Change is difficult, even — possibly most of all — for an apostle of “change.” What happened in Cambridge, MA, the other night is quite sad and I have mixed feelings writing about it. But I’m going to go ahead.
We all grew up with the received wisdom, with the donnée, if you will, that the U.S. was a racist country. And it was.
So were most countries. In fact, you might say all were racist. Despite the cliché wallowed in by our self-critics, racism is a global human phenomenon, not even remotely exclusively American.
In fact the United States, of all places I have visited, has done the most to obliterate its racism in a concerted manner. Perhaps it is because we are such a melting pot and have little choice that we have made a great effort. And of course there is the more than justifiable guilt over slavery. So we tried hard. And we’ve done a remarkably good job, considering that deep in the human psyche is distrust of the other. Most of us prefer to live in a comfort zone of our own people, our own ethnic, religious and racial groups. But we know that’s not cool and have, in our culture, worked very hard to combat that. Most of us have, anyway. And we have reached a point, I would say as long as twenty years ago or maybe more, when to be a racist or to exhibit racist tendencies was despised. To put it succinctly, to be a racist was to be a jerk.
But when the rules change, when values change, not everyone can adjust with it — not only the racist, but also those who depended on being victims of racism. For all his brilliance, Henry Lewis Gates is evidently such a man. Otherwise, why cry out about being victimized as a “black man in America” before there is any evidence that that is the case?
This is nostalgia for racism and our president probably suffers from it as well, although perhaps to a lesser degree, considering he clearly plunged into the fray without thinking. The problem is that this nostalgia not only blames people unfairly, it also increases the very thing it pretends to oppose — racism itself. The unfair or inaccurate imputation of racism promotes racism.
Our universities are havens for this form of nostalgia, so it is not amazing that Gates would suffer from it. You don’t get a job in our academic world by saying America has conquered racism, even to a small degree, even after it has elected an African-American president. [Didn't Sweden do that? Or was it Turkey?-ed. Don't get me started.] You don’t get a job with an NGO either by making such an “outrageous statement.” Large sectors of our society are dependent on an increasingly non-existent racism, not just obvious parties like Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright. We have a whole fabric of our culture endlessly clamoring for a “diversity” that is already accepted. Every business and social activity I have been involved with has for decades been desperate to enlist people-of-color and yet many insist it is not happening and demand more. There is something self-defeating in that, like a societal jack story. The secret wish of these people, buried not far from the surface, is for things not to have changed. They have a nostalgia for an evil past when they could feel self-righteous and victimized. Self-defeating indeed.
It is this nostalgia we must address, not, as Attorney General Eric Holder insists, our unresolved race problem. That is the moral of the Gates story and of the President’s response — at least so far. Race relations will never be perfect, just as human relations will never be perfect. But we now have civil rights laws that demand equality, as they should. Let’s rely on them and move forward. Without nostalgia.
UPDATE: I would just like to add that as a sixties civil rights worker, I can empathize with the nostalgia. In those days it was very easy to tell right from wrong and feel good about your actions. These days it’s a lot more complicated.
I think class had more to do with this incident than race did. But you are right, there is a sort of perverse tendency to hang onto to those old stereotypes. It is more comfortable for some people.
I agree, Terrye, that class had a lot to do with it. But Gates played the “black man” card, not just the Harvard professor card. He wants to identify – or rathe be identified with – impoverished black men when he has been a privileged intellectual for decades. Sort of funny when you think about it.
“Large sectors of our society are dependent on an increasingly non-existent racism, not just obvious parties like Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright.”
The Democratic Party would disappear overnight if race tensions ended in the United States. Only center-right people truly wish to get past race. Moreover, it is my adamant conviction that this would have occurred no later than 1990 if the Democrats did not subconsciously go out of their way to constantly reopen old wounds. The “race industry” has too much invested to see such a good thing come to an end. Barack Obama was born in 1961. Think about that for a second. Obama was 16 years old in 1978. This means that he rarely, if ever, was a victim of racial prejudice. Obama lived in a fairly affluent family during his teenage years and was given just about everything on a silver platter. He then changed his name from Barry to Barack and became an “authentic” man of color. The guilt tripped whites at Columbia and Harvard made sure he was amply rewarded for doing little work. As matter of fact, he was known to be fairly lazy while editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Please don’t feel sorry for Henry Lewis Gates. He may be able to increase his lecture fees. I bet he has received a number of offers to explain his recent status as victim. The incident with the police officer will likely be turned into a financial bonanza. Gates would also have never become a well known Harvard professor if he were not a left-wing whack job. He is well aware of which way the wind is blowing. Gates has kept that wet finger in the air for decades.
There is a new form of classism in the US that is highlighted by this and certainly deserves more scrutiny. The elite class are those with connections and money, like usual, but this time, as a result of working in the right professions and going to (primarily) Ivy League schools. This elite things it knows what’s best for us, and that everyone else is a lower form of human.
Like the cop, who no doubt is not a member of that elite.
One thing about it – this incident showed for sure that Obama is really bad at thinking on his feet, and sorely lacks the gravitas needed for his position.
But all is well – he invited the cop and the idiotic professor to the White House for beers.
Very thoughtful post, Roger. Thanks.
I’m tired of thinking about race. Be honest, be fair, and be respectful, what more can one do? And I expect the same from the “elites”.
Gates has spent all his life waiting for this moment.
There he is in handcuffs!
There he is!
Free at last!
As a Harvard academic, I think it is important to apply critical thought to this discussion:
Professor Gates arrived at his rented house after a long flight from China.
The professor was suffering from jet lag, of course.
He was sitting in First Class for hours and hours, and we should know what that means.
That means he was getting an endless supply of pardon the expression booze for hour after hour,
Some sleep in their big Fist Class Seats.
Some drink the endless supply of booze.
What did Henry Louis Gates do on his way home as a black man in America?
Did he sleep or did he drink?
And when, this black man in America arrived at his rented home near Harvard, was he stoned on all that booze, or was he not?
How can we ever know?
Do the airlines keep track of who sleeps and who drinks?
Especially for black men in America?
wanna bet sgt crowley is a touch reluctant
to buddy up with two black ivy leaguers who
think racism is okie dokie as long as white cops are ridiculed publicly…
Sarge Crowley should accept the Prez’ invitation to share a beer with men who must deal with the tribulations of being black mens in Amerika.
He should meet up with them in Asbury Park.
It’s the perfect place.
You all are wrong. Obama is still an immature college activist. His defiant buns didn’t pay this exact same cambridge force for 17 trafick tickets from 89-92 until right before he filed to run for pres. He thinks cops are beneath the social activists.
obama and gates had the same activist mentor under the name of
Charles Ogletree Jr.
JERUSALEM – The lawyer representing Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor at the center of a national race controversy, was a mentor of both Barack and Michelle Obama and served on the president’s black advisory council.
Charles Ogletree Jr., himself a Harvard University professor, is closely linked to the Black Panthers and to radical black ideology. He is a key member of the reparations movement and once pursued the possibility of bringing a class action lawsuit to win reparations for descendants of African slaves.
“I met Barack when he arrived at Harvard Law School in fall of 1988. He was quiet and unassuming, but had an incredibly sharp mind and a thirst for knowledge,” Ogletree said in an interview last year with Essence Magazine.
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=104928
Obama, while an evil socialist was right on this one.
The police do not have a right to put you in jail just because they get butt hurt because somebody yells at them for ACCUSING THEM OF BREAKING IN THEIR OWN HOME AFTER SHOWING THEM PROOF OF IDENTIFICATION.
My wife is proof that racism is a “global” issue. She’s an Aussie and she remembers being “too dark” for her Aussie classmates. Verses me being one of the only Chinese families (there were only three by the time I graduated High School.) in town had more issues with being fat than being Chinese or even a Halfy. (Don’t even get me started on being a mixed asian! O.O!)
As for this tempest in a teapot that’s been tossed onto the national stage it’s all a big mess. As always the media (and Obama) is focusing on broad strokes that ignore all the pertinant details. Officers deserve the benefit of the doubt in most instances, this is yet another one where that rule of thumb works well.
Nostalgia, perhaps. But don’t forget that race is his gig. It’s what he get paid for. Without people willing pay for his product, he’s bagging groceries or driving a bus.
When you suggest to someone like that that we’ve moved on beyond race, you might as well tell a mill worker that the mill’s closing.
It’s a bit, in fact a lot, more essential to both his self-concept, and his economic well-being that we continue to obsess over race. It’s much more profound than just nostalgia.
Nostalgia is what motivates his useful idiots, who do essentially the same thing for free.
I have three comments on this incident:
First, isn’t this essentially the start of the movie “Amos & Andrew”, without the gunfire? Samuel L. Jackson is an academic moving into his new summer home, and neighbors see him. The neighbors (wonderfully played by Margaret Colin and Michael Lerner) are 60s liberals who know what it means when they see a black man moving stereo equipment around in their neighbor’s house (they were unaware he’d sold). The police are called, and gunfire erupts, with much hilarity ensuing when the police chief hatches a lame-brained scheme to avoid the accompanying political and public relations firestorm his department’s clumsiness has started. Good movie.
Second, in one way, Obama is entirely correct. The police did act stupidly, in that they never should have arrested Gates. They would have arrested anyone else, but that’s the point. This is a *professor* of *African-American* studies at *Harvard*. Most of his responses to the cop were on the “Don’t you know who I am?” level, and I sincerely believe that if the cop had recognized him and catered to his celebrity status things would have gone differently.
Third, what sort of black man, “authentic” or otherwise, has the nickname “Skip”? Sounds like the trust-fund baby white guy from Back Bay or Long Island who hangs out with his best bud Winston and his girlfriend Betty, out on Martha’s Vineyard during the season. Sometimes you have to wonder.
Roger, I think there’s a kind of “false nostalgia” on the part of younger people who weren’t even born during the height of the civil rights movement. They want to share in the cachet of those who did the heavy lifting, but for the most part they are reduced to petty exaggerations and phony concerns.
Part of the problem with “racism” is how we define it. I was raised (back in the ’40s) to judge people as individuals. So to me it’s not just that discriminating against blacks is wrong, it’s that it’s wrong to discriminate against anyone because of their perceived membership in some class or group. Which makes affirmative action wrong because the people being passed over are not the ones who did the discriminating in the past. But the race baiters insist on stereotyping, just not in the same way the crackers did it.
BTW, the best name I’ve seen so far for this little dust-up is RaceBaitGatesGate.
Great post, but I think you let Gates and Obama off too easy. Their “nostalgia” for racism is itself a form of racism. It’s premised on white people being evil oppressors, as preached in Rev. Wright’s church and taught in Gates’s classroom. Obama is very comfortable with, even drawn to, such demonology. He quoted Wright’s ditty, “White man’s greed runs a world in need”, approvingly in his last book.
A white who looked upon blacks as inferiors would be rightfully considered a “jerk”, as you say. What is a black man who spins paranoid fantasies about profiling and the plight of the black man when a white cop comes to his door to answer a burglary report? What is his friend the president who readily adopts the racism fantasy as his own? A black cop at the door would have elicited an entirely different reaction from both men. Is it unfair to label their behavior “racist”, as they love so much to do to others?
There is a “teachable Moment” here, but it’s not the one Obama imagines.
Gates is not nostalgic for racism. He makes his living from it. He is a higher class Al Sharpton in that sense. He is ecstatic this happened to him. He will dine and receive speaker fees and academic street cred from this event for the rest of his life. He’s no longer a mere academic, but a bona fide race warrior, having confronted The Man in all his racist horror and shouted him down (and his mama, for good measure.)
Zoltan expresses my first reaction to the first report of this story: he sounds like he was drinking. And when officers encounter inexplicable enraged, animated humans exhibiting what in poice terms is called “tumultuous behavior, they know it can be explained by many things and that it can escalate lead in unpredictable and dangerous directions. And they are trained to deal with it in a certain manner, which is precisely what Crowley did.
There is absolutely no excuse for what Gates did or is still saying. The past behavior of many police is no more an excuse to assume the worst from this officer than the past behavior of many black males is an excuse to assume the worst about Mr. Gates. it is racism, pure and simple. It is also classicism and bullying.
Obama’s clumsy knee jerking his way into this matter, at a press conference that revealed him to be an obviously lying manipulator, further reveals what a small mind is his, how little awareness or regard he has for the dignity of the office of president (reminding us of Clinton) and how he simply shoots his mouth off without knowing what he is talking about. When that is revealed, he blames someone else, in this case the “obsession” with the matter. He didn’t act inappropriately, everyone else who is appalled by what he said is acting inappropriately. Judging rom his poll numbers, slumbering Americans are slowly waking to the real Obama, and this “small” incident has been very revealing.
This is a very reasonable take on what happened.
In truth, neither man was at his best – Gates should have provided the ID without protest and the cop should have found a way to defuse the situation once he has satisfied that Gates was the resident. It is never a good idea for anyone of any race to try to humiliate a cop publicly.
I also agree that the US has done much to move beyond race. As long as the current consensus holds that everyone deserves equal opportunity but not equal outcomes. We will be back in the soup if our current liberal hegemony tries to engineer quotas and dictate the outcomes.
As far Obama goes, what a horrible week! He calls a presser to sell an unsellable healthcare plan that doesn’t even exist yet and he gets baited into acting like Al Sharpton. After his press weasel tried to backtrack yesterday, he is forced back in front of the cameras to complete the cycle of almost completely retracting his own dumb comments. Or should I say, he “acted stupidly.” Yes I should.
For many Americans, this will represent a moment when they believe that for all of Obama’s hard earned image as a new post racial creature, he is really just an old school, race-baiting, community organizing angry black guy. It doesn’t help when Eric Holder, he of the “race coward” comment, doesn’t prosecute the Black Panthers for voter intimidation.
Why would you let yourself fulfull the stereotype of your conservative critics in a center-right country?
I don’t really know that there’s this great nostalgia for how it used to be when it comes to civil rights. I think there’s a belief that the pressure must continue to be applied or the gains will be lost, that everyone will slip back into the old ways if there isn’t a constant reminder of how it used to be and could be again. And the way to keep the pressure on, to keep white America on its toes is to keep picking at the scab to check for signs of infection. It’s probably a little like “Never Forget” and the Holocaust.
I’d like to see some protesters at the next tea party holding signs saying, “Our forefathers didn’t gain freedom from slaveholders in order for their us to be slaves to the state.”
I don’t feel sorry for Gates, he was overtly race-bating. And I wonder if he had played it up to such a degree that he might have jeopordized his career. When the tapes come out of how Gates behaved towards Crowely and after the statements he’s made he is going to look very bad indeed. How will his students react when he stands up before them complaining about how picked on his race is? If I were a student, I would feel very uneasy about listening to him after he pulled a stunt like that.
As a retired police sgt. I take umbridge at those who state that even though the professor acted in a loud and disorderly manner he was arrested for “contempt of cop” and should not have been. In the late 1970s I arrested the editor of the Post Gazette (he was white) for the same basic thing. If I had not arrested him there would have been no accurate offical record of what transpired and I would have lost a law suit and a career I loved. The arrest documents saved my reputation.
Gates is a dyed in the wool racist and Obama is a race-baiting,race-card playing race pimp to dept of his being. He couldn’t help from letting it show on a national stage,on TV. I wish it wasn’t so.
Interesting article.
Being the “victim” is a good excuse for failure to succeed, instead of your own lack of ambition. Continually using race as the means to agitate makes it a larger perceived issue than the economy and the errosian of our personal rights and freedoms.
10. john m e:
Who knows what’s true, but I’ve read that Crowley has agreed to have this beer at the White House with Gates and Obama. I don’t know whose idea this was, but I wish Crowley wouldn’t do it. I see it as an attempt to 1) let Obama recast himself as the unifier in this incident instead of the divider that he is, and 2) demonstrate the insufficiency of our civil and legal institutions to address genuine acts of illegal discrimination. No, it can only be overcome by Obama’s wisdom and forbearance. A return to the good old days, in other words. Nostalgia for racism.
An old guy goes to his front door with a crowbar. And, a friend who can add some weight to the shoulder thrusts. What if the wife tossed this bum out? And, one week passes. And, he decides “he’s gonna get back in?” The wife, in the meantime, has changed the locks.
When questioned Gates wants you to believe “he’s the poor misunderstood black man.” What BS! He was gonna sue the cop! Put the cop on the spot! And, it was only the fact that the cop was trained to handle racial explosive situations, that the cop acted appropriately.
We’ve yet to hear the taped 911 call. The whole incident was taped. And, I’d even bet this tape has played at the White House. But not for us.
It’s one reason Obama has stood down. Does he want the story to go away? Well, at some point, didn’t Nifong? Someday may come when shouting “racism” will be the same as shouting “fire” in a crowded theater. Plays with your free speech.
what’s wrong with all you ‘obsessed’ racists ?? barack just didn’t ‘calibrate’ his words……. HAHAHAHAHA.
good article, btw.
When presidents behave like activists and don’t behave like presidents, the public will treat them as such.
Obama forgot for a moment he was POTUS and mouthed off in “community organizer” mode. RahmBo had a spasm, and told him to do a pseudo-apology that doesn’t betray god-Alinsky.
I don’t know what caused this incident. Is Skip Gates blaming racism for his door being stuck? For the lady calling 911 to report an apparent breaking and entering? For the cops showing up to investigate? Or for the police officer not knowing him by sight and failing to genuflect?
While just about every African American will tell you stories about being racially profiled, just about every cop whose routinely stopped persons of color for speeding or some other traffic violation has been accused of racially profiling. Sooner or later, they’re going to have to get used to the idea that life isn’t a bowl of cherries for white people either and that common civility goes a long way toward fixing our past.
I remember going through an airline security line in Chicago where an African American guy was trying to hurry us along and he called me “My Brother.” I knew it was his habit of speech, but I was touched all the same. I was too far down the line to be able to go back and express my appreciation, but it left a positive impression. I’m not white or black or yellow. I’m just a brother and so is that man and so is Gates and so is Crowley.
White people yell at cops all the time and nothing ever happens to them.
Very good article. I am old enough to remember when racism was overt and pervasive. I grew up in a segregated city, not by law mind you, in one of the flyover states. I happened to live most of my life in a very liberal household in this city. I am white and as a teenager I had long hair, and was fairly radical. My experience with the white City cops was getting harassed on a regular basis, and many of my friends spent a lot of time getting beaten, and arrested, and they were white. I was a lower class white kid in a poor city and I was in the first group of children bussed in my city, to combat racism. Although I was raised a progressive, and taught that all races are equal, my white skin on a few occaisions earned me the right to get attacked by black kids. There was ALWAYs racism on both sides, it is not a “whites only” affliction. Later while working as a technician, I was stopped by a black cop, and as I got out of my car, I had a gun drawn on me. I could have assumed racism, and could have made a complaint, but by that time I had learned a few things about dealing with cops. I had also met a few and understood a little more what their experience is when they come to an unknown situation such as a traffic stop. It turns out that a cop had just a few days earlier been killed performing a routine traffic stop. Today I am much more affluent, and a libertarian. Is there still racism out there? You bet, and a lot of it exists in my black and hispanic neighbors as well as my white neighbors, as it always has. Is it anything like it was in the 60s and 70s? Abolutly not. I guarantee you, if I acted as as poorly as Gates did, I too would have been arrested. Cops are in potentially dangerous situations every day. When you escalate the tension of an encounter, as Gates did, they will often act quickly to mitigate that risk and arest you, regardless of your race. Is that fair? No idea, but if it comes down to being fair, and dead, they will always choose to be alive and reprimanded later. From what I see in the arrest report, the officer went out of his way to descalate, and Gates wouldn’t let him. He got treated more fairly then I ever did by cops, and I was white. I learned a long time not to be that “stupid”.
33. Jim Treacher: Not if they have any sense they don’t! Only dumba$$e$ and drunks argue with the cops!
The following is the best article I have ever read about disproportionate crime/incarceration/conviction rates and racial profiling for different races. I urge everyone to read it at length!
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_2_criminal_justice_system.html
A few excerpts just to get your juices flowing:
“The race industry and its elite enablers take it as self-evident that high black incarceration rates result from discrimination. At a presidential primary debate this Martin Luther King Day, for instance, Senator Barack Obama charged that blacks and whites “are arrested at very different rates, are convicted at very different rates, [and] receive very different sentences . . . for the same crime.” Not to be outdone, Senator Hillary Clinton promptly denounced the “disgrace of a criminal-justice system that incarcerates so many more African-Americans proportionately than whites.””
“About one in 33 black men was in prison in 2006, compared with one in 205 white men and one in 79 Hispanic men. Eleven percent of all black males between the ages of 20 and 34 are in prison or jail.”
“The black incarceration rate is overwhelmingly a function of black crime. Insisting otherwise only worsens black alienation and further defers a real solution to the black crime problem.”
“Racial activists usually remain assiduously silent about that problem. But in 2005, the black homicide rate was over seven times higher than that of whites and Hispanics combined, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. From 1976 to 2005, blacks committed over 52 percent of all murders in America. In 2006, the black arrest rate for most crimes was two to nearly three times blacks’ representation in the population. Blacks constituted 39.3 percent of all violent-crime arrests, including 56.3 percent of all robbery and 34.5 percent of all aggravated-assault arrests, and 29.4 percent of all property-crime arrests.”
And so on and so forth. Really! Read that article!
regards
#3 David Thomson:
“Obama was 16 years old in 1978. This means that he rarely, if ever, was a victim of racial prejudice.”
Actually, he was 16 and lived in Hawaii, where I currently reside. Hawaii’s not like any other place in America; haoli are, and were then, the discriminated-against minority. What are haoli, you ask? Why, continental US white people! Mixed marriages were more accepted here much earlier, and being black has always been considered cool, not a stigma.
Before Hawaii, he lived in Indonesia, where his skin tone was likely not very different from those of his classmates.
I’d bet that the racialist indoctrination Obama received was more at the hands of his white family members than at the hands of his peers. It is unlikely he experienced any racism at all until he entered college as a young man — and even then, I don’t know.
And here’s more from the same author:
“As for urban policing — where the police have victim identifications and contextual and behavioral cues to work with — blacks are stopped more, but only in comparison with their proportion of the entire population. Measured against their crime rate, they are understopped. New York City is perfectly typical of the black police-stop and crime rates. In the first three months of 2009, 52 percent of all people stopped for questioning by the police in New York City were black, though blacks are just 24 percent of the population. But according to the victims of and witnesses to crime, blacks commit about 68 percent of all violent crime in the city. Blacks commit 82 percent of all shootings and 72 percent of all robberies, whereas whites, who make up 35 percent of the city’s population, commit about 5 percent of all violent crimes, 1 percent of shootings, and about 4 percent of robberies.”
“National crime patterns are the same. Black males between the ages of 18 and 24 commit homicide at ten times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. Such vastly disproportionate crime rates must lead, if the police are going after crime in a color-blind fashion, to disproportionate stop and arrest rates.”
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YTU4MGE4MDkwYzhiYjY4OTk2OWRlZjcyMWY0MjFkNmE=&w=MA==
A much shorter article than the one previously cited, but a good read, too.
regards
>Jim Treacher: White people yell at cops all the time and nothing ever happens to them.
Um no. White people who escalate tension with cops, yelling, making asses of themselves etc. OFTEN get arrested, back in the day they also got beaten if they happened to be poor, and unrepresented.
Take some time out and watch “Cops”, or any other similar show. Even when on tape and on their best behavior, you will see white people get arrested on a regular basis for being beligerant. Impeding an investigation, Disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, or just the plain old since you pissed me off, I’m going to look a lot closes at you, do some more searches and see what I find, oh look hear, some drugs. You’re under arrest sir.
i watched the very dynamic that Roger Simon talks about here play out on MSNBC’s ‘Hardball’. We all know where Chris Matthews and his well-used kneepads stand. But I did make a notable observation. (I missed the middle part of the show, just FYI.)
Namely that the class element of this story was utterly utterly lost to everyone on the show. Not a hint of it. It was ALL race race race race race. One radio guy noted that whites and blacks were diametrically opposed, and said “If the races were reversed, black cop, white prof, the whites would have supported the prof, the blacks the cop.”
This is of course an astoudingly obtuse failure to understand some fundamental contours of today’s political landscape. Your white working class guy in Indiana is going to rally to the belligerant, arrogant, full-of-himself, “do you know who I am??” Martha’s Vineyard summering Harvard professor over the working class cop? What planet is this guy on??
But if working class whites took the side of the black cop over the white professor, well, that would send tremors through the entire leftist philosophical edifice. “He’s a professor of the Harvard elite!! Of COURSE he’s anti-racist! They’re working class whites! Of COURSE they hate black people! Of COURSE this is all true!”
So as far as ‘Hardball’ is concerned, that is all just the way the world is set up in their cozy little lefty world. And ever it shall be.
Let’s not forget that Obama sat for 20 years in the pews of a black separatist “church” and took in the preachings of Jeremiah Wright. If he had seen anything wrong with that, he and his wife would have left for another church. But no, he had his daughters baptized there and, we have to conclude, agreed with Wright that whites are naturally racists, that whites are irredeemably racist, and that whites will always be racist. It’s no wonder that Obama believed he was justified in offering his opinion on the arrest without knowing all the facts. After all, there could only be one right conclusion!
People like Obama and Gates built their careers on this assumption. Without racism, the race pimps and hustlers would have to get honest work, therefore they see racism in every little thing and teach others to do the same. If we really want to talk honestly about race–and people like Obama, Gates, Sharpton, jackson, Wright, et al. do not–then It’s time to judge people on their merits and put the grievance industry behind us.
Good consise article.
It is what it is.
Both polical parties and most politicians rely on the ignorance of the American people.
You just gotta wonder if Gates would have reacted the same if it had been a black officer that came to his door.
Was Gates reaction only because the officer was white?
If so, then it’s easy to see who the >real< racist is.
Summer of Love, Moon Landing, Death of the insult, “nigger lover.” That’s when white racism became marginalized to the nutty few. Can you remember the last time someone called you a “nigger lover?” I’m guessing mid Sixties at the latest. However, black racism is still thriving. Start the discussion right there. Otherwise, FO.
If immediately prior to now “To put it succinctly, to be a racist was to be a jerk”,then now “To be associated with Harvard is to be a jerk.” Heh.
I’ve said for a very long time now that ordinary, decent people of good will in this country are sick and damned tired of constantly being told they’re racist bigots. I’m thinking that Sargent Crowley has just personified this feeling, and is standing his ground rather than grovel and crawl in the endless que of craven public apology-makers. Great, that’s what I say. It’s about time somebody did it. It speaks for many who would do the same if they didn’t fear being falsely pilloried for racism all the time. The only thing I wish, along with Arhooley, is that Sargent Crowley would politely decline the beer invite. If he did that, he would avoid being part of the Big O’s pathetic show.
I apologize for being a little Johnny One-Note on this, but the clumsy insinuation of the president of the United States into a situation that he admitted “not knowing all of the facts” speaks volumes about this man’s judgement and abilities.
That he made a hash of it at first and then worse again trying to unwind it all with his bloviating, uncalibrated non-apology boggles the rational mind.
What about uttering “uncalibrated” remarks during negotiations with Russia, China, Iran, or other countries whose interest conflict with ours?
The man is an incompetent boob and incapable of critical strategic thought. The sooner he is relegated to the back pages of history and his hands are removed from the levers of power, the better for our nation.
It actually increases the very thing it pretends to oppose.
So do all the spewings of diversity, identity politics, class differences etc. that are incessantly spouted from university pulpits.
There is a whole cadre of people out there whose ethos & identity are closely tied to propounding notions that “others” are some kind of victim, victims of racism, of poverty, fill in the blank.
Constantly reinforcing notions of victimhood keeps people down, not up, exactly where the Leftoids want them. Without “victims” on whose behalf their betters will correct society (e.g., spread the wealth around, return the wealth to its rightful owners etc.), the Leftoid cosmology falls flat on its face.
In fact, all these supposed groups of “victims” should be disgusted by the self-serving wimps who purport to stand up on their behalf.
We all grew up with the received wisdom, with the donnée, if you will, that the U.S. was a racist country.
I did not grow up with that as a given, although prejudice against blacks (especially in my own family, my father was born & raised in the south) was entrenched and accepted when I was a child. But we have so far moved beyond that as a society, as I have personally.
Large sectors of our society are dependent on an increasingly non-existent racism, not just obvious parties like Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright. We have a whole fabric of our culture endlessly clamoring for a “diversity” that is already accepted.
Exactly. And Jesses and Jeremiahs and Louies have grown fat & rich from the game. The true travesty of Jeremiah Wright’s church in Chicago was the lies he regularly pumped into his congregants.
considering (Obama)clearly plunged into the fray without thinking.
I saw the President’s leap to judgment in the Gates incident in the same context as his comments and observations on his Caucasian grandmother when she encountered the black panhandler in Honolulu. Obama relies on such perceptions being “true”, eternal and immutable. It’s the prism through which, weakly enough, he sees the universe.
The scary part is all the other “frays” he has similarly plunged into without a thorough understanding, driven by his personal ideology or chips on his shoulder.
Is it the same trait of character that leads him to make overtures to wackos & to diminish America in speeches overseas ? Is it a similar trait of character that led his wife to make all those negative observations about Americans during the campaign and to instruct us all as to how Barack was gonna “fix” us ?
I have a giant prejudice, not tied to coloUr, wealth, gender or anything else under the sun. It is a prejudice against all people who cling to false cosmologies in order to self-righteously sustain their own self-importance.
“You don’t get a job in our academic world by saying America has conquered racism…”
Exhibit A: the Duke University gang of 88
“The secret wish of these people, buried not far from the surface, is for things not to have changed. They have a nostalgia for an evil past when they could feel self-righteous and victimized.”
See above.
the political hack and the harvard shmuck both made it stirring the pot as professional racialists. tragically, the stink they make comes from them.
The term “civil rights worker in the sixties” conjures up an image of courage. A young white man from the northern U.S. going deep into southern U.S. sounds a lot like a soldier going into battle.
Perhaps someday you could discuss this image
When reminded of Mr. Obama’s race speech and his reference to his grandmother, I always recall that he said she “sacrificed again and again for me, [she] loves me as much as she loves anything in this world. . . .” Not once, not anywhere that I know of, did he ever say the HE loved HER, that he has or would sacrifice for HER. He simply used her, as he uses so many other things and people, as a prop. It’s what he is–a user. And the rest of us, each and every one, are props.
Ugh.
Betsy – Yikes, that is a cogent and disconcerting observation.
Simple, when are the African Americans going to stop crying?
Everyone has to walk on eggshells when speaking around them.
Gates is a perfect example. If someone was breaking into his house and he called 911, if the police took longer to respond than he wanted it would be a racial thing. This time the police did their job and it is a racial thing.
You cannot win with a racist.
Racism is alive and well in the black community, matter of fact it is growing with their new leader, Obama.
People are getting tired of the same old tactics by the black community.
Re: 31. Crusader:
Obama forgot for a moment he was POTUS and mouthed off in “community organizer” mode.
YES, YES, YES!!
Professor Gates owes Sergeant Crowley, and Crowley’s mother, an apology for his filthy “yo’ mama” remarks, and then needs to attend a sensitivity workshop on race.
President Obama owes his mother’s mother an apology for his racist “typical white person” slur, and the Cambridge Police Department an apology for his “acted stupidly” crack. And let’s not forget, Obama also owes America a genuine birth certificate
The root cause of racism in this country is black racism, the belief of most US blacks that, no matter what the problem. it’s whitey’s fault.
And, why not? For a clever black, there’s good money or other advantage in advocating such a position. Obama goofed his way through college knowing that no liberal white professor would dare push him or report his plagiarism.
The worst practitioner of black racism is the Congressional Black Caucus. Why is such an organization allowed to exist? It is racist, black racist, on it’s face. And, the test for black racism is always very, very easy; if the NYT would oppose the Congressional White Caucus because it was racist, then, the CBC is black racist!
Reports say the neighbor lady reported “two men in backpacks” breaking into the house.
Doesn’t she recognize her neighbor, or at 5’7″ in a backpack, did he look like a kid?
Do 60 year-old Harvard professors really wear backpacks on 18 hour flights from China?
Did Gates get a urine test at the PD? What did it say?
Do the “drivers” of old Harvard professors drive with backpacks? Who was that guy, anyway?
Gates has issues the press needs to explore.
Racial politics will change when it stops working for those that use it. Obama was a beneficiary of this politics. His credibility as a post-racial politician has taken a big hit. It will be interesting to see if he loses popularity as a result. Maybe that will help put an end to use of this societal straightjacket.
Typical comment from a smug white guy.
this from the NYTimes is much more instructive:
“Henry Louis Gates: Déjà Vu All Over Again
I’m Skip Gates’s friend, too. That’s probably the only thing I share with President Obama, so when he ended his press conference last Wednesday by answering a question about Gates’s arrest after he was seen trying to get into his own house, my ears perked up.
As the story unfolded in the press and on the Internet, I flashed back 20 years or so to the time when Gates arrived in Durham, N.C., to take up the position I had offered him in my capacity as chairman of the English department of Duke University. One of the first things Gates did was buy the grandest house in town (owned previously by a movie director) and renovate it. During the renovation workers would often take Gates for a servant and ask to be pointed to the house’s owner. The drivers of delivery trucks made the same mistake.
The message was unmistakable: What was a black man doing living in a place like this?
At the university (which in a past not distant at all did not admit African-Americans ), Gates’s reception was in some ways no different. Doubts were expressed in letters written by senior professors about his scholarly credentials, which were vastly superior to those of his detractors. (He was already a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the so called “genius award.”) There were wild speculations (again in print) about his salary, which in fact was quite respectable but not inordinate; when a list of the highest-paid members of the Duke faculty was published, he was nowhere on it.
The Associated Press
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., during a book signing in 2006.
The unkindest cut of all was delivered by some members of the black faculty who had made their peace with Duke traditions and did not want an over-visible newcomer and upstart to trouble waters that had long been still. (The great historian John Hope Franklin was an exception.) When an offer came from Harvard, there wasn’t much I could do. Gates accepted it, and when he left he was pursued by false reports about his tenure at what he had come to call “the plantation.” (I became aware of his feelings when he and I and his father watched the N.C.A.A. championship game between Duke and U.N.L.V. at my house; they were rooting for U.N.L.V.)
Now, in 2009, it’s a version of the same story. Gates is once again regarded with suspicion because, as the cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson put it in an interview, he has committed the crime of being H.W.B., Housed While Black.
He isn’t the only one thought to be guilty of that crime. TV commentators, laboring to explain the unusual candor and vigor of Obama’s initial comments on the Gates incident, speculated that he had probably been the victim of racial profiling himself. Speculation was unnecessary, for they didn’t have to look any further than the story they were reporting in another segment, the story of the “birthers” — the “wing-nuts,” in Chris Matthews’s phrase — who insist that Obama was born in Kenya and cite as “proof” his failure to come up with an authenticated birth certificate. For several nights running, Matthews displayed a copy of the birth certificate and asked, What do you guys want? How can you keep saying these things in the face of all evidence?
He missed the point. No evidence would be sufficient, just as no evidence would have convinced some of my Duke colleagues that Gates was anything but a charlatan and a fraud. It isn’t the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate that’s the problem for the birthers. The problem is again the legitimacy of a black man living in a big house, especially when it’s the White House. Just as some in Durham and Cambridge couldn’t believe that Gates belonged in the neighborhood, so does a vocal minority find it hard to believe that an African-American could possibly be the real president of the United States.
Gates and Obama are not only friends; they are in the same position, suspected of occupying a majestic residence under false pretenses. And Obama is a double offender. Not only is he guilty of being Housed While Black; he is the first in American history guilty of being P.W.B., President While Black.
A good, complementary illustration to Roger’s piece on the racism nostalgia’s nurturing grounds would be an examination of Simmons’ (the Cambridge mayor, herself, actually a “DOUBLE OPPRESSED” as black AND! lesbian), enthusiastic dash at denouncing something that is becoming increasingly obscure.
Further, Gates’ act should be examined closer, too – for any outside observer, his erratic behavior didn’t suggest an offended man, but an excited dopehead.
So, Gates can join Obama in the Oval Office for sharing a line of coke (why Obama’s medical records are still un-available?) and we can all listen, teary-eyed, to Obama’s evoking his experience as a kid, when standing on his gan’dad’s shoulders on a Hawaii beach, assisted at the Apollo mission’s return to Earth.
Dear Anonymous “Shadow” #61
Your reified NYT (where else?) article proves my point. TWENTY YEARS AGO some workers in North Carolina were surprised a black man was rich enough to buy an expensive house. Well time marches on, anonymous one. You’re locked in nostalgia too. From the point of view of this blogger who was, yes, once a donor to the Black Panther PArty and wrote movies for Richard Pryor, you seem so far asleep you’re coming from the era of the original Shadow. Get over it and move on.
Roger (and Roger Kimball today too) have the last and best words.
As a kid in Kansas in the 50s my racism extended to thinking that most blacks were just crude, foolish people who didn’t do a very good job raising their kids. Although the finest young man in our entire high school was black and my friend.
Now I see them as mostly a criminal class and avoid their company as much as is humanly possible even to the extent of moving to a state where they are almost non existent.
Ask any big city cop about blacks.
scott #65, I find your comment absurd and veering toward the racist. I have plenty of African-American friends today just like your high school friend. Some of them work at PJTV. You should get over yourself just as much as The Shadow.
I was wondering how long that was going to take. It’s the white b****’s fault for calling the cops, because they lost the argument about Sgt. Crowley.
#61 The Shadow-
“It isn’t the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate that’s the problem for the birthers.”
No, that’s EXACTLY the problem!!
Gee…funny how things seem to always get twisted back onto race when it involves a black man.
Nostalgia indeed!
60. Steve:
Actually it sped up his declining polls according to RCP (Real Clear Politics)
54.7% on 7/24 Friday
54.8% on 7/23 Thursday
55.9% on 7/22 Wednesday
56.1% on 7/21 Tuesday
The cause of black racism is white progressive, elitists politicians. They are the ones who encouraged the African-American hyphenation; encouraged the continued black suffering at the hands of the unclean white man; encouraged the start of “Black Studies”, African-American Studies”, etc; encourage the idea that only white progressives have the black communities’ best interests in mind-regardless of the dismal record; and defend the indefensibe charges of black racism appear. They used the MSM to further the cause of white racism. Between the MSM and white progressives especially in colleges and universities, the black community has had it drummed into their heads that they are victims. The NAACP, ACLU and SLPC are the legal arms of black victimization. And the cottage industry of black nationalism, black liberation theology, and the race hustlers are all backed by the wealthy white progressive elite to further cement the relationship between the two.
The result is a nation that will forever be divided by race. Because white progressives see the black race as easy marks and have deliberately dumbed down blacks on purpose so they will be easily educated.
Ooops. Should read “easily manipulated.” in the last sentence. Sorry.
re #66
Tell me how to ignore the reality I see all around me Mr. Simon? I try not to act racist but I cannot pretend not to see what I see. I see black role models acting like thugs and criminals constantly. No not ALL of them. But many. Even most. For every Magic Johnson there appears to be a dozen Michael Vicks. I shouldn’t have to elaborate. Its all right there in our faces constantly.
I will not be able to improve my thought processes until I see and hear at least another dozen or so Bill Cosbys across the landscape.
“I try not to act racist…”
Evidently not hard enough, scott.
I realize I’m late in the commenting process, but I think it is interesting to compare Jeff Bezos’s Kindle apology — “stupid…thoughtless” and “we deserve the criticism” — to Obama’s “teachable moment” non-apology.
Obama, what you did was stupid and thoughtless.
As others have pointed out, too many people have a vested interest in fanning the flames over incidents like this. It really is an industry unto itself. Al Sharpton owes his “career” to the amplification of outrage, both real and wholly manufactured.
I would just add that all of this hyphenated-American sub-categorizing is in many ways as damaging as overt racism. When you put everyone in their own little box you sacrifice a little of their humanity, as well as some of your own.
For all my sixty plus years, I have lived by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s desire that all men be judged not by the color of their skin, but by their character.
I am tired of being designated as racist at the drop of a pin.
Life is not fair, and neither is the law. It is at best, just. Get over it. Take responsibility for your actions, and most of all, take responsibility for your in-actions.
The unemployment rate for black men is abominable, as is the graduation from high school rate. Students are labeled ‘acting white’ if they want to learn, to improve them self.
The Democrat party has inculcated a victimhood that would have been the envy of the KKK had they been running the public schools. Keep ‘em on the plantation of victimhood, with their hand out to the generous liberal Democrat…
As Betsy has said above, ugh.
tom
Hopkins: Wait a minute. How can you call Scott a racist because of what he has experienced. Isn’t that falling into the progressive trap of thought control?
And just how can you defend the racist undertones of rap music, gangsta thugs, Black and New Black Panthers, drug infested inner cities, black liberation theologins like Rev(?) Wright-who preach overt racism. This is what Scott has seen and perhaps felt.
No, I think Scott was not racist but being honest. And since when did speaking honestly legitimize your or some other critics labeling him as racist? Talk about Orwellian thought and speech control-you’ve already bought into it. He is merely doing what our esteemed AG wanted us all to do. And if you are going to stigmatize his speech and thought, then what does America stand for?
Please, everybody is giving Obama the benefit of the doubt and seriously over-intellectualizing the matter.
There is no such thing as an unapproved question or an unrehearsed answer in an Obama presser. Obama was disappointed at the coverage of his NAACP address and wanted another opportunity to burnish his street cred with the bruthas.
It simply did not occur to him that this would blow up in his face.
Now he has urinated all over his white guilt voting bloc. His reassuring, non-threatening, uniter-not-divider mask is irrevocably shattered. He has shown himself to be petty and hateful and the fist-pumping street-corner racial rabble-rouser he used to be (a drearily familiar type to big-city LEOs). I am much closer to believing that he actually did threaten recalcitrant CEO’s with inciting mob violence against them if they did not get on board.
I’m still in a daze at the shockingly unpresidential nature of his little jab. And I know I’m not the only one out there.
The Messiah has just come down to earth with a bump.
“7. Zoltan Newberry:
Gates has spent all his life waiting for this moment.”
CHA-CHING!
When Gates saw a white cop on his doorstep he wasn’t outraged, he saw dollar signs.
Oh, good lord.
Where was it that I “defended” rap music or “gangsta thugs” exactly? Rev. Wright? I don’t remember mentioning any of that.
Here is what scott wrote:
“As a kid in Kansas in the 50s my racism extended to thinking that most blacks were just crude, foolish people who didn’t do a very good job raising their kids. Although the finest young man in our entire high school was black and my friend.
Now I see them as mostly a criminal class and avoid their company as much as is humanly possible even to the extent of moving to a state where they are almost non existent.
Ask any big city cop about blacks.”
Yes, blotto, I “stigmatized” his speech and thought by expressing my own. Whatever you say.
By the way, Obama when speaking about cool-headedness probably was thinking of Eric Holder’s fair assessment:
“Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be in too many ways essentially a nation of cowards,” – yes, we can.
Jared Taylor, “Paved with Good Intentions” wrote about the phenomenon of political correctness–don’t recall if he used the term–being a cause for continued racism.
Today, we see it directed at Muslims.
In Norway, where Muslims are outrageously overrepresented as perps in the rapes of ethnic Norwegian women, the government has ceased breaking out the numbers by ethnic background. So, presumably, the peasants won’t be scared of what the intelligentsia doesn’t want addressed. But the actual result is suspicion both of Muslims and the government which exacerbates the problem.
Taylor, writing before this, says that’s the result of “good intentions”, and folks like Gates only prove the actual results.
Not to forget mentioning yet again that racism has been very, very good to Gates.
If , if we are truly honest we have to acknowledge that most racism today does not come from those evil (white) people but from Martians,they don’t have a civil rights organization yet to prove me wrong. So there , you racist bastards take that!
“When Gates saw a white cop on his doorstep he wasn’t outraged, he saw dollar signs.”
I mentioned this point earlier. “Skip” Gates may very well earn a couple million dollars due to this incident. Gates was previously only an academic star. The Harvard University professor might now be a superstar. Nope, he is not going to have to get in a soup line any time in the near future.
I try not to act racist but I cannot pretend not to see what I see.
Since you, by your own admission, live in a state where there are hardly any blacks, everything you “see” is on TV. There’s nothing at all wrong with living in a place that lacks racial and ethnic diversity; however, you can hardly make pronouncements about blacks or any other minority based on the MSM.
I have lived around and worked with black people my entire adult life. Some are jerks, some are nice. Some are smart, some are idiots. Most are simply going about the day-to-day business of working, feeding themselves and paying bills. In those respects, they are, gee, remarkably like white people.
The MSM presents us with gangsta rappers and Al Sharpton. Someone who bases their ideas about blacks entirely on police reports and what they see on the tube misses the guy with the mom and pop store, the bus driver, the IT guy, the office manager – the ordinary blacks who are neither threatening nor glamorous.
The worst prejudice I ever witnessed was in Uganda. It was tribal. It was also stunning. For me, a person raised to believe that prejudice was racial and that it existed more in the USA than in other places, I didn’t expect to be surrounded by Africans and hearing more prejudiced and stereotyped comments than I’d ever heard in the USA. X-tribal affiliation meant the person was a liar and you couldn’t believe anything they said. They were lazy and not to be trusted. Y-tribal affiliation meant the person was a thief and could be counted on to kill you if you crossed them. Z-tribal affiliation meant the person was stupid and should be scorned and laughed at, sort of monkey-like. I could not believe what I was hearing. It was Archie Bunker on steroids. And, it was tribal, not racial. I couldn’t wait to get back to the good ol’ USA where we had moved so far in the direction of looking at each person as a human being, and not according to race, tribe, etc. It was eye-opening.
“…In those days it was very easy to tell right from wrong and feel good about your actions. These days it’s a lot more complicated…”
Time is a constant, Roger. It’s you who have changed. I’m sorry for the blurring of your moral vision.
Many non-Jews who supported Zionism before 1967 when Jews and the Jewish state were seen as defenseless and needy turned against Zionism after the 1967 war. The condescension at the heart of their pre-1967 sympathy was offended by Jewish strength and self-reliance. You might consider that something similar with regard to African Americans may underlie your loss of moral clarity.
I don’t disagree with much of what you contend in your post. But racism among cops has not declined at anything like the pace of its decline in the rest of society. Nor thugery, dishonesty, and towering contempt for ordinary citizens, black and white alike.
The nature and character of policemen is not a matter of opinion. Read the Knapp Commission Report or any of the other reports of commissions of inquiry into police corruption and you’ll quickly realize that policemen are a criminal class in everything but name. “Show me a cop and I’ll show you a thief” was an oft heard comment in the Brooklyn of my boyhood.
The details of the confrontation between Dr. Gates and the arresting cop remains a mystery despite all the bloviating, overwhelmingly in support of the police. What is known fact is that such a confrontation was anomalous for an elderly professor and entirely ordinary for a cop. Gates was caught off-guard. The cop was in his everyday milieu. Moreover, the cop was young, strong, heavily armed and backed up by two colleagues similarly equipped.
Bottom line, the cop was in control throughout the entire event. Gates’s fear, anger and confusion are understandable even if the words that sprang to his lips were foolish. The cop made a clear, cold decision in arresting him on what amounts to a prideful chickenshit charge. For personal verbal insult, this typically arrogant SOB clapped an accomplished and respectable citizen in irons–a waste of his own time and that of his colleagues’ along with the taxpayers’ money.
A personal note: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the rare instance of a prominent African American who has stood up openly and publicly to confront black racists like Leonard Jeffries and condemn widespread anti-Semitism among African Americans. His moral clarity adumbrates of MLK’s plainspoken and public equation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.
Leave knee-jerk support of the police to Jack Dunphy and his friends at NRO, Roger. Look in the mirror and recognize that you’re cut from different cloth.
The outrage by Gates is not accidental, neither is the “Stupidly” comment from Obama. They both live in a world of racisim, it’s what they live for, where they go to church and who they’ve always been. Make no mistake about it, Obama is a racist and as such will do all in his power to promote racist programs.
Am I seeing straight? Did the commenter Levavi#88 reference the Knapp Commission Report in his long and loopy screed? That was 1972!… 37 years ago.
Mr. Simon is right; there is a style of thinking and a system of beliefs about race in America that just won’t be given up no matter how much progress is made. I used to work for an African American man who had succeeded handsomely in life — he had a professional supervisory position (with many white people working under him without any second thoughts about it, I might add); he had a lovely home in an upscale neighborhood; his wife had a high-paying professional job; his children attended prestige universities; he had disposable income abundant enough to have almost every luxury known to upper middle class man. Yet all this man did in personal interactions was complain about the racism he detected everywhere and carry a bitter chip on his shoulder about the sins of the past. I always thought how unfortunate it was for him that he couldn’t just give it up and enjoy his great life. He had the life most Americans dream of, but he couldn’t get beyond seeing himself as a victim.
I noted that the President embraced this as a “teachable moment.” Predictable. Does he not understand that American people have been taught about race relations for decades in school, by the news media, through television programs and movies, through books and magazines? Racial acceptance and tolerance has been enshrined in our culture for all of my life. The vast majority of Americans embrace it naturally by now, without question. Yet elites like Obama and Gates play a game that the great unwashed in America still need to be instructed by them about the correct way to think and behave. They’re invested in believing that Americans outside the Ivy League and the halls of government are irredeemable, knuckle-dragging neanderthals. This puts them in the position of being smarter, better educated, more deserving with the result of always being fawned over, deferred to, and insulated from the masses that they’ve never really had much interaction with anyway. Why would they ever want to get beyond it?
Broad brush much? Have you ever stopped and considered that the root of racism is stereotyping? Have you considered the possibility that stereotyping is the entire problem?
Roger – It is your inability to put yourself in another man’s shoes and see that though things have improved there is plenty of racism around.
Most is is more subtle today, but none the less real. Obama has demonstrated humility in this case. The opposite of what you have demonstrated.
He’s doing damage control. Having stupidly opened his yap when the appropriate thing to say is “no comment”, he’s now trying to regain control of the narrative. This is how that’s done.
Crowley should very publicly tell the POTUS to piss up a rope.
On the 19th of January, the erstwhile publisher of my first novel, The Price of Liberty – A Novel, was driving to Washington, D.C. from New York, to attend the following day’s festivities.
This man – who for propriety’s sake, will remain nameless at this time – is one of the country’s leading African American book publishers, and like tens of thousands of others, was headed to the City of Columbia to witness the historic inauguration of our nation’s first black president.
Would that I could have shared his enthusiasm for the moment.
As recent history has shown, Barack Hussein Obama does not share the values of a majority of those who voted against him – myself included – and an increasing number of those who voted for him.
Nevertheless, as I knew this event was important to him, as well as to black America, in general, I decided I should make the effort to watch.
As we finished our brief conversation, in which he reassured me that we were getting close to inking a deal, I thanked him for the call, and wished him well – and a pleasant time at the inaugural.
The next day, when the ceremony began, as I had feared it was a painful thing to watch: from the class-less booing of President Bush, to the endless, sycophantic chants of “Yes We Can,” to Chief Justice Roberts’ gooning the Oath of Office, the whole affair was nearly insufferable.
(In the interst of fairness, to both of the Obama’s credit, they handled the awkward situation during the botched administration of the Oath with great dignity and grace.)
As the ceremony came to a close, just as I thought it couldn’t get anymore excruciating, (what the hell WAS that “poem” about, anyway?), along comes the good Reverend Joseph Lowery.
In an offensive, sing-songy, Jesse Jackson-esque manner, his embarrassingly pedestrian ditty completely belied the last fifty years of our country’s history.
It was as if, to the tired, old civil rights war-horse, the last half century had not even taken place.
If the racial conditions in our country – the recent, much-ballyhooed arrest of Harvard Professor Gates notwithstanding – had not improved beyond the point which would have justified such an angry diatribe, then Reverend Lowery would not have been there to deliver his screed, as Barack Obama would never have been elected President.
Sadly, as I thought about my publisher, his famous movie director friend, and the thousands of other black Americans who were present that frigid morning, or were watching the ceremony by way of television, I’m sure this fact was completely lost on them.
Until promininent black Americans such as these can finally put away their racial prisms, we will never realize Dr. King’s dream of a world in which we are all judged not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character.
T.W. Elliott
- by the way, The Price of Liberty – A Novel is available at the following websites:
https://www.createspace.com/3389002
and http://www.amazon.com
Time is a constant, Roger. It’s you who have changed. I’m sorry for the blurring of your moral vision.
“Time is a constant?” So nothing ever changes? That doesn’t strike me as a very “progressive” POV. Notice that it only holds true for the USA. The Israelis have moved from “good” to “bad” in David L.’s eyes, but the USA remains bad and racist forever.
How about: circumstances have changed and Roger has grown older and wiser? It’s you who remain mentally and emotionally frozen in 1972 and refuse, like Peter Pan, to grow up and challenge your own beliefs. I doubt that will happen because old fools like you are too emotionally invested in the idea that the US is irredemiably racist (especially those trashy lower middle class types, eh, David?) and only you and your fellow elitist leftists have risen above it.
As much as I despise black pop-culture as degrading and crass and as much as I understand about the statistics and percentages of crime by race … I too am inculcated with the idea that the black man deserves a break. Even a special break. If as an employer I had two equally qualified men seeking the same job, one black one white, I would probably not be able to NOT give the job to the black man. I could not trust myself to have properly suppressed my racist tendencies.
Try to understand that I do not want to be a racist. I do not want to behave as a racist. I want to be fair and just.
BUT
I don’t wish to be around blacks. I especially do not want to live in a city with crowds of them. I fear them and cannot be comfortable around them. One third of my 1200 student high school were black. I had NO, read – zero, problem with them. At the time I dug their music and liked to go to black clubs and dance. Often with black girls. As I said before the best kid I ever knew was a black kid.
Something irretrievable has been lost. Sorta like my country.
Let’s not forget the upside to this story: Obama has reinforced his resume as a “community organizer” from Chicago, thereby further alienating a swath of the population heretofore asleep and Mr Gates has announced to the burglars in and around Cambridge that he travels and leaves his home unattended, that his neighbor is unlikely to call the police again for any reason, and that even if alerted by a passerby, the police are likely to be otherwise occupied.
Lucia Whalen, the lady who phoned in the police report, is the Circulation and Fundraising Manager for Harvard Magazine.
http://harvardmagazine.com/contact/staff
Her email is delinked but easy to figure out from the format of the other linked email addresses on the page.
Harvard Magazine’s address is 7 Ware Street. Gates’ address is 17 Ware Street.
Google Maps, satellite view, zoom in. http://bit.ly/DzGe6
They were next door neighbors! They could have waved out the window to each other across the yard!
So…they were colleagues at Harvard. Harvard Magazine covers all things Harvard and Gates is supposedly some big rock star at Harvard. He has lived at that address for a long time–not new neighbors. Harvard Magazine doesn’t know who their rock star, colleague, next door neighbor is? Then why should Officer Crowley know who he is?
This happened during office hours. I wonder if the whole office looked out the window and agreed a break-in was happening and Lucia was the unlucky slob to make the phone call. Her life will never be the same.
Couple of questions:
Why didn’t Lucia call campus security? She was a university employee on the campus looking at a university owned building.
Did she call them? Did they tell her to call the Cambridge police?
Second question…more of an alternate reality if Gates had a functioning brain. If Gates eventually used Harvard Maintenance to secure his door, why not start with that solution? In the same situation, I would have dragged my suitcase next door (Harvard Magazine!) and asked to use the phone to call Maintenance and possibly Security to report a potential attempted break-in due to the damaged door. If Gates had done this, no incident.
With that satellite view, also note the dense population of people and buildings in that area. Crowley was prudent to arrest Gates to keep the peace, because a crowd was gathering and could have easily turned into an uncontrollable or ugly situation.
Good going, Crowley. I stand with you. And so do the Latino and Black officers who were with you during this incident. They think you conducted yourself professionally, did the right thing, and they support you 100%. Even if you knew the charges wouldn’t stick, you got the inciter away from the crowd and defused the situation.
*applause*
“Obama has demonstrated humility in this case.”
How? He was arrogant to comment in the first place when he didn’t know the details of the incident, and then gave a slimy non-apology apology for calling the cop “stupid”. How much does Axelrod pay you for planting this astroturf, anyway?
President Obama–along with other’s like him such as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Sonya Sotomayor, Barbara Boxer, etc al–is a demagogue who feeds on division like a leech feeds on blood; furthermore, the Democrats, as a whole, feed their constituents as more victims. In fact, the Democrats like to create more victims so they can have more potential voters. The Democratic Party would cease to exist without their constant supply of class warfare victims. However, at the center of it all is an apocalyptic symphony in the maelstrom din of chaos is nihilism, racism, & hate–everything the Democrats supposedly is an antithesis of the other party.
97 Scott: Perspective please:
Black noncoms gave up their stripes and took demotions to private to fight as rifleman in WWII. Black airmen chafed to try to fight against the luftwaffe (and did). Black cops, soldiers, lawyers and others are glue for this country. You may see white esthetes selling secrets to the enemy and parading for Hussein and castro, but you won’t see US blacks doing that (or if there has been one or two its small compared to the stream of white traitors).
Despite a fringe among whites and blacks in the 70′s, blacks never bought into to revolution against the US. In the LA riots in 1992, a white trucker was hit in the head by a brick from a black man, and another black rushed from home and risked his life to get that white guy to an emergency room. When my ex wife became volently ill in her car and stopped at a service station, the black owner got her into a cab to a hospital. When she came back to get her car, he was gone for the day but her car had been cleaned out. No charge. There are solid and professional black judges lawyers, cops, nurses, etc. all over the country.
Race. Class. professionalism.
The Professionalism of Oficer Crowley is the tipping factor here. This is a man who handles hundreds of similar “disturbances” every year. He is seasoned. He is well-trained in handling race-tinged situations. He has seen enough people in various stages of intoxication and stress that he can spot them immediately. He has that highly devloped “sixth-sense” ( it is really mental profiling) that goes with high-risk jobs, to take into account those small clues that signal possible violent reaction. He works in a city with a high level of distinguished academics, and is aware of their high self-regard. He is not out to collect scalps.
We can be quite sure that Crowley would not have arrested the professor if his conduct had not fully warranted it.
The President’s home town, Hyde Park, IL, also an academic community, is probably the most over-policed in the U.S. The University of Chicago owns all the land around it, to provide a barrier from adjacent low-income tenement areas. No stranger on the streets at night can walk a block without being questioned by police. You can be sure Prof. Gates would have never been arrested there, however drunk and obscene his behavior. That’s the kind of policing Obama favors.
You are quite right in regard to the high level of racial tolerance in the U.S. The Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans speak casually of blacks in terms that would curl your hair. The most astounding race/class distinction I’ve ever witnessed was in Haiti, where the “creoles”, those with some french blood and lighter color, refer to those of mostly African blood as “peasants” and treat them accordingly. The South, in the days of slavery, didn’t have greater race discrimination.
RE #103/stuart Williamson: [...] You are quite right in regard to the high level of racial tolerance in the U.S. The Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans speak casually of blacks in terms that would curl your hair. [...]
Stuart, unfortunately I beg to differ a little bit here – even with only a superficial grasp of Spanish, what kind of remarks you can hear in Los Angeles during a bus trip would make you, well… pretty thoughtful.
90. Nancy Lopez:
Alas Nancy, thirty-seven years is not a great long time. The time of the Knapp Commission hearings is the time roger criticizes racial opportunists, accurately in my view, for wistfully harking back to.
Large bureaucracies–especially authoritarian bureaucracies rooted in martial tradition–change at at a glacial pace. Racial attitudes among the police lag far behind the rest of society.
Sorry to be so long and loopy. What means “screed,” Nancy? Can you define it without turning to a dictionary?
Think before you insult, woman. Gates and Obama didn’t and look where it got them.
96. Donna V.:
Mathematically, Donna, time is indeed a constant. But please don’t put assume and attribute opinions and positions to me that I didn’t express.
I’m sixty-two and I’ve done my share of foolish things but I’m confident that those who know me wouldn’t describe me as an “old fool.”
I didn not suggest that “nothing ever changes.” I did not claim to be a “progressive, a conservative or a reactionary. I did not say that “the USA remains bad and racist forever.”
Circumstances have indeed changed. Roger is indeed older and, hopefully, wiser.
I sincerely wish that refusal to grow up was an available lifestyle choice as you seem to imagine it is. I would have grabbed it with both hands. The only thing Peter Pannish about me is a full head of hair that refuses to turn white and a libido that continues to function.
FYI, I happen to believe that the Americans are less racist (and less violent) than most people. I’m firmly elitist but unless Attila the Hun was a Commie, I’m not a leftist. It is true that I have met some trashy lower middle class types and I consider myself far superior to them in every way.
I hope this satisfies you, Donna. I’m no less nostalgic than Roger but I was far less altruistic in my twenties. I was running my first business, living in a duplex designed and furnished by an architect friend, driving a little red Alpha and boffing every female foolish enough to buy my line of bullshit.
Civil rights was just something dominating the news. Had nothing to do with me.
I have heard speculation there is a tape related to this incident somewhere. In fact, this day and age, I’d be surprised if there isn’t. I am very confident that, if the tape were in any way beneficial to the good professor, it would have been leaked by now. I hope Crowley has the sense to stay away from the White House Pub, and sticks this incident right down the throats of race pimps everywhere. Our universities are festering tumors.
The endless hullabaloo over white racism is a socially acceptable method of expressing a racial hatred of whites. You can experience and display the most venomous bigotry, and feel all self-righteous about it, too. Nice work if you can get it.
It’s tiring to have to act like these classless people have to be so carefully analyzed, rather than just being taken at face value, as rude and vain neurotics.
Obama, his friends, his political cronies and his street buddies–
1. are not nice people
2. are racist in their behaviors
3. seldom give any indication of actually caring about any one not already in their inner circle
4. while supposedly “highly educated” seem to be terribly ignorant of common sense public mores….
they just aren’t that special. Like I said, they’re not even nice.
Meh. Doesn’t matter. White man, bad. Any other skin tone, good. Even a blend.
And so it shall be.
Victims, unite! You have nothing to lose, and everything to gain!
Forget the racist purging going on today around the world; let’s focus on the past, feel our guilt, and continue to shell out billions of bucks to able bodied people!
Long live The One! May he reign forever!
97. scott: I can see where Scott is coming from. I don’t agree with all of his reasoning, but a lot of folks do. He has engaged in what is known as “White Flight.” It’s been going on for a long time. With consideration to the atrocious black crime rates and the degradation of most communities when blacks become a majority, I can see his point. I don’t think he’s a racist necessarily. But he is prejudiced. He is acting in his own self-interest here probably due to previous experiences that he has had while among a group of black folks.
102. Blackwell wrote: “Black noncoms gave up their stripes…in WWII….” Sir, that was a long time ago. In the meantime, the widely-accepted black culture has evolved to revolve around sheer thuggery. My dad has a high regard for the black folks he served with in Vietnam. Something that is missing in this instance and in your example is that: people in the military are generally much more disciplined in their actions than the populace in general; they have been treated in recent times as equals; they have been taught to overlook race.
You also wrote: “In the LA riots in 1992, a white trucker was hit in the head by a brick from a black man, and another black rushed from home and risked his life to get that white guy to an emergency room.”
This doesn’t change the facts that there WERE riots by blacks because of some perceived slight. Neither does it change the fact that a white trucker was hit in the head by a black guy for one reason and only one reason-because he was white.
regards
47. betsybounds: I’m completely with you! What Sgt. Crowley should do is demand a public apology from Gates and from Obama before even thinking of accepting an invite. And then he should refuse on the grounds that: because of his profession he doesn’t want to be seen among known racists.
My post from another thread: “If I were to open the front door of my house and someone who I had never seen before were standing there, there’s a number of things I would immediately discern (generally in this order): Race, gender, physical size, age, dress, facial and body posture (smiling/welcoming, or frowning/threatening), and perceived intent. And you probably would make the same judgements in approximately the same order. Then we, as preprogrammed human beings, would apply our own prejudices which are based (in general) on our past experiences. If it was a fat, smiling, short white woman carrying a bible and wearing a dress, I would definately not feel very threatened. If, however, it was a young, big black guy wearing his pants sagging way down off his butt with a black baseball cap on sideways, teardrop tattoos under an eye, smelling like marijuana, I would be much more on my guard. Wouldn’t you?”
We must all face the facts that: until black crime rates are in line with the percentage of the overall population; until the deification of criminals by the mainstream black community is halted; until blacks have the foresight and wherewithal to refute gangsta and thug and drug culture, that they will always be looked at with a jaundiced eye by others. If all three conditions above were met, then give it 50 years for all of the people who have witnessed these behaviors to refute their own stereotyping of blacks. At that point, maybe black folks can shed the reputation that follows them everywhere and even precedes them. But that ain’t gonna happen!
regards
Interesting that you had to add the last paragraph “I was a civil rights worker in the sixties”. CYA…just in case!
Assuming you are telling the truth you were definitely out of step with one of the many conservative heroes (and presumingly one of your heroes)…. William F Buckley. He was clear where he stood on “laws on civil rihts and integration”. So why didn’t he stick to his righteous stand?
Oops… he stood there till he couldn’t stand there any more! Hey but who knows maybe he was a civil rights worker too!
Conservatives are a joke and you are a big one! Come on tell the truth how you really feel…
Worthwhile commentary on this:
http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-303137
Meryl
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
To many libtards are racist thugs. Brown shirts in blue suits.
If the sun is a disinfectant, their time in the sun will be fast fading.
Racism, bigotry, domestic terrorism. They were tried in the 20th century in Russia and Germany. And look where it got em’.
Barack’s hobnail boot gang are doomed to the same fate. Not only can’t they shoot straight with the country, but they’re shooting themselves in the foot every chance they get.
The day is coming when these feckless, loathsome, contemptible, despicable, vile, north end of southbound mules will be driven back to the cesspools from which they emerged, never to be heard from again.
I know the airwaves are reeking with their vile poison. In a multi-layered strike back strategy, I’m personally attacking the Daily Show with advertiser pressure that makes Jesse Jackson’s style of extortion of corporations seem school girl polite by comparison.
Libtards.
The mouthy, bully boy ones have no place in polite society except behind bars. Make no mistake. They know it, too. It’s only a matter of time till their fungus is no longer among us. pr
David L.: Forgive me if I mistakenly called you a “progressive” and mistook you for an old hippie. Gee, where did that idea come from? From your posts portraying white cops from lower middle class backgrounds as bigots who do nothing to keep us safe?
There are bad cops. There are crooked and bigoted cops. But the police, most of them, are decent people who deal with situations most of us would not have the nerve to face day in and day out.
Plus, it doesn’t look like Crowley exactly fits your profile. From the Boston Herald:
Crowley . . . has taught a racial profiling class at the Lowell Police Academy for five years.His academy class, which he teaches with a black police officer, instructs about 60 police cadets per year who spend 12 hours in the classroom, said Lowell Police Academy Director Thomas Fleming.“He’s a very professional police officer and he’s a good role model,” Fleming said. “Former police commissioner Ronny Watson, who is a person of color, hand-picked Sgt. Crowley. . . . I presume because he would be the most qualified and most professional. He’s a very good instructor. He gets very high reviews by the students.”The Herald quotes Lawrence Hickman, a black Boston policeman who teaches alongside Crowley: “He’s well versed in the subject matter he taught. He is the right instructor for the subject material. . . . I’m an African-American police officer, If there were any issues or if I thought he was biased, I would have addressed that. We all do the same job and we all know how things get spun out. The bottom line is he was there answering a call for help, he responded as a professional police officer.”
But tell us some more about those brutal trashy micks, David. I’m not Irish, myself – but I can recognize a bigot when I see one. You’re one.
I’ve done a lot of traveling for business so I know what it is like to have to improvise when problems occur. So I ask myself, what would I do if I know I don’t have my keys when returning from my international trip. First I would ask myself, “who else has a key, my wife, secretary, left one under a flower pot somewhere? Second, maybe I should go to the office, especially if it is still during the workday, drop off my luggage and call a locksmith to change the lock rather than break something. Three, maybe campus security or the police could help. Maybe the secretary, or my limo driver would have an idea. But I don’t think I would just try to break into my own place.
And then to add to real stupidity, I would never talk back to a police officer and escalate a situation. I would comply, explain and do whatever they asked me to do.
My main reaction to Gates was that he was creating a PR situation to promote a book or event of some kind, or given Harvard’s rather large decline in endowment, maybe he was working to protect the African-American Studies Dept if budget cuts were coming. Then he could make a case for continued relevancy before playing the race card with the university. But believe me, this is all about the money. Race is a business for these clowns. Both Gates and Barry.
A point I would like to make; The people who promote this “race industry” have something to gain. Power and influence, and they are succeeding. The race baiters in our society are trying to bend the rules so blacks have more rights than white people. They want blacks to be able to do exactly what they want, have no checks or balances for their actions, and they are succeeding. The media is scared to death of the black race pushers, and the truth is in the reactions to any charge of racism that is broadcast in America. Look at any white person who is stupid enough to mistakingly say something bad about black people. Al Campanis. Michael Richards. Don Imus. Rush Limbaugh. How many whites have been fired for what they have said?
How many famous blacks have gotten in trouble for what they have said? What about Reggie White? What he said to the Wisconsin legislature was as much or more racist than anybody has ever said. Did that get him in any trouble at all? No!
Someday, the media needs to stand up to the “Modern day Joseph McCarthys” that are Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and any other of the race baiters. They need to be stopped, so we can get balance back in our media. The black race mafia has too much power. They need to be stopped. This poor cop just had is reputation destroyed by a racist, stupid race-baiting professor.
Shadow #93: Yes, and your abilities to see deeply into the souls of all humans, to transcend the limitations of time and space with your wisdom and all seeing eye leave mere mortals dumb with awe.
Of the three,Obama,Gates and Crowley,one is not a racist.Do you know which one?This is a joke of stupidity.The worst racist in America is a black person and everyone knows it but wont admit it.I pray that Crowley does not share a beer with those two.It would only add validation to Obama and gates.
A S #112:
You sure you want to head down the ‘conservatives are racist’ road there, bud? Ever hear of Dem. governors George Wallace, Orval Faubus, or Lester Maddox? How about the Dem. senators who filibustered and/or opposed the Civil Rights Act, such as Robert (KKK) Byrd, Clinton mentor J. William Fullbright, Al Gore Sr., Sam Ervin, Richard Russell, and on and on.
Many people contributed in many different ways from more than one political point on the spectrum to advancing racial equality. Folks like Mr. Simon and many others, both black and white, bravely stood in the face of hateful bigots and told them to go to hell — and I wouldn’t hold against him if he said the same thing to obnoxious trolls who anonymously write things like “Come on tell the truth how you really feel.”
The people who promote this “race industry” have something to gain.
The inimitable Mr. Steyn
I wasn’t there. Neither was the president of the United States, or the governor of Massachusetts, or the mayor of Cambridge. All of whom have declared themselves firmly on the side of the Ivy League bigshot. And all of whom, as it happens, are African-American. A black president, a black governor, and a black mayor all agree with a black Harvard professor that he was racially profiled by a white-Latino-black police team, headed by a cop who teaches courses in how to avoid racial profiling. The boundless elasticity of such endemic racism suggests that the “post-racial America” will be living with blowhard grievance-mongers like Professor Gates unto the end of time.
111. Donna V.:
“…There are crooked and bigoted cops. But the police, most of them, are decent people…”
Sounds like “there are just a few rotten apples in the barrel who give the police a bad name” which we hear defensively with each outrage by the police that makes headlines.
What makes you so sure of your opinions, Donna? I don’t mean your silly assumptions about me, which aren’t germane. How can you be so certain of your assumptions about the police? Can you cite statistics in support? Or is this merely wishful thinking? Perhaps supporting the police makes you feel more secure.
Growing up, I saw cops get up from booths and breakfast counters, nod at the cashier and walk out without paying any number of times. I have personally witnessed some half a dozen policemen taking cash bribes. I personally knew a policeman who was moonlighting as a pimp with a stable of at least three women that I was aware of. I personally witnessed two beefy cops working over a high school kid with slapjacks. But these individual cops are not the basis of my opinions regarding policemen at large.
My opinions are based on the detailed findings of every commission that has ever looked into police corruption in New York. The conclusion is, invariably, that the barrel is rotten through and through. Police corruption is universal. Goes with the job. Systemic graft and criminality from precinct captains down to foot patrolmen. Lonely Frank Serpico who was forced to relocate to Switzerland to avoid a second attempt on his life by NYPD assassins was not a fictional character.
Now to my personal opinions: During the Sixties and Seventies for which my generation and Roger’s and probably contemporary race-tension-exploiters are nostalgic, cops were called pigs. That insult may have described the heavyweight pink-skinned no-necks blocking the schoolhouse doors and clashing with civil rights and anti-war demonstrators. But it is the wrong choice of animal to describe cops whose nature more closely aligns with that of dogs.
A policeman is a Doberman at the end of a politician’s leash. His first loyalty is to what Jack London described through a dog’s eyes as the “food giver and fire builder.” He may ballyhoo his patriotism but the flag is merely an icon he worships absent any connection to the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. If there were a communist revolution tomorrow, he would transfer his loyalty to the hammer and sickle. If fascism became the political fashion, he would put his faith the swastika.
In France, rank and file policemen who swore loyalty to the principles of the French Revolution remained on the job under Vichy and its Nazi overlords. After the war, they went back to serving democracy. The chief regret of the Pentagon regarding Iraq is that we disbanded Saddam’s Republican Guard who might otherwise have kept the peace under our control. Policemen serve the politician in power regardless of affiliation.
Moreover, policemen are a universal brotherhood. Beneath the uniform, an American policeman a British policeman and a Russian or Chinese policeman are the same personality. Certain personality types gravitate toward police work just as certain personality types gravitate toward nursing, teaching or science. Each individual exercises free volition in making a career choice. But examine the mass and the individuals run to type.
When the fascist brownshirts and the communist blackshirts were mixing it up in roiling, bloody streetfights in German cities during the Thirties, Hitler ordered his brownshirts to break the communist’s heads but not to kill them because, once defeated, the communists would make the Nazi’s best recruits. Hitler recognized that the diametrically opposed political causes to which the two sides were fanatically loyal were secondary to the fact that the combatants were all of them fanatical loyalists. Beneath their shirts they were one and the same creature.
Policemen, all policemen regardless of nationality, are not so much members of a profession as they are a breed. And not a very nice breed.
Finally, I said nothing about “brutal, trashy micks.” Those are your words. . To be fair, you’re the second person to accuse me of bigotry this weekend and for voicing the same opinions.
I don’t feel that personality is based purely on nurture. I believe that behavioral characteristics and tendencies—including aggression and brutality as well as altruism are, at least in part, genetically transmitted. I also read history and believe that there exist distinct national characters.
If that translates to bigotry, I plead guilty as charged.
Ok. Done.
Ref: 120. Lightnin’ Hopkins:
“… Many people contributed in many different ways from more than one political point on the spectrum to advancing racial equality. Folks like Mr. Simon and many others, both black and white, bravely stood in the face of hateful bigots and told them to go to hell..”
You are right I do not know about Mr. Simon and he maybe genuine. Who knows?
But there is no doubt in my mind that more than 50% of the comments here and much of the conservative stuff is just code word for what they are uncomfortable saying out loud — so yes I do not mean to attack Mr. Simon since i do not know enough. But w/o atttacking an individual the fact is that david dukes, tancredos, maccaaca folks some TX woman calling Asians to take a “regular” name have one underlying theme in common — they are all conservative republicans. You are in denial if you don’t think you guys have a major race problem and 50% (or so) of the folks just don’t have the courage to join KKK today so they become conservative republicans!
That was an amazing mea culpa. Starts out saying “I shouldn’t generalize”, and ends up hooting and hollering ever cliche in the book.
No one likes the cops, until they need one.
#124 AS, I find your conventional gibberish laughable. Wake up. Besides our host – who, if you read his book you would see, was once a financier Black Panther Party – there are many others on here who have actually lived complex lives. Don’t be such a fool and believe everything in the most traditional sense. Shame on you. If you’re looking for the KKK, don’t look here. Look at Robert Byrd!
Ref: 127. Nancy Lopez:
So why don’t coloreds vote for your party?
How come you only have old white (mostly southern) men as reps?
How come you carry less-eduacted “working class” precincts? No college towns?
So what happened to all the KKK folks and many others who were not KKK but sympathized? They get to vote too? Do u think they voted for Pelosi and Obama?
U r the one in denial and should be ashamed of your party…
Sorry, I am an independent, not a Republican. This site is filled with independents. Learn to read. You are so unsophisticated it scarcely seems worth arguing with you. I must say Mr. Simon is generous letting someone like you waste his bandwidth with your drivel.
“Coloreds” ?
Is that one of those code words you speak of?
A*S is not a native Anglophone. Thus the idiosyncratic nomenclature.
Ref: 129. Nancy Lopez: Sorry, I am an independent, not a Republican.
You have convinced yourself otherwise for convenience.
re: waste his bandwidth with your drivel.
See that is why you are a conservative…u have no argument. U insult, period.
I feel sorry for all of you suffering under a black president…must be hard!
re: 131. Strawman: A*S is not a native Anglophone. Thus the idiosyncratic nomenclature.
I came over the rio grande amigo. I realize that makes me less of a human. But similarly to me you are a Native….why don’t we have you and the rest of the republican party on a reservation…lots of booze and gambling for you!
ref: 130. Lightnin’ Hopkins:
“Coloreds” ? Is that one of those code words you speak of?
If you said it would be…but then what can we expect from a sothern white male (aka conservative)? You guys are a joke!
I’m a Detroit City white male, my man.
….with a Black Texan blog handle. Sort of messes with your worldview, I know.
David L: A few weeks ago a cop in my town was murdered when he tried to stop a guy who had just robbed a bank. It happened in broad daylight. That’s the reality of police work. Every now and then, a cop gets killed in the line of duty. It’s a tough job – even tougher than being a Harvard prof – and most of us would not have the stomach for it. I respect them for putting their lives on the line, although I understand that some of them are not noble or nice and that the potential for some to abuse their power is always present – which is why I would not want to live in a police state.
I feel the same way about our armed forces – I honor our troops while knowing that individual soldiers can behave badly and abuse their authority. Making that distinction seems a bit too hard for you.
In these threads, you have been acting as if Crowley just happened to see a black man in a house in a wealthy, mainly white neighborhood and decided to harass him. Crowley is guilty in your mind – he must be because that fits into the little “racist pig” scenario that affixed itself to your brain 35 years ago.
What makes you so sure of your opinions? Crowley teaches classes in racial profiling. He is well-regarded by his collegues. One of the officers at the scene is black and he backs up Crowley’s account. And yet you automatically lump Crowley in with NYPD crooks from your long-vanished youth.
And no, you didn’t say “trashy micks,” David. You just made insulting comments about “a certain ethnic group” in the other thread – just like polite WASP anti-semites used to talk about “certain ethnic groups” at dinner parties during your 1950′s childhood.
I had a certain resentment toward cops in the 1970′s too. They put a damper on my ability to walk down the street smoking a joint. Why, the injustice! It was, like, worse than friggin’ Nazi Germany, man!
A S: If you said it would be…but then what can we expect from a sothern white male (aka conservative)? You guys are a joke!”
Sus oraciones son racistas y morónicas. De ahora en adelante le prohíben de la fijación a este blog. Adios y buena suerte.
Nancy Lopez is a wise Latina. Show proper deference. Or am I missing an instruction sheet to my Calvinball set?
Levavi: Oh give it a rest. You’ve proven yourself to be a racist toward white Americans. Every post you lecture us on what you experienced and it looks like you have a deep seated problem. I am surprised you haven’t said but I have some white friends, yet.
You try to defend your posts with these fanciful renderings of what happened long ago-to you. Gosh, how did you ever grow up. Must have been difficult.
Look, if America is so dreadful, go to Israel. Too bad you forget all those Irish, Italians, Scottish and others who saved your “bacon” in WWII. And those evil Catholics and Christians who support Israel–I guess they are evil in your eyes as well.
You should be kissing the ground you walk on here in America. It has allowed you to be the bigot you are and yet remain free-free to be the American hating, self loating racist you are.
Simple.
A.S.: Your over-the-top assertions only serve to prove that you are a racist. You constantly make the attempt to disparage Republicans by calling them racist without any proof.
You are simply following the ideas that HuffPo or Kos, or if by chance, a college professor, tells you.
I have yet to see you make a comment germane to the topic.
Here is one: Define and differentiate how Sgt. Crowley’s actions were racist as opposed to Gates’ actions?
It’s nostalgia, that’s exactly what it is.
Gates was hoping and dreaming and inwardly creating this incident for decades, however long it had been since he actually experienced racism.
As for Obama, I believe his big example of a racist moment was being mistaken for a waiter by an elderly woman when he was a young state senator (ignoring that he was probably the youngest person in the room).
Obama and Gates have done nothing but benefit from their race. Obama doesn’t even have slave ancestors.
This was the moment they dreamed of and had it been a different police officer, they would have milked it for everything they could, for months and years. They happened to run into a gutsy officer who was not going to pretend he did something wrong.
I don’t think any of this has anything to do with racism. It has to do with culture. I read somewhere, a long time ago, that if you removed American Black and Hispanic crime statistics that the US would have a crime rate similar to Switzerland. Note that I said only American Black and Hispanic, nothing about Asians, nothing about Indians or Arabs, nothing about African immigrants, nothing about Polynesians.
If you think it’s racist to criticize American Black culture that glorifies criminals and anathematizes the police, if you think it’s racist to criticize the Hispanic gangbangers spreading across the country, with their insistent graffiti (oh wait, that’s an emblem of their art) and their drive by shootings, then you can never come to grips with the problem nor ever offer up possible solutions.
And by the way…every damn human being who has ever lived sees two things first when they see strangers…skin color, sex and then how they’re dressed. It’s what they do next that’s important.
This might be why Gates was so wound up:
http://icanhascheezburger.com/2009/07/26/funny-pictures-u-iz-lokked-out/
This little “mishap” will increase Gate’s standing in the world of the racist black scholar/activist.
One wonders if BO ever did a ride-along with a regular cop on a regular shift? Would that have been too much to ask for an ex-community organizer? He’s fond of wanting others to walk in his or Skip’s shoes, but has he done the inverse? Will any of the pre-approved press ask this at the next scripted press conference?
No one has the right to disrespect the police, but it is a civic duty to cooperate with them, no matter how inconvenient. You’d think a college professor would know that. When Professor Gates cries racism over this incident, he merely trivializes true incidents of racism.
Are you still glad that you voted for Obama?
Am I the only one who thinks the idea of our President inviting two private citizens involved in a local dispute to the White House to “have a beer and clear the air” is the most moronic, mushy-minded warmy-n-fuzzy hogwash imaginable?
As my girlfriend would say “As IF!”
What a narcissist! Barack the Magic Nero! He can heal anything with his touch! sarc/ Brother!
I don’t know if that was intentional, but it does seem to be the emerging truth.
…we’ve done a remarkably good job…Most of us prefer to live in a comfort zone of our own people, our own ethnic, religious and racial groups. But we know that’s not cool…to be a racist was (is) to be a jerk…Every business and social activity I have been involved with has for decades been desperate to enlist people-of-color…
Sounds to me like a great deal of self-congratulation. I believe some qualification is in order. Racism is certainly last year’s fashion but though we don’t display it in public, last year’s fashion still fills our closets.
Black employment remains heavily concentrated in government, non-profit institutions, and the lowest rungs of the private sector. Housing–white people’s willingness to live among black people–remains firmly segregated. And this segregation is glaring even in ultra-liberal neighborhoods like the Upper West Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York and Palo Alto in Northern California.
The happy picture of racial harmony with blacks and whites deeply and intimately involved in each other’ lives on an equal footing exists mainly in the movies and on television. When a liberal screenwriter writes in a black business executive or a black scientist he imagines himself heroic for broadening white minds, creating positive role models for black kids and promoting racial amity in our society. In fact, by presenting anomalies as ordinary, common and even prevalent, he is insulting truth and art and trafficking in fashionable false propaganda for dollars.
Roger is proud that he has written screenplays for Richard Pryor and Whoopi Goldberg. This along with his employing black talent at PJM establishes his race-friendly bona fides and gives him the right to blame blacks for complaining about racism which, in his benighted view, is largely a thing of the past. Roger has spent so much time falsifying race relations on screen that he has lost sight of reality.
How many successful black screenwriters can Roger name? When was the last time he had to compete with a black for a job? Does Roger imagine there are no black writers so minimally talented as to be able to churn out the abysmal trash we all see on our screens every day? Roger profits from the absence of black competition as German academics once profited from the racist mass-dismissal of their Jewish colleagues.
On reflection, suggesting that blacks are nostalgic for racism is the crudest form of blaming the victim for his own victimization. Roger’s attitude is analogous to that of people who complain that Jews are too obsessed by the holocaust. Too quick to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.
Perhaps it’s formerly liberal whites who are nostalgic for racism. Time was, earlier in the civil rights movement, that a front office Negro understood his role. Under Reagan the African American director of HUD sat in his fancy office all day watching television. Now come the like of Gates and Obama who insist on being more than window dressing and robustly fulfilling their job descriptions. Terribly frustrating and annoying. It isn’t how their roles were scripted.
Regarding Gates and Crowley, I would suggest that there are far fewer black professors nostalgic for racism than there are cops nostalgic for a time when billy-clubs and blackjacks ruled the streets, policemen got more respect and black people stayed uptown where they belong.
Suggesting
I am firmly convinced that Professor Gates WANTED to be arrested and photographed, and staged his foul-mouthed ravings to ensure it. The break-in provided an opportunity that he could never have contrived, and he seized the advantage of the moment.
This episode gives him creds he lacks on black street. Now he can say, “I, too’ have shared police abuse, the humiliation, the blotch on my reputation.” With elitist peers, this will increase his stature. display him as a victim rather than just a pampered academic. Since he ha recently declared his horror at finding out, through DNA test that he is 75% white, this is a boost that he needed.
This is the only logical explanation for the scale of his outrageous rant.
I agree wholeheartedly and I am glad to see people recognize that false accusations are hurting race relations.
I also agree that it’s not easy today to know right from wrong (if it ever was simple). I think in this case there’s a confusing mixture of not only race and class, but also of attitude. Regardless of skin color, people who think police officers deserve respect have no sympathy for Gates’ behavior, and may even be eager to scapegoat Gates out of exasperation with people defending militant disrespect toward the police (which IMO is escalating, not helping, the problem of determining whether police are too brutal).
I should clarify: I meant that militant disrespect toward the police is IMO escalating, not helping, the problem of determining whether police are too brutal.
I did not mean to imply that people getting angry at Gates (for trying to provoke police into doing something wrong) is escalating the problem.
I sincerely hoped Obama enetring the White House would help extinguish cries of racism from both sides. His response to the situation was disappointing and just plain sickening. With all his power he slips on his elitist shoes and runs to the aide of a friend crying wolf. For that moment the needs and the wants of the american people took second fiddle while our president waved his big stick, micromanaging the affairs of the police department, coming to the aide of his friend. Obama had the opportunity to truly unite the american people in a way no one before him has had, however his actions and those of Gates’ were typical of elitist people who feel above the law. Sargent Crowley was a typical hourly paid employee like most of us americans are ( I won’t use the term blue collar) just doing his job as he was trained and as he has trained others. There is one thing our President was right about. This was a teachable moment. I hope he and Gates learned from this incident as they were the two in the wrong. They are the ones that sincerely need teachable moments if they are going to move forward from the past.