Gatesgate

I recently talked with my friend, Lori, about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the black Harvard professor, the arrest that President Obama in his prime time press conference called stupid, followed later by a kind of an apology to the Cambridge police and the arresting officer. Obama said he could have "calibrated" his words better, a calibration that I'm sure has his critics hooting.

Anyway, she said that we shouldn't waste our time talking about the incident, and I said I disagreed. I said, not fully believing myself, that it might lead to some useful conversation about race and class. With her permission, here's her email response (with some minor editing):

Ok, here's a real response to Gatesgate (it's only a matter of time, right?).

First, everyone who knows or knows of Skip Gates has said, "serves him right." This guy is typical of BigHouse Academics--coasting on a reputation and the work of grad students. He hasn't had an original thought since the late 20th century and is besotted by his own celebrity. His documentary about Africa was atrocious (reportedly, for I saw only a few minutes.) His public personae is unctuous and unworthy of scholarly attention. Oprah's DNA. Please.

But those are the rewards of life in America--if you become a celebrity in anything you get to leave all the mundane stuff behind. You don't have to teach, really (just come in and "profess"); you go on TV, you become Famous. So most of us are just thinking, "Good. You probably deserve a little jail time, you f______ twit."

But there's a real issue here which is, why do the police feel free to arrest, harass or otherwise not give the benefit of the doubt to someone who is black and male and standing on his own front lawn. If he were drunk, fine. If he had pulled a gun or brandished a weapon, there's a case. But he was YELLING. He called the cop a racist and, after a few weeks in China (where he was, ostensibly, doing some other

celebrity documentary on a subject not of his own expertise) and a long flight he was probably more than a bit cranky. A white guy in the same predicament (a white upper class guy--there aren't any poor white people living in Cambridge) would have been cut a much larger slice of slack. They would have patted him on the head and sent him inside. But to ARREST the guy? Preposterous. And Obamarama was right the first time--STUPID! Do NOT arrest celebrity intellectuals who have a platform over which you have no control. Now we will have the specter of Gates proclaiming his solidarity with all the brothas who are doing time. Now he will have street cred because he spent, what, an hour in the Cambridge lock up. Oh, boy. Is your sphincter twitching? Did you become someone's bitch, Dr. Gates? How horrible for you.

What I dislike most about this is that Black people like Gates (and me--I do not disavow my own privilege) exist between the scylla of race and the Charybdis of class. Not dammed if we do or don't, but rather--what's at work here? Clearly, as the "phantom negro" pointed out [found here], Gates forgot where he was from He's lived most of his life within the protective shell of academic privilege. That doesn't mean he doesn't get funny looks in the grocery store. My father was a well-paid, well-known surgeon for his entire life in Indianapolis but it didn't stop clerks from not wanting to cash his checks or making sure that what he was buying was EXPENSIVE. (He was once buying pistachio nuts for my mother - a pound I think. The girl at the counter said, 'you know those are $3.00 a pound" or whatever they were. And he said, 'Yep. I'll take two." Better to have a sense of humor about this sh__.) Anyway, Gates always wants to seem as if he is "down" as if he is just that poor black kid from West Virginia. But he's not anymore. He hasn't been that for a long time. He has come to expect to be treated with a certain deference that comes with academic status. I think about this all the time--I'm walking up the stairs and a horde of clueless cellphone-humping 18 year olds are standing between me and my job and I think "can I have a little deference here? Anyone? I'm the f______ teacher, you sh__heads. Get out of my way." But, alas, no. The waters do not part. They treat me like the help I am. SO be it.

So, it's complicated. Skip Gates is an asshole and some of us are glad he was publicly humiliated. But his being an asshole doesn't mean he deserves to be treated like a criminal on his lawn. Will this do anything to advance the conversation about "race"? No, because Americans do not WANT to have a conversation about race. Americans do not want to think intelligently about class and discrimination and respect and privilege. The fact that the guy who arrested him was their diversity trainer says a lot. Here is a man who can't see far enough into the near future to think "hmmm... maybe I shouldn't arrest Professor Gates because it might look as if I'm harassing a well-respected Black man and that might echo centuries of racial oppression. Maybe I'll just walk away." THIS is the guy who trains OTHER cops about racial profiling. Good.

At least more folks around the world like us now. . .

In my last post, I groused about President Obama's continuation of imperial ambitions.  I suppose an anti-imperialist position in the heartland of empire is hopelessly idealistic, or foolish (though there are pragmatic considerations related to the costs of managing empire, and of what Chalmers Johnson calls "blowback").  I suppose I should also recognize that anyone moving into the US executive necessarily takes the reins of empire, and I can't expect him (or her in the future) to drop them and let the horses run where they will.

And clearly Obama's no Bush, thank god.  He showed that last night in the press conference, where he was, as always, articulate and thoughtful, and clearly, he's just plain smart--it's a relief that many Americans appreciated such characteristics enough that they would put him into the presidency, and that the yahoos in this country who equate anti-intellectualism with virtue don't always win the day.

Obama's character, and his foreign policy endeavors, are apparently producing positive consequences abroad, according to a recent Pew study (found here).  In brief:

The image of the United States has improved markedly in most parts of the world, reflecting global confidence in Barack Obama. In many countries opinions of the United States are now about as positive as they were at the beginning of the decade before George W. Bush took office.

I still am heartily opposed to our ongoing efforts to turn Afghanistan and Iraq into stable, manageable outposts of US empire, especially in the name of democratization.  But I shouldn't evaluate the Obama administration on that one policy alone.

Innocent Americans

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.  That's basically Andrew Bacevich's message in his new essay in the recent edition of World Affairs (you can find an interview and a link to the essay here).  It's something William Appleman Williams--one of my professors at Oregon State, and a source for Bacevich's writings--argued 30 years ago.  "Empire as a way of life," was Williams' term for the US worldview in which Americans act like an empire, deny they are an empire, refuse to acknowledge the sins of empire, and foist the costs of empire onto the backs of their soldiers and their families, as well as peoples in other lands that we, with our innocent good intentions, are determined to save from themselves.

Bacevich's essay is a review of Graham Greene's marvelous book, The Quiet American. Published in 1955, it was one of the earliest accurate gauges of the style and consequences US involvement in Vietnam.  We apparently learned little from that bloody fiasco now memorialized on a simple, somber wall with the names of 58,195 dead.  I remember hearing some NSA analyst at a 2003 International Studies conference--as Bush pushed our country willy-nilly to war, with many Americans marching in lockstep--blithely arguing that we needed to win the "hearts and minds" of the Iraqis.  My god, I thought, what's next? Strategic hamlets?  In The Quiet American  Greene says "Innocence is a kind of insanity."  It can also be a kind of stupidity.

Bacevich argues that

Those who conceived the Iraq War, the cheerleaders who promoted it from the sidelines, and critics of that war who have now succeeded to positions of power share a common interest in wiping the slate clean, refurbishing the claim that the United States meant well because the United States always means well. No doubt mistakes were made.  Yet America's benign intentions expiate sins committed along the way--or allow those in authority to assign responsibility for any sins to soldiers who in doing Washington's bidding became sources of embarrassment.

It's not only expiation we seek.  We deny the costs of our imperial sins.  Guantánamo is a good example. President Obama made a campaign promise to shut down the prison there, a place chock-full of victims of the notion that good intentions trump egregious violations of our Constitution and international human rights law.  Yet he can't.  Americans and their state governments all refuse to have the prisoners resettled on their presumably innocent turf.  Congress has cut off funding for the closure (see story here).  All those Americans who backed the Bush Administration's war and other 'global war on terror' actions now don't want to pay for the consequences of those policies.  I guess that's the privilege of empire.

But it's not like President Obama is innocent of innocence.  As Bacevich suggests, the President's Afganistan-Pakistan gambit is evidence that his administration has learned little from the past, for all his allusions to Lincoln, FDR, and Kennedy.  While the tone and style differ dramatically from those of Bush, Obama shares Bush's fervor, or perhaps fever.  We can do this thing in Afghanistan, as if he's stumbled on to the magic warring-while-nation-building formula that no previous administration has ever been able to produce.  I guess that's another privilege of empire--the ability to say without a qualm that, this time, we'll get it right, we can "destroy a village in order to save it."