To Be Mad @ Obama for Speaking Truthfully about Gates' Arrest is to be on the Wrong Side

[Bullet1987]

Henry Louis Gates has the entire edge in this argument. Because he was doing absolutely nada wrong and was arrested (even after showing ID) because the police thought he was breaking into his own house. Another note of interest, people mouth off at police officers all the time...it doesn't give them a right to arrest you unless they think you're hostile for some reason. People still have freedom of speech in this country so calling cops racist for what seemingly was racial profiling does not warrant someone's arrest anyway.

I'm baffled by the folks taking the side of the police officers in this wrong incident. Now I see why police brutality gets absolutely no traction. Some will always think police are in the right no matter what happens.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

1. Happens every time there's an act of racism.

The racist apologists come out of the woodwork.

Every. single. time.

[Lilyeye]

2. After seeing how some acted with the pool incident a couple weeks ago, I'm beginning to agree.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

3. Pool incident. Ashley Todd.

Geraldine Ferraro.

You name it, people have defended it.

[BlooInBloo]

5. Every. Single. Time.

It bears repeating.

[Number23]

21. It's a damn shame, isn't it? And some wonder why black people are TIRED of explaining this sh*t

[bread_and_roses]

25. And a third repeat. Every. Single. Time. (n/t)

[fishwax]

30. Indeed n/t

[redqueen]

37. Yep.

Like clockwork.

[EFerrari]

4. I was so proud of or grateful to Obama tonight.

This is exactly the kind of frank discussion we need to have if we're ever going to heal up as a country.

I know this wasn't the topic he wanted to promote and my respect for him doing justice to it anyway couldn't be greater.

[MarjorieG]

6. Think people concerned for political backlash at Obama from police community, or stepping on

health care message.

I'm with Gates on this, and even think Obama may have his own memories of Cambridge cops. Not many realize his work with IL police on profiling, getting cameras in interrogation. Working well with police, as he is with any other group.

[MercutioATC]

7. You're obviously not aware of disorderly conduct laws.

Police CAN arrest you for "mouthing off" even if you don't pose a reasonable threat to anybody.

That said, there's a difference between "taking the police officers' side" and stating that Gates (by first refusing to step outside and then telling the officer that he was only asked for ID because he was black and the officer was white) contributed to the situation by acting like an ass.

I don't condone the arrest, but I also don't condone Gates' behavior.



That aside, my disagreement with Obama's statement is that he characterized this as a racial issue...which I don't believe it was. Gates was arrested because of his behavior, not his race. The arrest might not have been justified, but race wasn't an issue.

[EFerrari]

8. Obama explicitly said he didn't know how much race was involved.

And for you to characterize this as being about Dr. Gates behavior is simply sad. For you.

[MercutioATC]

9. I just read a complete quote and I agree...Obama didn't state that it was a racial issue.

That said, I stand by my characterization of Gates' behavior...and the officer's behavior.

[LooseWilly]

20. There may not be any hard evidence that "it was a racial issue"

... but odds are the cops wouldn't've been called if Dr. Gates weren't black.

As for Dr. Gates' behavior... one of his own statements suggests that he had a moment of visceral fear when he was approached as a suspect by the police. I'm only half brown, and I know that fight or flight rush... I can only imagine what a 58 year old black man's reaction must be... so, to expect that he should be comfortable with the officer following him into the kitchen, and that he should refrain from doing something like asking for the cop's name and badge number so as not to offend the cop, or to suggest that he shouldn't be a little bit pissed when the cop ignores his request for a name and badge number... let alone to suggest that those requests, in whatever tone, made in his own home, somehow justify his being arrested??...

As far as I'm concerned, Dr. Gates' statement passes the smell test with far more flying colors than does the officer's... especially as I've personally seen the police "massage" the facts in court with a professional grace that obviously comes only with long hours of practice.

If the officer wasn't motivated by racism, then that only means, in my opinion, that he's an equal opportunity gaping asshole.

[Raschel]

35. You think Gates passes the smell test? Just wait until the police find a speeding ticket on his

record. Well that will prove right then and there to bigots that he had it coming.

[Political Heretic]

11. I completely condone Gates behavior.

Fuck this bow down and grovel "yessir" bullshit.

I would refuse to step out of my own house too, and I'd have some words with a cop after I showed him my ID as well.

[Political Heretic]

13. Anytime there's a race issue, its always possible to say it isn't a race issue.

Do you get that?

The pool incident - its possible that it was all just a misunderstanding.

The Gates incident - its possible that it was just his conduct and nothing else.

And so on...

If you want to be "that guy" - you can always come up with an explanation for events that is not racism. That doesn't mean its true. And you've got to ask yourself: while its possible to explain away almost everything as not racism, we do have a very dark history of past and current racism in this country.

So to sound so certain that this is "not racism" makes you look pretty ridiculous in my eyes.

I think the smartest thing we could say something like this:

given our history and social attitudes toward race I wouldn't be surprised if race didn't affect this situation - whether it was overt or not is something I can't say. I don't know what when through the mind of the officer. But I do know the narratives and stereotypes that continue to pervade or culture, and which none of us can completely escape. While it might be technically allowed to arrest someone out of their own home for speaking obnoxiously to an officer, I think the police in this instance acted pretty stupidly to elect to do so.

[MercutioATC]

15. The opposite is also true.

Any time there is a disagreement between people of different races, it's possible to characterize it as a race issue. One can claim that the O.J. Simpson prosecution was "racist"...but I don't believe it was.

I look at the facts and form my own opinion based on the available data. In this case, especially because we're talking about Cambridge, I might not agree with the officer's decision to arrest Gates...but I don't believe that decision (or any of his behavior at the scene) was racist in nature.

[Political Heretic]

17. The opposite is not also true, and this is why

Unlike saying that an issue involves some sort of racial component has an overwhelming wealth of historical and socialogical evidence to back up that likelihood. Saying that an issue involves NO racial component has about zero historical or socialogical evidence to back up that likelihood.

Any place there is a racial interaction, race influences that interaction in our society. Doesn't mean its a bad influence, doesn't mean its an overt or dramatic influence, but the influence is there, and its not in any particular dispute among sociologists, historians or social philosophers.

(Or on the street for that matter... just on the internets.)

[MercutioATC]

18. So any issue involving a man and a woman has an inherent "sexist" component?

How far does your little theory go?

[Political Heretic]

34. I say racial, you say "racist." I say sex (gender), you say "sexist" - this is the strawman

You create.

For any interaction between a man and a women, both individuals personal experiences and cultural attitudes influence that interaction.

[TahitiNut]

23. I'd say it's you that lacks familiarity with disorderly conduct statutes.

First of all, many/most such statutes are on thin ice from a Constitutional standpoint, having far too vague and unspecific language. Second of all, the very notion that an individual's conduct, in their own home, would meet any of the tests under such statutes -- which focus on public conduct and its impact on others in a public setting, is a massive stretch of interpretation that would almost certainly run afoul of Constitutional boundaries. Whose "peace" was disturbed? Whose public meeting was disrupted? Whose travel or egress was hindered?

There are many statutes that are just totally inapplicable to one's conduct in one's own home or on one's own private property. The cop overreached. They dropped the charges because the charges were completely without legal or factual merit.

[Solomon]

26. You don't get it Tahiti. They WANT to stretch the

authority of the police to invade your home and do what they want. At least to minorities. After all, we have no rights a white man is bound to respect anyway.

Racism deniers. Just as bad as holocaust deniers.

[Raineyb]

24. How dare these uppity civilians mouth off like they're some kind of equal or something.

Don't they know they're supposed to bow and scrape?

[Political Heretic]

10. I once again return to my guess about DU democraphics: white, and mid to upper middle class

One of the historical centers of racial prejudice has been the middle class. For example, during the 1960s and Johnson's War on Poverty (which I have written about academically) ultimately it was not simply "Vietnam" that brought that and the whole Great Society down. It was also the growing resentment among the white middle class at programs that (in their eyes) seemed racially motivated (instead of poverty motivated, seeing as they wouldn't make the connection that more blacks were in poverty).

Middle class America is the breeding ground of white resentment and the development of the reverse discrimination crowd. When something like this happens, you there are usually a bunch of middle class white people ready to spring into action to suggest that everything would be the same if he was white, and that there's no racism, and to speak in angry resentful tones that silently scream "reverse racism" even though most here have enough sense not to type that. Middle class more than poverty level because they have just enough materialistic comforts to be out of touch with actual oppression or discrimination. Middle class more than the rich because frankly, they don't give a shit. (Seriously, attitudes among the wealthy tend to drift left on social issues, right on financial issues.)

A whole new racism is brewing in this country. This this white resentment bullshit. And this more than a little of it right here at DU, buried just under the surface, in my opinion.

[wisteria]

14. What do you have against white middle class Americans to suggest they are all racists?

This is nonsense.
What is needed in this country is a real honest and open discussion regarding discrimination of all kinds. You can't go around accusing the white middle class of being racist simply because individuals do not share your opinion on certain matters. There are always two sides to a story, and if someone sees merrit on the side opposite yours that does not mean they are racist.

[Political Heretic]

16. I don't believe I suggested that "they" are "all racists"

I can most certainly can "go around" and accuses middle class America as an income bracket generalization (and a race generalization only in the sense that in this country one somewhat follows the other - especially in the past) if there is a historical evidence base to suggest such a trend.

There is.

Try reading a few history books, perhaps. Or, go back and re-read my quick example of the war on poverty and the middle class resistance, resentment (and ultimately) revolt that became very racist in the end. The middle class, is without any argument, majority white people. And they are a group of white people more out of touch with desperate poverty and also very anxious about keeping what they have.

Black poverty is a threat to that, and many white middle class people fear that somehow something will be taken away from them - this is the origin of the reverse discrimination crowd, and the Pat's for the world who truly believe that the white middle class is being oppressed by minorities.

This is not a new subject. Literally tons of sociological writing has been done on the trends of racial prejudice in middle class America. It's not like I just woke up tonight and invented the idea.

[bread_and_roses]

31. Yep. It bubbled and simmered all through the '70s; that blood-soaked monster Reagan

- elected by the "Reagan Democrats" - was among its outcomes. I am old enough to remember the "Welfare Rights" movement, old enough - to give our younger readers a marker of the sea change in this Country - to remember that Nixon did not dismiss the notion of a "guaranteed national income" out of hand.

It was racism that was the propellant that drove the dismantling of the "War on Poverty" and most of the shift to Right - to NeoCon/Lib Free-Marketeerism, the total abandonment of the inner cities, the "war on drugs,tough on crime," in this country.

I am the most casual of "historians" (I don't claim the title, thus the quotes), widely read but often confusing names and dates and ignorant of vast swaths of "fact" and theory. And someone will no doubt come along and point out that it was during the '70s that we began to see wage stagnation, and that this is a class issue, not a race issue.

While I don't dispute the importance of class in America, it seems to me that those that make that arguement get so far and no further, not asking why it is that when we have class oppression, the result is an assault on people of color, not on the class doing the oppressing? (With the White poor the "collatoral damage" (further fueling racism and thus underming any possibility of a class-based response to oppression). Why is racism the fall-back position of the working and "middle-class" (most of whom are actually working class wage serfs but won't acknowlege it) in this country?

For anyone who says it ain't so, I refer them to any data set on health, housing, education, unemployment, income, drug arrests, incarceration, red-lining, availability of grocery stores or public transportation, or any other indicator one can imagine that breaks down by "race."

And I can't wait for someone to come along and note musingly that Asians don't seem to have these problems with the police.

[Political Heretic]

33. Well said, and thank you for "bringing the history" and not just uninformed opinion.

Thanks for the great post.

I'd like to suggest, in response to your second paragraph, that at least in this country, issues of race and class are inexorably linked. If you're discussing class and race never enters into it, you're doing something wrong. If you're discussing race and class never enters into it, you're doing something wrong (in my view.)

[Mimosa]

19. Preachy and wrong

The tragic bloody mess which was Vietnam nearly alone brought down LBJ. The deaths of seemingly endless thousands of dead service members who had been conscripted tore apart the country. I was involved in the anti-war movement during that era. If Obama's admin goes down a similar path in Afghanistan and other areas he'll find himself in a similar morass.

During times of extreme economic strain people of different classes and ethnicities turn on each other. I think old Prof Gates and the cops were overreacting and yes, race may have amped up the interaction. But this Gates thing just doesn't rise to the level of a major racial incident.I think it's horrid to accuse people of racism because they don't see it as you do, Heretic.

[Political Heretic]

32. "Preacy and wrong" then you make my points.

Disclaimer: I slept terrible last night, only 2 hours, and just got up, so hold on for a rough ride

Your first paragraph is irrelevant to the issue but probably true and I agree.

"During times extreme economic (actually its "social" - beyond just economic) strain people of different classes and ethnicities turn on each other."

Actually the rich, in terms of those who are players in our political and economic system, don't "turn" on anyone, and don't need "economic strain" to change their attitudes. Middle class resentment of the poor and their racial interpretation of that resentment also does not need "extreme economic strain" - that's just something that sounds plausible and "common sense." Alternatively, what I'm talking about is a matter of history, and sociological research.

And this is what I do for a living by the way, not just something I chit chat about in the internet.

There's a reason why middle class resentment built against the war on poverty, and why middle class voices coined it "black aid." The resentment had a clear racial element - that's not really disputed by anyone respectable that I'm aware of.

There's a basic sociological trend that's not particularly controversial, and that is that the middle class gets comfortable (i.e. just out of poverty) and then begins to partially base its attitudes and actions on a sense of "protecting what you have." Out of this foundation comes middle class racism that takes a different form that more overt racism of the past - it looks like white resentment, talk of "reverse discrimination" etc.

Again, this is a trend - it would be foolish to suggest that any middle class individual or family shares this race based resentment just as it would be foolish to suggest that all middle class individuals or families are even white. But its a trend. It was enough of a trend to play a significant part in the failure of the war on poverty, according to most historians, and according to the accounts of the people involved in the program itself (see in particular a history book focusing on CAPs for fascinating information on this)

I agree that this "gates thing" doesn't arise to the level of a major racial incident, and I never said that it did.

I also never accused "people" of racism. I merely pointed out what history and sociological research tells us about class attitudes, and suggested that my guess is that DU is likely compromised of majority white, mid to upper middle class persons and that effects how issues are seen and framed.

This really isn't outrageous, its basically an obvious truism. If DU was comprised of majority poor, working class women of color, the tone of the boards would be different. Not necessarily better (though I personally would probably like it more) - but certainly very different.

[alcibiades_mystery]

28. "this white resentment bullshit"

You damn skippy.

Don't need to be wearing a sheet to be performing racism.

[Raschel]

36. I don't know that it's a whole new racism. IMO it's the same old racism.

American demographics are changing rapidly and racists see the White power structure slipping away. And they ain't gonna go quietly.

[wisteria]

12. "Unless they are hostile", you answered your own question.

Police put their lives on the line everyday. They can never know who may lash out at them. The officer may have overreacted, but it is also very possible that Gates was not being at all cooperative- perhaps overreacting also. Frankly, I think this entire incident has been blown out of proportion and involves bruised egos.
As for the apple and orange comparisons, regarding policy brutality,-you use a broad stroke when you suggest that those who may see a little of the police side of this, would also support police brutality. It is just wrong to even make this reference.

[LooseWilly]

22. According to Gates' statement, after presenting ID to the cop, he asked for a name and badge number.

If you think about it, he's just presented his ID, why would the cop not be willing to do the same, if the cop has nothing to fear, either? Right?

Except that, according to Gates' statement, the officer ignored him, and walked away. Have you ever been treated disrespectfully by the police? I know I have. Have you ever been treated disrespectfully by the police inside your own home when you're jet lagged, and you've just had to break the lock on your front door because it's been jammed while you were gone? I know, at that point, I'd be in a rather pissed off mood. Hostile even.

I don't think that that level of "hostility" is what was intended when the "unless they are hostile" clause was added to the law. In fact, I'm pretty sure "unless they are hostile" was intended to refer to people like a friend of mine who, one night while drunk, threw a bottle of tequila at a police car- and hit the windshield.

From the sounds of it, this officer knew full well that the term "hostile" could technically be stretched from the intended use (tequila bottle chuckers and their ilk) to someone who uses a raised-volume "hostile" tone... and from the sounds of Gates' statement, the moment Gates followed the officer out to the front porch, that's when he finally responded to repeated requests... by arresting Dr. Gates.

And for the record, I personally would like to register my official doubt that the officers of Cambridge "put their lives on the line everyday". I suspect that there are more traffic fatalities in Cambridge than there are officer fatalities... which would mean that commuters "put their lives" more "on the line everyday" than the police. And commuters never know who'll lash out at them either... it's called "road rage." I'm frankly not willing to buy either of those excuses to justify Bad Cop Behavior.

[alcibiades_mystery]

27. +1

[billyoc]

29. Can roughing up the President's friend be anything BUT stupid?