuse the acronym, “WTF?” So the teachable moment that Obama talked about in his revised comments is that the dilemma of over-aggressive policing can be solved by a bottle of beer, a slap on the back and a good laugh about it all. That strategy might indeed work for Gates, a renowned Harvard Scholar, but what about the rest of us? What about those who do not have the name recognition to have their story make the news cycle? Who do not have the connections to get the charges dropped? Who do not have a personal friendship with the president who will speak out on their behalf? If Obama went too far in his initial remarks by saying that Cambridge police “acted stupidly,” he certainly went way too far in his later remarks to diffuse the controversy. His acknowledgment that he should have calibrated his earlier remarks more carefully so as not to appear to disparage the police department was a sufficient attempt to silence his critics. But engaging in reductionist reasoning regarding the intersection of race and law enforcement and then offering to have a beer with the arresting officer, whom he never identified in his remarks, all in the name of taking the high road, goes a bit too far. This merely trivializes police misconduct which far too often results in the false incarceration, physical injury and death of countless people of color in this country.
I understand that Obama, as the first African American to assume the presidency, has to walk a racial tight rope, a burden no other American president has had to bear. But as an African American woman who cried the night he was elected and cried the day he was inaugurated, I feel a deep sense of betrayal. It is the same sense of betrayal I felt when I heard and read his comments regarding Katrina. Yes, he has to be the president for all the people; but, this should not come at the expense of people of color. African Americans are deeply shaken by Gates’s arrest. As a wife, mother, sister, aunt, cousin, daughter and friend of Black men, my anxiety for them has now increased tenfold. And should they fall into the hands of an officer who refuses to disengage from a situation even after it has been established that no crime is in progress or has been committed, they undoubtedly will not be as lucky as Gates. Obama asserted that we should all step back and realize that Professor Gates and Officer Crowley are two decent people. Fine. But perhaps we should also step back and realize that our collective reaction to this event clearly demonstrates that the idea that the election of a Black president is evident that America has moved beyond race is far too premature. As Gates pointedly stated in his most recent interview, and I concur, “I thought the whole idea that America was post-racial and post-black was laughable from the beginning. . . But the only black people who truly live in a post-racial world in America all live in a very nice house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” Indeed. I guess the rest of us at the bottom will have to fend for ourselves.
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