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Where's the ambiguity?
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Henry Louis Gates, Jr. being taken into custody by police.
For the first time since taking office, President Obama has finally demonstrated a willingness to forthrightly condemn brutal, heavy-handed police state tactics. Unfortunately, he chose to do so at the expense of an American police officer in a situation in which he admittedly was underinformed, rather than the security forces whose brutality was self-evident on its face, and in full view of anyone who cared to watch. One is left to wonder what became of the measured, studied president who carefully weighed the impact of his words before openly concluding that Iranian security forces were out of line in clubbing, gassing, and shooting people on the streets of Tehran for daring to protest election fraud.
The contrast couldn’t be more stark, could it? On one hand, you have video footage of a young woman being gunned down by government sources as she observed her countrymen asserting the basic human right to be governed by consent. On the other hand, you have a situation in which a black Harvard professor was taken into custody after a confrontation, which took place out of public view, with a policeman responding to a report by a citizen of two black men seen attempting to break into a home in broad daylight. Knowing the person taken into custody, and little else other than the fact that it was his home that was supposedly being broken into, the president nevertheless saw fit to decree that it was the officer and his partners who acted stupidly.
Now, it may be that Professor Gates had reason to be hostile toward the officer. The fact that I’ve never had to account for my presence in a certain location based on my race limits my ability to see things from Gates’s perspective. I don’t doubt for a moment that he has encountered racism of all kinds in the course of his life – overt and subtle, individual and institutional. Such experiences are bound to have an effect on one’s perceptions when dealing with white police officers.
It also may be that the officer could have handled things differently and avoided all the ugliness that followed if he’d swallowed his pride after being insulted repeatedly by a man whose property he was willingly putting his life on the line in order to protect. Having never had to walk into a strange home on the assumption that there is an armed person inside who sees me as the enemy, I can’t quite put myself in Sgt. Crowley’s shoes, either. Given all this, there’s one thing I know about the situation: I don’t know anything about the situation.
Now, it’s probably true that President Obama does know what it’s like to be questioned about his presence in a certain place because he’s black. I can hardly imagine how he could possibly have gone through life without feeling the sting of that particular humliation. While great progress has been made in terms of racial attitudes over the past 40 years, it didn’t all happen at once, and some progress was very slow in coming. So, perhaps the president can be forgiven for being personally familiar with what he suspected took place inside Professor Gates’s home.
Still, President Obama is the president of the most racially diverse nation in the world, and he’s the president of all its people – though there are some on the fringes who may not accept that fact. He won the presidency among all racial demographics. One would think that this would be cause for him to stop for a moment and reflect on whether or not race is the motivating factor in every situation in wherein a white police officer decides to arrest a black man, and whether or not it might be a convenient means of blame-shifting for some black men who have put themselves in an embarrassing, frustrating situation.
Admittedly, the situation might have been resolved in a better way than placing Professor Gates under arrest. In hindsight, it would have been better for all parties involved to have stood down – for Sgt. Crowley to simply shake his head, throw his hands in the air, and walk away from the situation. It also would have been better for Gates to have thanked the officer for putting life and limb at risk protecting his property rather than assume his presence at the home was racially motivated. But, given the life experiences of both men, it is somewhat understandable, if not acceptable, for both of them to react in the way in which they did to the situation.
However, what’s not acceptable is for an American president to condemn the actions of American citizens in such unambiguously harsh terms without knowing the circumstances which brought about those actions. The president did demonstrate some wisdom in eventually recognizing that he contributed more heat than light to the situation in his choice of words, and he deserves credit for doing so. Whether or not he offered a literal apology to Sgt. Crowley is less important, and would have essentially been meaningless in this era in which apologies from politicians are sought for added humiliation value rather than any genuine desire for amends.
Still, one can’t help wondering how it is that President Obama concluded that forcefully condeming the plainly thuggish actions of a regime which is a sworn enemy to America and democracy itself could be misconstrued as undue meddling, while seeing fit to cast his lot on one side of a controversy whose details are murky to anyone who wasn’t on the scene at the time, and likely not entirely clear to those who were.Whatever the outcome of the president’s meeting with Gates and Crowley over beers, this has not been a good moment for him. And, while it does help to relieve some of the political tension that he recognized the error in his choice of words, it seems he has done some permanent damage to himself, his presidency, and the hopes of his legions of supporters who see him as the Great Racial Reconciliator as well as the thoughtful, studied, big-picture leader America so badly needs in this age of polarization and mistrust.
Worst of all, he’s demonstrated himself to be less concerned about alienating American policemen putting their lives at risk in the line of duty than appearing to take sides against Iranian security forces beating and slaughtering their subjects with abandon, in full view of the world, on the streets of Tehran for doing nothing more than demanding what is rightfully theirs. For all the lamented bellicosity of the Bush administration, it at least had the mitigating factor of being directed toward America’s enemies and not its first responders.
