 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
||
 |
 |
|
||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
More Gates, and Obama and Crowley TooJuly 25, 2009 Dear Mr. President: I am really, really glad that you followed up on this. I'm glad you spoke to Sergeant Crowley, and I'm glad that you qualified your earlier public remarks about the incident. It's a relief to have a president who doesn't perform like a marionette, and it's also a relief to have a president who's willing to re-examine his public remarks and find them, in some respects, wanting. We really don't know everything that happened at Professor Gates's house last week. Even so, I'm about 95 percent sure that race was involved, from the moment the neighbor called to report a possible break-in. Things would have played out differently if the neighborhood had been mostly black, or if the men on the porch had been white, or if Prof. Gates had been white and/or Sgt. Crowley black. (For that matter, they would have played out differently had one or both of them been female.) We can't know how they would have played out in these different configurations, but I think it's a safe bet that the sequence of events, and quite possibly the outcome, would have been different. Prof. Gates and everyone else is right: we have plenty to learn from what happened, and what is still happening -- not least that a president of the U.S. gains stature by acknowledging an overreaction. Another thing is that because people of color have suffered plenty at the hands of law-enforcement officials, not to mention the judicial system, every dubious arrest of a black person by a white police officer may look like the same old same-old -- there may be more to it than that, and it's best not to let the ugly general history take the place of particular here-and-now facts. Of course there's a connection, but the fact of the connection doesn't tell us what actually happened. The problem is serious, and improvement is imperative. But change is hard to effect when people are screaming at each other, their voices amplified by the media -- which regularly turn up the amplification according to the sensationalism of the incident or the celebrity of the individuals involved. As Prof. Gates and Sgt. Crowley both know, people are not at their best when they're screaming at each other. Same goes for those who've been discussing the incident online and elsewhere. In many quarters, the word "racist" (like "sexist" and comparable words) is pretty much heard as synonymous with "rotten hateful person with no redeeming characteristics." At high decibels it's often said that way. I understand the word differently, as suggesting that if you're white in a society that accords privilege to people on the basis of color -- the lighter the color, the greater the privilege -- there's no way that you can not be affected by color when you assess a situation. Maybe that's a place to start, and a place where your leadership could make a difference: get the idea across that in a color-conscious society, we're all affected by color. We white people are wasting our breath claiming that we aren't racist -- no, it's worse than that: we're giving many people of color the impression that we're either simple or incorrigible. If we're going to judge ourselves, let's do it according to what we're doing about racism: identifying our own assumptions, catching ourselves when we start to act on them, countering racist statements when others make them, and especially countering racism when it manifests in public life. If we all, or most of us, understood the same thing by "racism," it might help. Sincerely yours . . .
|
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
Home - Writing - Editing - About Susanna - Bloggery - Articles - Poems - Contact Copyright ©
Susanna J. Sturgis. All rights reserved. |
||||