Eugene Robinson: What if the Big Cheese Had Been White?

[babylonsister]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090727_gates_got_caught_in_an_obama_backlash/

What if the Big Cheese Had Been White?


Posted on Jul 28, 2009

By Eugene Robinson


If race were the only issue, there would be much less hyperventilation about Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.‘s unpleasant run-in with the criminal justice system. After all, it would hardly be the first time a black man had unjustly been hauled to jail by a white police officer. The debate—really more of a shouting match—is also about power and entitlement.

This is a new twist. Since the triumph of the civil rights movement, minorities have been moving up the ladder in politics, business, academia, just about every field. Only in the past decade, however, has a sizable cohort of African-Americans and Latinos broken through to the tiny upper echelons where real power is exercised.

I’m talking about President Obama, obviously, but also Citigroup Chairman Richard Parsons, entertainment mogul Oprah Winfrey, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor and many others—a growing number of minorities with the kind of serious power that used to be reserved for whites only. In academia, the list begins with “Skip” Gates.

snip//

Apparently, there was something about the power relationship involved—uppity, jet-setting black professor versus regular-guy, working-class white cop—that Crowley couldn’t abide. Judging by the overheated commentary that followed, that same something, whatever it might be, also makes conservatives forget that they believe in individual rights and oppose intrusive state power.

There was a similar case of collective amnesia at the Sonia Sotomayor hearings. Republican senators, faced with a judge who follows precedent and eschews making new law from the bench, forgot that this is the judicial philosophy they advocate. The odd and inappropriate line of questioning by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., about Sotomayor’s temperament was widely seen as sexist, and indeed it was. But I suspect the racial or ethnic power equation was also a factor—the idea of a sharp-tongued “wise Latina” making nervous attorneys, some of them white male attorneys, fumble and squirm.

Is a man of Gates’ station entitled to puff himself up and remind a policeman that he’s dealing with someone who has juice? Is a woman of Sotomayor’s accomplishment entitled to humiliate a lawyer who came to court unprepared? No more and no less entitled, surely, than all the Big Cheeses who came before them.

Yet Gates’ fit of pique somehow became cause for arrest. I can’t prove that if the Big Cheese in question had been a famous, brilliant Harvard professor who happened to be white—say, presidential adviser Larry Summers, who’s on leave from the university—the outcome would have been different. I’d put money on it, though. Anybody wanna bet?

[Karenina]

1. Here's a "pre-Gates" related topic from June:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/opinion/15mon4.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

"The experience of being mistaken for a criminal is almost a rite of passage for African-American men. Security guards shadow us in stores. Troopers pull us over for the crime of “driving while black.” Nighttime pedestrians cower by us on the streets.

And black men who work as undercover cops are occasionally shot to death by white colleagues, as happened to a young officer named Omar Edwards when he was off duty and in plain clothes last month in New York City.

We have often been seen as paranoid for attributing these things to bias. But the racial stereotypes that link blackness and crime have recently become a hot topic in social science.

These pervasive and often unconscious biases affect social transactions of all kinds. They drive voting behavior. They make it likely that black defendants will receive longer sentences than whites for comparable crimes. They wreak havoc with the job possibilities of young black men. And they give the lie to the idea that the Unites States is becoming a “postracial” country."

[babylonsister]

2. Thanks for that link. Seems like this conversation

really does need to happen. That's just sad.

[Buzz Clik]

3. Robinsons nails it. I believe he also has touched upon some of the odd debate here at DU.

Considering the large element at DU that despises power, position, and money, choosing a side in the Crowley/Gates dust up became muddled. Here at DU, it goes even deeper than that. So many bizarre comments have been made during this debate that the hair on the back of my neck is permanently at attention:

-- Obama thinks he's better than a lot of African-Americans because his mother is white (yes, I read this here at DU)
-- The Gates/Crowley incident is irrelevant and uninteresting because it's just two men fighting over the size of their penises (mutli hits on this one)
-- Some convoluted comparison of the relationship between Gates and Obama and Obama's relationship with Donnie McClurkin, and Jeremiah Wright. (no clue)

[lunatica]

4. Eugene Robinson can count himself among the handful of successful

minority he talks about in this article. It gives him a very special perspective and I'm glad he's penning this. Learning how to fight stereotyping can only happen if it's a conscious decision. The fact that stereotyping is in fact in our unconscious actions is to understand that we accept certain thinking as normal when it really isn't because it would be different if circumstances were different. Racism probably has less to do with hate than it has to do with stereotyping and the fear that the stereotyping depends on to exist, although, granted not in all cases.

Any mixed race family or mixed race school such as the kind that military dependents go to attests to the fact that when the races are exposed to each other as equals from the beginning they actually get along just as well as they do with people of similar race.

It's not just a conversation we need to have as a nation. We need to start addressing the issue of separation and stereotypical thinking that racism thrives on. As a nation we are still in the separate but equal mind set. I think racism is taught, but it could be that non-racism must also be taught. It has to be a conscious decision. And it can be done, for starters, by exposing everyone to other cultures and races and customs from early childhood.

That's my two cents

[Beacool]

5. God, am I tired of this topic!!!!

After days on end of discussing this issue all over the airways, print media and blogs, I have come to one conclusion:

Crowley shouldn't have arrested Gates, but Gates didn't help matters by his inability to keep his mouth shut. Calling a cop a racist over and over is asking for trouble.

:shrug:

[Spazito]

10. Yet you felt the need to click on the thread and...

spout how "tired" you are of this topic.

Not tired enough to just ignore this thread, scroll past it or, if it irritates you so badly, click on the x that hides it from your irritated eyes.

Not too tired to not only tell us how tired you are but to include your perspective on it.

[Beacool]

12. Oh, chill out.................

:7

[Spazito]

13. I am not the one "so sick of this topic" so it would seem the wisest course would..

be for you to take your own advice and "chill out". You would find yourself less "sick" that way!

Thanks for the laugh, though. I often find your posts amusing and you didn't disappoint me here.

:rofl:

[Beacool]

14. Your post made me laugh, that's why I was teasing you.

Ciao.........

:D

[Cali_Democrat]

6. Eugene Robinson hits the nail on the head again. n/t

[TexasObserver]

7. Recommend

[Political Tiger]

8. I love Eugene Robinson! I don't think I've ever disagreed with him. n/t

[never cry wolf]

9. If the President had been white, he's never asked that question at the presser

The only reason he was asked about a prominent man of color being wrongly arrested, is because he is a prominent man of color. The reporter's pea brain thought, "hmmm, what do these two have in common?"

[Igel]

15. Pretty much.

But if he had waded into, he'd have been nailed by somebody. Taking sides, failing to take sides, supporting the racist cop, supporting the arrogant professor.... There's always a possible excuse when politics intrude.

As an aside, one of my former professors was biking when he was stopped by a policeman on foot patrol. He was told not to ride his bike on the sidewalk (per city or state codes), just given a verbal warning. He responded by ranting at the policeman, and then decided to follow the poor guy a little ways down the sidewalk. He was promptly arrested for disorderly conduct and taken to the police station; the charges were dropped within 24 hours. This was in Oregon. The professor was white, the cop was white ... hell, pretty much the entire city was white. (Years later still ranks as probably my favorite professor.)

[Spazito]

11. I love Eugene Robinson, he always nails it

Thanks for posting this, it is much appreciated.

[Romulox]

16. Sounds like a defense of class based privilege

Fighting for the right of rich people of color to demean working people just like "all the Big Cheeses who came before them" did is not my idea of civil rights.


(This is comment on Eugene Robinson's take on the matter, not on the facts of the specific case.)