Eugene Robinson: What if the Big Cheese Had Been White? [View All]

[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.

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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?