It’s taken me awhile to finally write a blog post (not that people will read this, haha). I’ve been late to the game and I don’t really have much to add. But here are some of my thoughts and I’m sure these have been expressed already on many other blogs. I’ve been hesitant to write about it for some reason. I don’t claim to be right or have the answers. I have my own blind spots in all of this. But these are some of my thought – for what they’re worth.
I’ve been reading various blogs about the whole situation with Deadly Viper. In some ways I have been encouraged and inspired and in other ways I have been angered and disheartened.
What has been encouraging for me is to see Asian American voices being heard in all of this. I was able to hear from voices I hadn’t hear from before. I was able to talk with people about this in a way I hadn’t before. People were willing to share their pain and were not willing to be silent on this. You could see people writing emails to Zondervan to express their dismay at what was taking place. You could see and feel the empowerment of Asian Americans to speak up. I saw glimpses of an American American voice and presence in the larger Christian community. As the larger Asian American Christian voice is still forming and emerging, it was gratifying for me to see other Asian American Christians willing to engage and participate in this vital issue of race and racism in the larger Christian community. I was also encouraged by non-Asian American voices in the Church willing to advocate and speak out on this issue.
I was also inspired by Asian American leaders in the church willing to speak up for those who feel voiceless. It’s not an easy place for these leaders to put themselves out there because they knew there would be a backlash against them. But the courage they showed in their Christ-like advocacy has been inspiring for me and so many others who felt like they didn’t have much power to say anything.
While there have been things that have been encouraging, there has been plenty that has been discouraging, especially the backlash against the Asian American leaders who spoke out and against the Asian American community at large. I guess I shouldn’t surprised. But it’s still disheartening nonetheless. In this age of Obama, things are scary out there.
I’ve been listening to so many Christians, mostly white, but also other Asian Americans, who are basically telling those who have been offended and who have spoken up that “we need to get over it”. Our problem or our sin is that we CHOOSE to be offended. Everything feels so backward. How did the oppressed get turned into the perpetrator? This has brought up all those all too many times in my life when I was told to GET OVER IT! I need to be thick-skinned and if I was offended I just suck it up and move on. I went through a long period of my life with that attitude. How damaging it was for me to keep all my emotions and anger inside. I will not GET OVER IT! I am speaking up not so I can go through my gripes against white people. It has nothing to do with that. It has to do with my love for greater Christian community that values Christ-like justice, reconciliation, and inclusion.
Many have commented on the way Professor Soong-Chan Rah handled the situation. He’s already apologized for his part. However, much of his reaction was facilitated by the dismissive response by Mike. Had he responded differently, I think Professor Soong-Chan Rah would have acted differently. Had Soong-Chan Rah not called people to action, I don’t think Mike and Jud or Zondervan would have responded.
I know some who claim to know Mike and Jud have said they were trying honor Asian culture and consulted other Asian Americans. However, I have to ask, who were the Asian Americans around them who were giving them counsel that thought this marketing would be culturally sensitive and honoring to Asian culture and Asian Americans?
What may be the saddest part of this whole deal is how this is looking to nonChristian Asian Americans who already think Christianity is an oppressive force and that the Church glosses over issues of race and justice. What kind of witness are we demonstrating to nonChristian Asian Americans with this backlash and justification of cultural insensitivity to the Asian American community?
I have been taken aback by the arrogance of those who confidently state that they have the theological high ground by quoting the same scriptures that purport to devalue race and ethnicity. It just shows the dominant view in the Church through the lens of individualism and reductionism. Like Soong-Chan Rah’s book states, we are witnessing the Western cultural captivity of the Church. Scripture being used to justify ignorance and cultural insensitivity is extremely dismaying to say the least.
I’ve already seen comments on blogs in which there have been white Christians not just discussing the Deadly Vipers incident but also their gripes against Asian Americans and other people of color. It’s sad that it has deteriorated to that point.
Lastly, I’d like to say that it’s not courageous to say you weren’t offended. I’ve seen some blogs by Asian Americans who have proudly stated that they weren’t offended by the marketing of Deadly Vipers and they even have the audacity to apologize on behalf of the whole Asian American community. The Asian American community is not monolithic and they don’t need to apologize on my behalf. I have no problem with Asian Americans stating that they weren’t offended by the material or they thought Mike and Jud were trying to honor Asian Americans. That’s fine. However, those views have implicitly given license to those white Christians who are angry about this to blame the Asian American community for their feeling of “losing” Deadly Vipers and in some way “losing” power. I’ve seen so many of the white Christians who are angry about this justifying themselves by citing various Asian American bloggers who say they weren’t offended. They are called courageous by these white Christians. I don’t think it’s courageous. I think the ones who have been courageous are those who have spoken out against the cultural insensitivity of the marketing of Deadly Vipers even though they knew there would be a huge backlash by many white and some Asian Americans in the Church.
Soong Chan-Rah, Eugene Cho, Kathy Khang, Ken Fong, and Nikki Toyama-Szeto have stated their desire for Mike and Jud to be restored and for their ministry to continue. I hope Mike and Jud come back and get to continue their ministry that has changed the lives of so many. I think they can do that without being culturally insensitive to Asian Americans in the process. Let’s hope the reconciliation process will continue and that all those involved would continue to rely on God for discernment and that we would move a step forward in the elusive place of racial reconciliation.
I hope the three people who read this post enjoyed reading it. =)
No more than five or six minutes elapsed from the time the police were alerted to the possibility of a break-in at a home in a quiet residential neighborhood and the awful clamping of handcuffs on the wrists of the distinguished Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.
If Professor Gates ranted and raved at the cop who entered his home uninvited with a badge, a gun and an attitude, he didn’t rant and rave for long. The 911 call came in at about 12:45 on the afternoon of July 16 and, as The Times has reported, Mr. Gates was arrested, cuffed and about to be led off to jail by 12:51.
The charge: angry while black.
The president of the United States has suggested that we use this flare-up as a “teachable moment,” but so far exactly the wrong lessons are being drawn from it — especially for black people. The message that has gone out to the public is that powerful African-American leaders like Mr. Gates and President Obama will be very publicly slapped down for speaking up and speaking out about police misbehavior, and that the proper response if you think you are being unfairly targeted by the police because of your race is to chill.
I have nothing but contempt for that message.
Mr. Gates is a friend, and I was selected some months ago to receive an award from an institute that he runs at Harvard. I made no attempt to speak to him while researching this column.
The very first lesson that should be drawn from the encounter between Mr. Gates and the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, is that Professor Gates did absolutely nothing wrong. He did not swear at the officer or threaten him. He was never a danger to anyone. At worst, if you believe the police report, he yelled at Sergeant Crowley. He demanded to know if he was being treated the way he was being treated because he was black.
You can yell at a cop in America. This is not Iran. And if some people don’t like what you’re saying, too bad. You can even be wrong in what you are saying. There is no law against that. It is not an offense for which you are supposed to be arrested.
That’s a lesson that should have emerged clearly from this contretemps.
It was the police officer, Sergeant Crowley, who did something wrong in this instance. He arrested a man who had already demonstrated to the officer’s satisfaction that he was in his own home and had been minding his own business, bothering no one. Sergeant Crowley arrested Professor Gates and had him paraded off to jail for no good reason, and that brings us to the most important lesson to be drawn from this case. Black people are constantly being stopped, searched, harassed, publicly humiliated, assaulted, arrested and sometimes killed by police officers in this country for no good reason.
New York City cops make upwards of a half-million stops of private citizens each year, questioning and frequently frisking these men, women and children. The overwhelming majority of those stopped are black or Latino, and the overwhelming majority are innocent of any wrongdoing. A true “teachable moment” would focus a spotlight on such outrages and the urgent need to stop them.
But this country is not interested in that.
I wrote a number of columns about the arrests of more than 30 black and Hispanic youngsters — male and female — who were doing nothing more than walking peacefully down a quiet street in Brooklyn in broad daylight in the spring of 2007. The kids had to hire lawyers and fight the case for nearly two frustrating years before the charges were dropped and a settlement for their outlandish arrests worked out.
Black people need to roar out their anger at such treatment, lift up their voices and demand change. Anyone counseling a less militant approach is counseling self-defeat. As of mid-2008, there were 4,777 black men imprisoned in America for every 100,000 black men in the population. By comparison, there were only 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white men.
While whites use illegal drugs at substantially higher percentages than blacks, black men are sent to prison on drug charges at 13 times the rate of white men.
Most whites do not want to hear about racial problems, and President Obama would rather walk through fire than spend his time dealing with them. We’re never going to have a serious national conversation about race. So that leaves it up to ordinary black Americans to rant and to rave, to demonstrate and to lobby, to march and confront and to sue and generally do whatever is necessary to stop a continuing and deeply racist criminal justice outrage.
In one week, President Obama covered the waterfront on racial politics. Although, in his address to the delegates at the NAACP’s Centennial he said, “an African-American child is roughly five times as likely as a white child to see the inside of a jail,” he also used the same “personal responsibility” rhetoric as he has every time he has spoken to African American audiences as candidate and president. Just days later, he would answer a question at a prime time press conference regarding the arrest of African American Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. that would place him in the middle of the debate on racial profiling.
“Personal responsibility,” a Republican vocabulary word born in the Reagan era, plays politically well among moderate and conservative Whites, and even among some White liberals who, unfortunately, have a hard time distinguishing reality from the right-wing noise machine. The “personal responsibility” argument suggests that there is some inherent pathology within African Americans that is disabling. “Personal responsibility” is the modern day replacement for the antebellum term that endured through the middle of the 20th century — “shiftlessness.”
Today, Republicans argue “personal responsibility/shiftlessness” most frequently with the statistic that 70% of African American children are born to single mothers. But according to the Institute for Policy Studies, “the increase in the share of White children living in a single parent home has been much higher (229%) than for Black children (155%) since 1960.” Yet Whites are never accused of lacking personal responsibility or preached to about the subject. And sometimes we Democrats, Lefties and Progressives are too quick to repeat what the Right has popularly propagandized without a careful analysis of this rhetoric’s roots.
I criticized the president for feeling the need to include “personal responsibility” repeatedly and exclusively in front of African American audiences (not to mention his admonition while in Ghana for Africans to get over colonialism). Even he mused aloud to the Washington Post‘s Eugene Robinson after his NAACP speech about the attention he received. “I’ve noticed that when I talk about personal responsibility in the African American community, that gets highlighted,” Obama said. “But then the whole other half of the speech, where I talked about government’s responsibility . . . that somehow doesn’t make news.”
Enter Gates. Literally. Or Gates attempt to enter into his own home. An arrest is made. The Harvard professor charges racial profiling, and most of us who are African American can immediately identify. Countless studies have proven that African Americans are disproportionately stopped and detained Driving, Walking and Flying While Black. Hence, the NAACP has introduced a mobile rapid response system for African Americans to report police misconduct. I co-founded the Washington, DC NAACP Police Task Force that pressured the DC Police to implement their own profiling study using data collection and analysis. (I even taught a course at the police academy on racial profiling and the historical relationship between African Americans and law enforcement. So, I would love to talk shop on racial profiling instruction with Gates’ arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, a reported fellow teacher on the subject.)
There is no question that the president is an African American who has genuinely lived the African American experience. So when asked about Gates’ arrest he gave an answer which unlike his NAACP speech was unscripted. He said that “the Cambridge Police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home…what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.”
Immediately, the political punditry and police unions focused on “acted stupidly,” and demanded an apology from the president. The demographic to whom “personal responsibility” rhetoric was appealing a week earlier was at risk of alienation. The White House then began Walking Backward While Black. The president invited first, Crowley, then, Gates, over for a beer.
But this does not erase the most important part of the president’s statement at the press conference: “There is a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.”
White House refreshments are insufficient to end racial profiling. As a student of Abraham Lincoln, President Obama knows that Lincoln’s diplomacy by appeasing the South with a plan for gradual emancipation failed to stem the tide of the Civil War. Injustices must be pulled promptly by their very roots.
Why not invite stakeholders on all sides to a National Conversation About Race and Policing as the National Black Police Association has suggested? Why not endorse the reintroduction and swift passage of the End Racial Profiling Act in Congress? This bill would require state and local jurisdictions to practice data be collected by race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, and religion, so as to determine the extent to which profiling exists in a jurisdiction, if at all. For both sides of this debate, this legislation puts the proof in the pudding.
Mr. President, refreshments are insufficient. Without a national conversation and passage of this important legislation, there can be no post-racial America before we achieve an era of post-profiling. With your gifts, Sir, and as president, getting us there is your personal responsibility.
If race were the only issue, there would be much less hyperventilation about Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s unpleasant run-in with the criminal justice system. After all, it would hardly be the first time a black man had unjustly been hauled to jail by a white police officer. The debate — really more of a shouting match — is also about power and entitlement.
This is a new twist. Since the triumph of the civil rights movement, minorities have been moving up the ladder in politics, business, academia, just about every field. Only in the past decade, however, has a sizable cohort of African Americans and Latinos broken through to the tiny upper echelons where real power is exercised.
I’m talking about President Obama, obviously, but also Citigroup Chairman Richard Parsons, entertainment mogul Oprah Winfrey, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor and many others — a growing number of minorities with the kind of serious power that used to be reserved for whites only. In academia, the list begins with “Skip” Gates.
He’s a superstar, one of the best-known and most highly acclaimed faculty members at the nation’s most prestigious university. A few years ago, when he made noises about leaving, Harvard moved heaven and earth to keep him. The incident that led to his arrest occurred as he was coming home from the airport after a trip to China for his latest PBS documentary. Following the traumatic encounter, he repaired to Martha’s Vineyard to recuperate. This is how the man rolls.
Obama’s choice of words might not have been politic, but he was merely stating the obvious when he said the police behaved “stupidly.” Gates is 58, stands maybe 5-feet-7 and weighs about 150 pounds. He has a disability and walks with a cane. By the time Sgt. James Crowley made the arrest, he had already assured himself that Gates was in his own home. Crowley could see that the professor posed no threat to anybody.
But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Crowley’s version of the incident is true — that Gates, from the outset, was accusatory, aggressive and even obnoxious, addressing the officer with an air of highhanded superiority. Let’s assume he really recited the Big Cheese mantra: “You have no idea who you’re messing with.”
I lived in Cambridge for a year, and I can attest that meeting a famous Harvard professor who happens to be arrogant is like meeting a famous basketball player who happens to be tall. It’s not exactly a surprise. Crowley wouldn’t have lasted a week on the force, much less made sergeant, if he had tried to arrest every member of the Harvard community who treated him as if he belonged to an inferior species. Yet instead of walking away, Crowley arrested Gates as he stepped onto the front porch of his own house.
Apparently, there was something about the power relationship involved — uppity, jet-setting black professor vs. regular-guy, working-class white cop — that Crowley couldn’t abide. Judging by the overheated commentary that followed, that same something, whatever it might be, also makes conservatives forget that they believe in individual rights and oppose intrusive state power.
There was a similar case of collective amnesia at the Sotomayor hearings. Republican senators, faced with a judge who follows precedent and eschews making new law from the bench, forgot that this is the judicial philosophy they advocate. The odd and inappropriate line of questioning by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) about Sotomayor’s temperament was widely seen as sexist, and indeed it was. But I suspect the racial or ethnic power equation was also a factor — the idea of a sharp-tongued “wise Latina” making nervous attorneys, some of them white male attorneys, fumble and squirm.
Is a man of Gates’s station entitled to puff himself up and remind a police officer that he’s dealing with someone who has juice? Is a woman of Sotomayor’s accomplishment entitled to humiliate a lawyer who came to court unprepared? No more and no less entitled, surely, than all the Big Cheeses who came before them.
Yet Gates’s fit of pique somehow became cause for arrest. I can’t prove that if the Big Cheese in question had been a famous, brilliant Harvard professor who happened to be white — say, presidential adviser Larry Summers, who’s on leave from the university — the outcome would have been different. I’d put money on it, though. Anybody wanna bet?
The Huffington Post – Posted: July 24, 2009 02:17PM
The best news about the Professor Gates arrest in Cambridge, Massachusetts and its aftermath is the very fact that it is news — big news. And I believe that is positive. I think that too many White Americans thought that with Barack Obama in the White House, we could just skate through the next four or eight years without having to deal with this annoying and uncomfortable “race” issue, since Obama as president should quiet those kinds of unsettling issues. I warned sometime ago that I feared that too many black Americans thought that with Barack Obama in the White House, we could just skate through the next four or eight years without having to deal with a lot of “race” issues since his being president would somehow make things better and magically reduce the instances of racially motivated incidents in the country.
Nothing could be further from the truth. From country club swimming pool incidents in Pennsylvania, to “birthers” demanding to see the president’s birth certificate because they “want their country back” quoting from one angry white female at a protest meeting, to cartoons about the First Lady with racial overtones, to — how much time do we have here — we have seen a nationwide outbreak of incidents that are or imply an extension of racially insensitive and hurtful motivation.
I have a theory about that which I will expound on further in another forum, but let’s say it has to do with a society wherein if Americans really like an African-American, they like them more than anyone else — Oprah, Tiger, Colin Powell, Michael Jordan. If they really don’t like an African-American, they don’t like them more intensely than anyone else. Right now, more and more Americans are liking Barack Obama less and less (thanks also to some prodding from talk show hosts and agenda driven commentators). Those who like Obama less are now more easily incited to transfer that dislike into racially motivated comments and smears. That’s not everyone — but it never is everyone.
But the Professor Gates incident is different because it has aspects to it that we have seen consistently for 100 years that have nothing to do with having a black President, as well as aspects that are unique to this particular case (internationally renowned scholar and intellectual from Harvard), and the incident has aspects to it that are specifically related to having a black President. You can’t find too many other incidents like that, and I didn’t have to spend much time searching, either.
Earlier, I said that the fact that this topic is now national news is really a good thing. Let me expand on that a bit further. At one point in a TV interview, CNN commentator Candy Crowley said that “the president has given this story more legs.”
And she was right — and I am glad he did. It doesn’t matter to me what side you’re on (there shouldn’t be sides) and it doesn’t matter how you feel — not to me anyway. What matters to me is that you’re talking about it — that’s what conversation is. The story needs not just legs, but arms, hands, and a talking head on it — and that turned out to be the president himself. And that is good. I have been saying for the longest time that our country elected a black President before it had the conversation on race that we really needed, and because of that, there could be a real price to pay unless the president used a substantial portion of his term in office to address issues of race in a way that used his office to further the conversation and further the understanding we need.
You folks can argue about who was right and who was wrong — not my issue. I just want you talking about it. Because you can’t really talk about it in any extended conversation without at some point addressing perceptions, built up frustrations, attitudes among an entire community as well as a subset within that community (African-American males) about their relationship with law enforcement, and pre-conceived notions about crime and people’s intentions. If we are talking about that, all over the country, whites and blacks — then that’s good for America. Enough of all of the criticism that the president should have stayed out of this or he went too far. The fact is, the only reason we are now having this discussion nationwide is precisely because the president jumped into it — and I applaud him for doing so.
Now as to the incident itself, there is still information to be obtained and deciphered, and I hope that all those weighing in now with judgments about the behavior of the parties will reserve final judgment until all the facts are in. But there are a couple of issues that I have a problem with, and I will share those with you again for measured and calm reflection on your part.
1.I am concerned about the neighbor who originally called in the report to the police department. Since it is a neighbor, they should absolutely have regularly seen Professor Gates coming and going from the house and, particularly with the popularity and stature of this professor, they would have seen many African-American males coming and going from the house from time to time as well as whites and a multitude of visitors to that home. Furthermore, the neighbor might still be guilty of a “rush to judgment” even if it was any African-American male going to that home to call in to the Police department before being just a bit more certain. But in this case, we weren’t dealing with some other African-American male — it was Professor Gates himself. A neighbor who could see this man that close to see what he was doing should also have seen him enough times in the past to recognize that it was in fact Professor Gates himself. That’s a problem I have which is separate from the facts of the confrontation and arrest itself.
2. Whatever comes out as to the facts of the case, it is my current impression that Professor Gates was totally not justified in referring to Officer Crowley as a “rogue cop.” Rogue cops plant evidence in people’s bathrooms and then arrest them for drug use. Rogue cops take bribes and deliberately set out to go after targeted troublemakers and abuse their rights. Rogue cops manufacture evidence. Officer Crowley’s credentials and record on paper are impeccable, and I gladly note his work in helping to train other officers on how to deal with racial profiling. So let the record for my part stipulate that.
However, it is entirely possible that Officer Crowley reached a point where his adrenalin surge took over and he reacted in a way to what he judged to be provocation on the part of Professor Gates in a manner that maybe he would have been better served to “let go.” He had established that there was no crime, that Professor Gates was in his own home, that he was in fact Professor Gates (and don’t tell me that doesn’t matter — this is America — of course it matters — and people are right — if it was Henry Kissinger there would have been no arrest. And finally, the fact that at some point the officer had established that Prof. Gates himself was not armed and was not a threat to cause harm to anyone in the area. So maybe when the officer was leaving the home to conclude the incident he should have continued on his way. That is an option that would have been far more likely if Professor Gates was a white professor with his stature and credentials and the officer at some point became aware of that.
3. I am concerned that white America understand that there is a real problem here that is steeped in racial profiling and stereotyping that has in fact victimized African-Americans (and Hispanics, as well) for far too long. Many African-Americans look at this situation and not only understand the reaction of Professor Gates, but they also are frustrated because they know that when this type of incident takes place all over the country, usually the African-American male involved is not a world renowned professor, is not universally acknowledged as an intellectual and scholar, and cannot count on public expressions of support from the governor of the state and the president of the United States in a national press conference. As a result, in those cases, the person has to fend for himself, and it becomes just the word of this black man against the integrity and consistency of the version of the story as presented by the police department. And in reality, even if the facts of the Gates case do not warrant a charge of racial profiling by Officer Crowley, the circumstances remind too many African-Americans all too painfully of how close this is to what happens to so many of them when there is racial profiling and there are no resources or circumstances like those surrounding Professor Gates to help them deal with the aftermath.
4. The fact is, at this point I am inclined to believe that Officer Crowley had good intentions but may have made a mistake in judgment in how he handled the situation. I can live with that because we are all as human beings subject to that, and it is also my impression that Professor Gates contributed to the officer’s reaction by his own conduct. I’ll let them and all of the commentators deal with that. If I can be satisfied that Crowley was not pre-disposed to racially profile Gates or allowed his own biases to affect how he dealt with the situation, then I can move on because I can separate this case from true racial profiling cases but still use the case as a launching pad for the conversation we need on these kinds of subjects. Fine. But I am not interested in hearing any more commentators point out that there was an African-American police officer on the scene as if that would automatically rule out profiling or somehow provide an automatic pass or validation for Officer Crowley. Oh, no. What most African-Americans know clearly is that having an African -American police officer on the scene means absolutely nothing and may sometimes even empower the white officers in charge into thinking they have a license to get away with more. I just wanted to state on the record at least one challenge to that argument that I have been hearing frequently in the discussion of the Gates case.
5. I also heard Professor Gates remark that “this incident has made me realize how vulnerable all black men are” in situations like this. I want to go on record as expressing my shock that a man of his intelligence, with such scholarly accomplishment, such worldly views with such a well traveled background and an eloquent ability to articulate the black experience, could be so naive as to reach his late 50′s or early 60′s and need to experience a personal incident like this to realize how vulnerable the status is of black men in America. He should think about that statement and ponder just how ridiculous the implication of that admission is for those hearing it coming from him.
In a Huffington Post editorial I wrote paying a final tribute to Michael Jackson, I said that President Obama needed to address the race issue while he still has such high personal approval ratings with so much political capital in the bank. With the slower than expected economic recovery for the working and middle classes in America while Wall Street is almost fully recovered and fully re-cashed chipping away at his approval ratings, and with health care chopping away at his political capital bank account, the president needs to step up the pace a bit if he is going to be effective in using his unique term in office to further the understanding of “race” in America and enable all of us to make progress as a country in this regard.
The comments he made at his press conference, while coming under so much criticism from so many, actually were a good start as the effect has been exactly what I have been calling for — focusing on the conversation we need to be having. That’s a win. But I also felt it was an opportunity missed when the day after the president’s press conference, he went to a Town Hall meeting in Ohio facing a perfect forum to move the discussion further, and the president said nothing about the larger race issue: not the specifics of the Gates incident, but using that incident to launch the conversation we need. That’s a loss.
The issue of race will never be a win-win. Very often it may be a win-loss. But what we cannot have is an approach where we skip from racial incident to racial incident, ramp up the conversation at each incident, and then a day later forget about it and forget about having the conversation. That’s a loss-loss for all of us, and we can and must do better.
In his first comments on the incident, Professor Gates was quoted as saying his crime was “housing while black.” That reminded me of Franklin Ajaye, one of the best and sharpest black comedians of the 70′s who was perfect in the movie Car Wash. Ajaye was one of the most successful black comics ever in focusing specifically on using humor to expose the harm of racial profiling. From Ajaye, we got “driving while black”, and “housing while black,” and any other derivative formulations thereof — maybe “writing while black.”
For as Ajaye used to joke, things were so bad that he and a buddy were driving along the boulevard with the top down in a convertible, and they were stopped and arrested for being “black on a sunny day.” Like Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor and Dick Gregory and George Carlin before and after him, Ajaye and the others demonstrated that humor and comedy are sometimes the only forum where we as Americans have even been willing to listen to a conversation about the pain and hurt of racism and prejudice and try to learn from it and become better for having the discussion.
But it’s no laughing matter. And with a president in the White House who has a keener sense of the ravages of prejudice and hate and misconceptions than perhaps any president we have ever had, we must not only take this opportunity, but also insist that he and we take this opportunity to initiate the conversation, and keep it going so that as each new incident comes up, we are already set up to deal with it rather than having to ramp up to devote every waking moment to that incident only to return to normal after the 24 hour news cycle. Let’s try to do that — even if it’s just you and I.
Carl Jeffers is a Los Angeles-and Seattle based columnist, TV political analyst, radio talk show host and commentator, and a national lecturer. E-mail: cjintel@juno.com
Pat Buchanan, a conservative pundit who worked for Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and who has also run for president three times including winning the New Hampshire primary for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996, wrote an article telling the Republicans to use Sonia Sotomayor as a way to stoke white resentment to grow the party.
After watching the Republican senators grill Sonia Sotomayor about issues of race in a patronizing, condescending and patronizing way, it is pretty obvious that the Republican party is trying to tap into the angry white vote. They are definitely using the Pat Buchanan playbook.
Here is a clip from the Rachel Maddow Show in which Rachel Maddow and Pat Buchanan battle it out. Buchanan says some extremely racially incendiary comments
Many Americans like Judge Sonia Sotomayor because she represents the quintessential American success story.
By dint of hard work, determination and sacrifice, she overcame poverty and personal tragedy to rise to the top of the legal profession.
If she is confirmed, as seems likely, she would become the first Latino and the first woman of color to serve on that storied bench. And, for many of us, her ancestry makes her rise all the more appealing.
Her parents left Puerto Rico during World War II; her mother, then Celina Baez, enlisted at 17 in the Women’s Army Corps. She raised her children alone after her husband died of heart ailments at the age of 42.
Her daughter’s accomplishments — as well as those of her son, Juan, a physician — reinforce our favorite national myth: in this country, anyone can succeed.
But that poignant tale hasn’t won over everyone. Though Sotomayor will likely win some Republican votes, there remain many conservatives who believe she represents the activist-judge/liberal-elite who are pushing the country in the wrong direction.
They would oppose any judge nominated by a Democratic president who favors reproductive rights and supports civil unions for gay couples.
However, there is also a less articulated but equally intense reaction to Sotomayor on the right that has nothing to do with issues and everything to do with ethnicity.
There are still some conservatives who deeply resent the social and demographic changes that have swept the country during the past four decades, leading to the election of the nation’s first black president.
That faction sees the rise of a “wise Latina” as one more indication that the country no longer belongs solely to them.
Consider the analysis of Pat Buchanan, GOP presidential candidate turned political pundit, who has labeled Sotomayor “Miss Affirmative Action.”
In a recent column, Buchanan railed that “pundits here get hoots of appreciation for doing to a white Christian woman what would constitute a hate crime if done to a ‘wise Latina woman.’” (Note the designation of Sarah Palin as “Christian” as if Sotomayor, who grew up Catholic, is pagan.) Buchanan advised his fellow Republicans to “expose Sotomayor … as a political activist whose career bespeaks a lifelong resolve to discriminate against white males.”
Never mind that Sotomayor’s record shows no such thing. An analysis of her record has shown that she has ruled against claims of discrimination far more often than she has ruled for them.
Still, among some on the right, Buchanan’s views represent the gospel truth. They explain a world in which white men no longer control all the levers of power — in which an “uppity” black man could become president and a woman with a strange-sounding name could end up on the Supreme Court.
It’s no accident that Buchanan dragged Palin into the debate. Resentment of high-achievers like Barack Obama and Sotomayor runs deepest among Palinites, who see in John McCain’s running mate a perfect spokeswoman for their long list of grievances.
For them, Palin represents “authentic” America.
There’s just one problem: That vision of America — a country run by and for God-fearing white people of small-town heritage — is losing its appeal in a country that grows more diverse and more urban every day.
As long as the Republican Party is held hostage by a group of voters who refuse to let go of that image of America, it cannot hope to be a national party. Sonia Sotomayor represents the future, not Sarah Palin.
Is this a great country, or what? Even though Alabama’s Jeff Sessions was blocked from a federal judgeship because of kooky statements about the NAACP and the Ku Klux Klan, he could still go on to become a U.S. senator, and lead a racially tinged charge against the first Latina Supreme Court nominee. Equal opportunity, indeed!
I thought that Sessions’ bullying and blundering in the first two days of the Sonia Sotomayor hearings might get the GOP to ask him to hide his light under a bushel for a bit, but there he was on Wednesday, holding a quick press conference in the hearing break to announce he continues to be “troubled” by Sotomayor’s views on race, as if there was any doubt about that.
Not to be outdone by Sessions, though, Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn shamed himself with an unbelievable reference to Desi Arnaz’s ancient Cuban stereotype, Ricky Ricardo, husband of Lucille Ball on “I Love Lucy.” During a surreal exchange on gun rights, in which the theoretical example was what might happen to Sotomayor if she (wrongly, illegally, but maybe understandably) got a gun and shot Coburn, the right-wing senator told her, “You’d have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do,” referring to Arnaz’s refrain when Lucy got in trouble with one of her crazy schemes.
It should be shocking that in 2009, a U.S. senator would be inspired to relate to an eminent jurist who happens to be Puerto Rican with half-century-old Latino stereotypes (as well as a sort of sexist comparison to wacky Lucy) but after these last few days, it isn’t shocking. The way Republicans have shellacked Sotomayor over her “wise Latina” remarks shows they really, really want to be the party of aggrieved white men. No others need apply.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, who ought to know better, hectored Sotomayor on the issue (after she’d already said her choice of words was “bad,” and had already committed herself umpteen times to judicial objectivity). In what seemed to be a poorly veiled reference to Sessions, whose bid for a judgeship was derailed by the controversy over his NAACP and KKK remarks, he pompously and condescendingly asked Sotomayor whether if she got a do-over on a poorly chosen statement on race, white guys should too?
GRAHAM: If Lindsey Graham said that I will make a better senator than X, because of my experience as a Caucasian male makes me better able to represent the people of South Carolina, and my opponent was a minority, it would make national news, and it should.
….Others could not remotely come close to that statement and survive. Whether that’s right or wrong, I think that’s a fact. Does that make sense to you?
SOTOMAYOR: It does. And I would hope that we’ve come in America to the place where we can look at a statement that could be misunderstood, and consider it in the context of the person’s life.
I said soon after President Obama nominated Sotomayor that she would almost certainly have to walk back her “wise Latina” comment, and that she probably should. I think that we need new ways to talk about race, given that what used to be self-evident observations about minority oppression can sound tin-eared and maybe even threatening to some white people in the era of the first black president and the most diverse Cabinet ever.
Still, my Caucasian certainty about our new era of race relations, as whites become a minority group, has been shaken watching the way Republicans have treated Sotomayor in these three days — as an exotic, hot-tempered curiosity who isn’t quite like the rest of us, and whose 17 years of legal rulings matter far less than the words she uses to encourage minority law students. These three days show we haven’t come that far at all.
I can’t say it any better than Mike Madden, who’s live-blogging the Sotomayor hearings today: “So far, it’s been remarkable to watch the GOP bash Sotomayor for saying she’d have empathy with some people because of her background and life experience, and also bash her for not having empathy with the firefighters in the Ricci case.”
I’m confident Sotomayor will survive her grilling, but seriously, with leadership like this, the GOP might not survive as a national party.
The only real suspense in the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is whether the Republican Party will persist in tying its fortunes to an anachronistic claim of white male exceptionalism and privilege.
Republicans’ outrage, both real and feigned, at Sotomayor’s musings about how her identity as a “wise Latina” might affect her judicial decisions is based on a flawed assumption: that whiteness and maleness are not themselves facets of a distinct identity. Being white and male is seen instead as a neutral condition, the natural order of things. Any “identity” — black, brown, female, gay, whatever — has to be judged against this supposedly “objective” standard.
Thus it is irrelevant if Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. talks about the impact of his background as the son of Italian immigrants on his rulings — as he did at his confirmation hearings — but unforgivable for Sotomayor to mention that her Puerto Rican family history might be relevant to her work. Thus it is possible for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to say with a straight face that heritage and experience can have no bearing on a judge’s work, as he posited in his opening remarks yesterday, apparently believing that the white male justices he has voted to confirm were somehow devoid of heritage and bereft of experience.
The whole point of Sotomayor’s much-maligned “wise Latina” speech was that everyone has a unique personal history — and that this history has to be acknowledged before it can be overcome. Denying the fact of identity makes us vulnerable to its most pernicious effects. This seems self-evident. I don’t see how a political party that refuses to accept this basic principle of diversity can hope to prosper, given that soon there will be no racial or ethnic majority in this country.
Yet the Republican Party line assumes a white male neutrality against which Sotomayor’s “difference” will be judged. Sessions was accusatory in quoting Sotomayor as saying, in a speech years ago, that “I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage, but attempt . . . continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.”
This is supposed to be a controversial statement? Only, I suppose, if you assume that there are judges who have no opinions, sympathies or prejudices — or, perhaps, that the opinions, sympathies and prejudices of the first Hispanic nominee to the Supreme Court are somehow especially problematic.
There is, after all, a context in which these confirmation hearings take place: The nation continues to take major steps toward fulfilling the promise of its noblest ideals. Barack Obama is our first African American president. Sonia Sotomayor would be only the third woman, and the third member of a minority group, to serve on the nation’s highest court. Aside from these exceptions, the White House and the Supreme Court have been exclusively occupied by white men — who, come to think of it, are also members of a minority group, though they certainly haven’t seen themselves that way.
Judging from Monday’s hearing, some Republican senators are beginning to notice this minority status — and seem a bit touchy about it. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) was more temperate in his remarks than most of his colleagues, noting that Obama’s election victory ought to have consequences and hinting that he might vote to confirm Sotomayor. But when he brought up the “wise Latina” remark, as the GOP playbook apparently required, Graham said that “if I had said anything remotely like that, my career would have been over.”
That’s true. But if Latinas had run the world for the last millennium, Sotomayor’s career would be over, too. Pretending that the historical context doesn’t exist — pretending that white men haven’t enjoyed a privileged position in this society — doesn’t make that context go away.
Yes, justice is supposed to be blind. But for most of our nation’s history, it hasn’t been — and women and minorities are acutely aware of how our view of justice has evolved, or been forced to evolve. Women and minorities are also key Democratic Party constituencies, and if the Republican Party is going to be competitive, it can’t be seen as the party of white male grievance — especially in what is almost certainly a lost cause. Democrats, after all, have the votes to confirm Sotomayor.
“Unless you have a complete meltdown, you’re going to get confirmed,” Graham told the nominee. He was right — Republicans probably can’t damage her. They can only damage themselves.
