That is the question I ask myself, and perhaps you may ask yourself, as you first read Bob Herbert's column this morning. in Anger Has Its Place, he begins by telling us that between when the Cambridge police were notified of a possible break-in and the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in the home he owned was six minutes, between 12:45 and 12:51, and he puts it simply thus:
The charge: angry while black.
He notes that Obama has written that this should be a teachable moment, but argues the wrong lessons are being drawn:
The message that has gone out to the public is that powerful African-American leaders like Mr. Gates and President Obama will be very publicly slapped down for speaking up and speaking out about police misbehavior, and that the proper response if you think you are being unfairly targeted by the police because of your race is to chill.
I have nothing but contempt for that message.
Herbert acknowledge his friendship with Gates, that he has was selected toreceive an award from an institute run by his friend, but informs us he has not consulted with Gates while writing this column.
And whether or not Sgt. Crowley liked being yelled at, with Gates demanding to know if he was being treated the way he is because he is black, should not, according to Herbert, matter:
You can yell at a cop in America. This is not Iran. And if some people don’t like what you’re saying, too bad. You can even be wrong in what you are saying. There is no law against that. It is not an offense for which you are supposed to be arrested.
That’s a lesson that should have emerged clearly from this contretemps.
Let me pause for a moment. Whether one is Black, White, or Pink, are we going to have a standard that yelling at a policeman is grounds for arrest? Are those we entrusted with the power of taking us into custody so thin-skinned that someone raising a voice to them is considered automatically a breach of the peace? Are policemen now automatically immune from criticism? If merely raising one's voice or questioning a policeman's action or intentions is an arrestable offense, then perhaps Gates was wrong to argue that he was been treated differently because of race. But then we have a far more serious issue to confront - that rather than being instruments of assuring our safety police are free to impose their will upon any one who disagrees with them. That could include not only raising our voices, but wearing statements of our political beliefs with which they disagree.
Oh wait, perhaps we have forgotten. That already happens, as we might remember at the last two Republican national conventions in New York and in St. Paul. Many of those here expressed visceral anger at the inappropriate application of police power to suppress political dissent.
And I remember what some of my students told me on both occasions - perhaps some of those demonstrators now had a hint of what it means to be black in America.
Herbert provides some statistics that should bring us pause. For example,
New York City cops make upwards of a half-million stops of private citizens each year, questioning and frequently frisking these men, women and children. The overwhelming majority of those stopped are black or Latino, and the overwhelming majority are innocent of any wrongdoing. A true "teachable moment" would focus a spotlight on such outrages and the urgent need to stop them.
Herbert reminds us of a group of young people of color arrested while walking peacefully down a Brooklyn street who had to hire lawyers and fight for two years to get their arrests dropped and to be obtain a financial settlement. He wrote several columns about that, and I diaried about one of those columns.
Thinking back to that, I remember my students telling me of the occasions they felt they were treated disparately. More than a few had experienced "Driving while Black" - being pulled over, their license and registration checked, sometimes given a ticket for a minor offense, while their white classmates driving similar cars in similar fashions were not stopped, or if they were got off with a warning.
The point my students made, however, was broader - that the police action towards them was symptomatic of a broader societal attitude. They would point at the times when they went into a store, perhaps a convenience store or even a clothing store, and they were followed around, while their white classmates were not. If they dressed in baggy trousers people assumed they were gangster wannabes while the white males who emulated the same clothing style might be looked at askance, yet suffered no disparate treatment. And if a group of loud teenaged boys was walking down the sidewalk, people might cross to the other side of the street if the group were exclusively black, yet not do so if exclusively white.
Even in our school, students pointed out, a white student well dressed caught out in the hall without a pass was far more likely to be told simply to get to class than a black with sagging trousers, who might be immediately disciplined.
Let me offer two more paragraphs Herbert pens about disparate treatment:
Black people need to roar out their anger at such treatment, lift up their voices and demand change. Anyone counseling a less militant approach is counseling self-defeat. As of mid-2008, there were 4,777 black men imprisoned in America for every 100,000 black men in the population. By comparison, there were only 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white men.
While whites use illegal drugs at substantially higher percentages than blacks, black men are sent to prison on drug charges at 13 times the rate of white men.
We know about the different penalties for powdered versus crack cocaine, and the disparate impact by race that has. But look at the paragraph immediately above this. And remember the impact this has. If you are a black male between the ages of 18 and 35, the chances of being involved in the criminal justice system in some fashion is about one in 3. And given the nature of our electoral laws, particularly in some parts of the South, that had lead to a disenfranchisement of a substantial portion of African-American males, and an increasing portion of Hispanic males.
Herbert concludes by noting that most whites do not want to talk about race. We can see this in recent actions by the Supreme Court that want to move past issues of affirmative action. We note those who will point out that the issue should be one of economic class perhaps needing a boost up, rather than merely because of a darker color of skin. We hear - and ourselves sometimes use - examples of the children of Michael Jordan and the Obamas not needing a leg up. And certainly one can look at the mass of people in desperate need of medical and dental attention that I encountered a week ago in Wise, VA, and see that there are large numbers of whites who are in need - we saw very few Blacks and Hispanics, but then the population in that area is far more white than is Arlington County where I live, or Prince George's - majority Black - where I teach.
And yet - we can hear of a National Security Advisor being challenged because he was black, as Colin Powell reminded us this week. We still have a society in which attempting to get a taxi cab as a black man is difficult, in which people of color experience the every day indignities of some of my students.
Can I understand the anger? Perhaps somewhat, because I try to understand and know my students. I remember a student from middle school, whose mother questioned an action by local police, found herself slammed against the wall for being "uppity," who then himself, at age 13, tried to come to his mother's aid, and was himself slammed to to the ground, handcuffed, and arrested. Four policemen, all white, one black woman and one at the time slight teenager, both physically slammed - because the police could? The arrests were eventually dropped on the condition that the family not sue, with a nominal settlement being offered to cover medical and legal expenses. Too often, instead, additional charges are piled on - with at best an agreement to drop charges in return for not suing, with no discipline of people acting inappropriately under the color of authority, who are - it seems to me - clearly abusing the power of their badges and uniforms.
Obama has sought not to focus on issues of race, although he knows he has to address it, as he did in his speech in Philadelphia. He offered criticism of the Cambridge police - that they acted 'stupidly" - and as a result was forced to take further action. Was not he being held to a different standard because he is Black? Perhaps we forget that all presidents have occasional foot in mouth, and yet I cannot think of a parallel action to "heal" - to walk back the situation, from possibly inflammatory statements by Nixon, Reagan, Carter, Bush 41, Clinton or Bush 43. I will not list all of the examples that I can recall, but I can with little trouble find at least one parallel situation in each of those presidencies, and for the most recent president far too many - but he was treated differently, perhaps because our expectations were so low, or perhaps because the media had decided that he - like Reagan - was a nice guy so that they did not want to beat up on him.
Bob Herbert is not about to back off on this. His final sentences are a challenge:
We’re never going to have a serious national conversation about race. So that leaves it up to ordinary black Americans to rant and to rave, to demonstrate and to lobby, to march and confront and to sue and generally do whatever is necessary to stop a continuing and deeply racist criminal justice outrage.
If I imagine myself as a black, and remember all I have seen over my 6+ decades, I think I too would be angry. I might hear people describing how their parents told them never to 'backtalk' a person with a badge or a gun. Were I to compare that to my white middle class upbringing with a mother who served as an Assistant Attorney General in New York, I was trained to get the badge number of any policeman I encountered - having a good memory, that was not too difficult even in the few encounters I did have, which were so infrequent as to be memorable in a far different way that what my black contemporaries experienced.
If we have any doubt that race is still a major issue, yesterday's poll about Obama's birth nationality should put it to rest. There are still parts of our society deeply riven by race. And if we do not seriously address it, there will be continued outrages. Outrages warrant a response, and that response will at times be angry.
Bob Herbert is angry. I think I understand, but I cannot fully. I believe that were I black, I might respond as does he, as did Gates. Whether or not Gates was arrogant in his response to Sgt. Crowley should be irrelevant, because were arrogance a crime most of the elected in Congress should be in handcuffs.
Perhaps I cannot fully understand the anger. What I cannot do is dismiss it. We need to be challenged. It is still an unfortunate aspect of our society.
That's my response. What's yours?
Peace.