Poor Henry Gates. From what I’ve read, his reaction to having a police officer on his front porch who refused to identify himself was mild compared to what mine would have been. I’d be screaming for the little bastard’s job. But I’m a privileged white guy who is used to having people do what I want them to do, and getting away with yelling at them when they don’t, a bad habit I learned from my father, who builds houses in central Oklahoma and has to persuade/order some pretty slow, sometimes recalcitrant people to do his bidding.
But I’m an over-privileged white guy who grew up seeing police officers as public servants, emphasis on the servant part, and my experiences with the police growing up were mostly positive. When I got arrested for possession of marijuana, I was actually in possession of marijuana at the time. Every time I have been stopped for speeding, I was actually speeding.
This stands me in sharp contrast to most African American men, who report frequently suffering just the sort of police harassment that Professor Gates suffered, but with little attention for their plight because it’s just routine for this nation.
In his second round of comments on the incident, President Obama said that it involved "two good people." I’m willing to believe that, at some level, this cop is a good person who just found himself in what he allowed to become an intractable problem. This is the difficulty that race poses every day in the United States: otherwise good people get cross-ways with each other and become unable to communicate because of race. The situation only gets worse when one of the parties is a police officer, with all of the necessarily somewhat arbitrary authority that status conveys.
When I think about the possibility of practicing law in Atlanta, I fantasize about filing whole lots of law suits against the police and the city on behalf of any black man who wants to file over having been stopped for driving while black. I think that’s the only way to stop situations like this from happening – make it cost the bastards, in settlements, and in litigation costs. I’d go around to every black church in town and sign up every plaintiff with anything resembling a viable claim, and go file them wholesale in federal court. Eat up every moment of the city attorney’s office’s time. Make it cost ‘em. That’ll make it stop.
In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, Frank Rich asserts, I think correctly, that we don’t know that the cop is a racist. I’m willing to say in public that he’s not. That’s the problem – the deep-seated racism of our culture does the racist work even when no one involved is a racist. Even if that particular cop is not consciously racist, he still lives in a culture where white cops don’t take lightly to having black men challenge their authority, which, at base, was Gates’ only "crime." Except that, in the United States, it can never be a crime to challenge government authority -- it’s what this nation was founded on.