A perspective on Professor Gates' arrest

Empowerer

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Thu Jul-23-09 06:30 PM
Original message

A perspective on Professor Gates' arrest

Edited on Thu Jul-23-09 06:30 PM by Empowerer

The events leading up to Professor Gates' arrest, the arrest itself and reaction thereto - from the President and others - cannot be fully understood without considering it within the larger context. Unfortunately, many people not only don't understand that context but refuse to even consider that there is one.

So, I will try my best to explain it because I think that if we try to see a different perspective, we may be able to better understand where Prof. Gates was coming from.

First, let me make one point that some may find difficult and even offensive, but it is true. Stick with me here: I am presenting this from an African-American perspective in hopes that white people who may not fully understand may be able to consider a point of view they had not previously considered. However, I am not going to try to present the white American perspective to help African-Americans understand because, frankly, black Americans already are fully aware of and understand the white American perspective (also known in American culture as "the American perspective"). It's a rarely mentioned but nonetheless unassailable fact that black folks have always intimately known white folks in this country, while the opposite has not always been and may still not be the case. We are fully immersed in and aware of how white people think, what their various experiences, opinions, strengths and weaknesses are. We live it every day, we're exposed to it every day, we're surrounded by it every day, we see it and hear it in the media every day. So we get it.

Now, let's do us.

I don't know what Professor Gates' personal experiences have been. But, based on my own experience and that of my African-American friends and colleagues - especially black men - I have no doubt that he has also experienced specific and glaring instances of discrimination and profiling, experiences that are not commonly encountered by white Americans.

Professor Gates was born in 1950 in West Virginia, below the Mason Dixon line, before Brown, before the Civil Rights Act, before the Voting Rights Act.

He has spent his life living in a country that often treats black men as servants or criminals no matter how distinguished and respectable they may be.

He lives in a country in which my teenaged brothers were regularly stopped and often yanked out of and occasionally thrown spread eagle onto the hood of their car by police officers who didn't believe that car really belonged to their parents, parents who had to constantly remind them not to say or do anything that would cause them to get shot while escaping - something that never happened to our white classmates living in the same affluent community.

He lives in a country in which a top aide to the President of the United States - like my brothers back in the day - was yanked out of HIS car, frisked, harassed and humiliated in front of his wife - also a top aide to the President of the United States.

He lives in a country in which a friend of mine, a young African-American lawyer, Harvard grad practicing with top firm in the city, standing in a courtroom dressed in an Armani suit and carrying an expensive leather briefcase was "mistaken" for one of the hookers being brought in for arraignment - by the assistant prosecutor.

He lives in a country in which my cousin, an African-American who looks like he could be Hispanic, was detained and when he tried to leave, beaten on the sidewalk, by store personnel who assumed he was using a stolen credit card because it bore an "American" name.

He lives in a country in which racial profiling is a real, not an imagined problem. He lives in a country in which blacks are still all-too-often profiled, suspected as criminals, assumed to be intellectually inferior, and treated as something different, slightly exotic and somewhat untrustworthy - and when we suggest that this is the case, we are just big whiners "playing the race card."

He lives in a country in which for years I refused to set foot in Boston because of terrible memories of regularly being called "nigger" whenever I walked around in the city during my college days.

He lives in a country in which my distinguished, accomplished and prominent father is STILL handed claim checks and asked to fetch parked cars and gestured over to tables and asked to refill champagne glasses at formal dinners by white people who have been conditioned all of their lives to assume that an 80-year-old black man dressed in a tuxedo (even when every white man in the vicinity is also dressed in a tuxedo) must be there to serve them.

This was the context against which Professor Gates pushed back. This was the context in which President Obama, a black man who - whether he talks about it or not - has more likely than not also experienced similar humilitations and who knows that, if he weren't the President of the United States but instead a colleague of Professor Gates who was treated this way in his own house, he, too, would have been hauled off to jail.

I don't know what Professor Gates' experiences have been, but I know the experiences that my friends, family and I have endured. And against that backdrop, Professor Gates' reaction to the police behavior is perfectly understandable. Different people react differently to such treatment. Some people try to ignore it. My father tends to just shake his head and feel sorry for the perpetrator - especially when he knows he ruined their whole day by telling them who he is and watching them slink away, mortified. And some people, like Professor Gates, get mad.

One need not have endured these experiences to at least appreciate and respect the fact that most black people have. It only exacerbates the racial divide in this country when people refuse to consider this larger context but instead dismiss Professor Gates and the countless blacks who have stepped forward in recent days to say, "Yes, I understand. The same thing happened to me . . ."

There's much you can learn from our voices and stories and histories.

We're telling you something.

Please listen.

Please learn.