Beginning To Unpack Race, Class, and Privilege in the Case of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

I’ve been mulling over the incident regarding Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. over the last few days and I fell like there is a lot to unpack regarding the intersections of race, class, and privilege here. If you aren’t familiar with the incident, Dr. Gates was arrested last week after someone called and reported an attempted robbery into his home. It turned out that Dr. Gate’s himself was trying to get his own door open, but after an altercation with the cops, Gates found himself arrested. There are, as usually is the case with incidents where the police are accused of wrongdoing, two quite different versions of events.

Now, I’m pondering questions of Class and Privilege in this incident at the risk of seeming to minimizing the very real disproportionate abuse and harassment of people of color in the hands of police officers. I want to make it clear that under no circumstances can I condone Professor Gate’s arrest. That said, I found myself alarmed at what I perceived (rightly or wrongly?) as the notion that what outrages is not so much that a black man was arrested for trying to get into his own home, but that a prestigious Harvard Professor, who also happens to be black was arrested for trying to get into his own home. There are more than enough examples of police abusing people of color just over the past six months. Why did this incident gain so much currency amongst the blogs, the media, the Twitterers? Why is President Obama being asked to weigh in on this incident and not, say, the Oscar Grant murder?

I suspect that it all boils down to class and status privilege with who is often deemed worthy of our outrage.

The police report alleges that Professor Gates said something along the lines of “you don’t know who you’re messing with.” The claim is questionable only because it’s a “he said/he said” situation, and it wouldn’t be the first time a cop has lied on a police report to cover ass. Is it really that unthinkable that Gates would say this, though? I have a hard time believing that Gates was not fully aware that he was going to come out of all this relatively unscathed. Professor Gates surely knows who that cop “was messing with.” He had to know that he could count on the best legal representation you can get; he had to know that he would have an outpouring of support based on his reputation as a distinguished scholar. In other words, he had to know that he wasn’t going to find himself face down on the ground with a cop’s knee in his back; he had to know that he wasn’t going to be tasered for tumultuous behavior; or worse, find himself dead. The point being: while I feel that Gates was done wrong, I have a hard time seeing him as the poster child for police abuse of black people. There most certainly were racial overtones to his treatment, but ultimately the affront upon Professor Gates was one of class and status. He’s not one of those working-class or poor people that probably “brought it upon themselves.” He’s distinguished, damnit! And so we must be outraged!

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I also need to say a few things to ward off the inevitable:

Do not take this post as some sort of affirmation of a post-racial United States. This is where class and race intersect, and it is much more complicated than that half-assed, simple-minded notion. Don’t go there.

I still feel that Professor Gates was done wrong. This isn’t an “hate on Gates” post. This is me trying to scratch the surface of what is going on. I write this because I don’t want to see anyone, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation have to put up with stuff like this. I write this because a lot of us would never get off as easily as Professor Gates did.

This is one of those posts that I’m putting out there for serious discussion. I’m not saying that I have it all figured out. Let’s talk. I won’t, however, put up with the usual drive-by comments from people that want to display their bigotry under the guise of free speech. This post, and all others following will be heavily moderated. Don’t come with the bullshit and I won’t delete you.

U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Voting Rights Act

Bloomberg:

June 23 (Bloomberg) — Consensus is back at the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts — at least for a day.

Issuing perhaps the most highly anticipated ruling of its nine-month term yesterday, the justices voted 8-1 to avoid ruling on whether a central provision of the Voting Rights Act is constitutional. Roberts’s opinion for the court circumvented that issue by instead making it easier for some jurisdictions to change election procedures and district lines.

The compromise ruling comes from a court that has divided along ideological lines in the past two years on race, terrorism, campaign finance, abortion and the death penalty. The decision recalled Roberts’s first term in 2005-06, when the court ruled unanimously in an abortion case and Roberts spoke publicly about his desire for consensus.

I could go on at length about that one dissenting vote, however, a picture really is worth a thousand words.

LGBT Groups Speak Out Against DOJ Defense of DOMA

What they said, yes.

From the ACLU

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org

We are very surprised and deeply disappointed in the manner in which the Obama administration has defended the so-called Defense of Marriage Act in a brief filed today in Smelt v. United States, a lawsuit brought in federal court in California by a married same-sex couple asking the federal government to treat them equally with respect to federal protections and benefits. The administration is using many of the same flawed legal arguments that the Bush administration used. These arguments rightly have been rejected by several state supreme courts as legally unsound and discriminatory.

We disagree with many of the administration’s arguments, for example, that DOMA is a valid exercise of Congress’s power, is consistent with Equal Protection or Due Process principles, and does not impinge upon rights that are recognized as fundamental.

We are also extremely disturbed by a new and nonsensical argument the administration has advanced suggesting that the federal government needs to be “neutral” with regard to its treatment of married same-sex couples in order to ensure that federal tax money collected from across the country not be used to assist same-sex couples duly married by their home states. There is nothing “neutral” about the federal government’s discriminatory denial of fair treatment to married same-sex couples: DOMA wrongly bars the federal government from providing any of the over one thousand federal protections to the many thousands of couples who marry in six states. This notion of “neutrality” ignores the fact that while married same-sex couples pay their full share of income and social security taxes, they are prevented by DOMA from receiving the corresponding same benefits that married heterosexual taxpayers receive. It is the married same-sex couples, not heterosexuals in other parts of the country, who are financially and personally damaged in significant ways by DOMA. For the Obama administration to suggest otherwise simply departs from both mathematical and legal reality.

When President Obama was courting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender voters, he said that he believed that DOMA should be repealed. We ask him to live up to his emphatic campaign promises, to stop making false and damaging legal arguments, and immediately to introduce a bill to repeal DOMA and ensure that every married couple in America has the same access to federal protections.

More later. I have some thoughts on this nation of laws argument that seems to be popping up all over the place. (*cough cough* I smell bullshit.)

Quotation of The Day

The Weekly Standard:

…but perhaps what’s most striking is that on the issue of diversity, Obama seems to have the views of a 21-year-old Hispanic girl — that is, only by having a black president, an Hispanic justice, a female secretary of State, and Bozo the Clown as vice president will the United States become a true “vanguard of societal ideas and changes.”

Wow, dude. I didn’t think it was possible to get so much wrong into one sentence. I’d give you an award, but I think you’re an asshole.

If You Thought People Liked Obama, Don’t Worry; It’s 0nly Black People.

One of my non-blogging buddies (one of the coolest mofos on the planet, actually) tipped me to this nice little article, by Byron York, entitled The black-white divide in Obama’s popularity. Imagine the look on my face when I read this, the very first paragraph (actually, don’t imagine that look; it’s not pretty):

On his 100th day in office, Barack Obama enjoys high job approval ratings, no matter what poll you consult. But if a new survey by the New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are significantly less popular with white Americans than with black Americans, and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.

Um, yeah…WTF?

This dude actually wrote this. Here, let me translate this for you:

Black people don’t count (or if they do count, they sure as hell don’t count for more than 3/5’s of a white person) so, even if President Obama has a high approval rating, it’s not accurate (or actual) because black folks are all up in the mix. We all know that only white people’s opinions matter, right?

The entire article says nothing other than black people like Obama, and so he’s not really as popular as you think he is. It doesn’t matter that we happen to be members of the population and so our opinions count too. It doesn’t matter that black folks also overwhelmingly liked Bill Clinton. No one challenged Bill Clinton’s popularity because black folks loved him (ok, now that I think on this some more, I bet a good handful of folks did, but still). But when a lot of black folks happen to like another black dude, well then obviously something is amiss.

Post-Racial United States. Gotta love it.

And You’re Just Now Figuring This Out?

Pat Buchanan says the GOP is “heavily white” and that could be a problem.

The GOP, as it stands, won’t listen to him, though. Why do so when it’s so much easier to just blame the Negro.

Stoopid Quotation of the Day

“What better way to sneak a virus into this country than to give it to Mexicans?”

–Neal Boortz, suggesting that terrorists are giving Mexicans Swine Flu as an act of bio-terrorism against the United States.

Wow. The logic fail here is amazing, but the racist, knee-jerk, let’s cynically blame it all on the brown folks and whip up even more anti-immigrant sentiment and terrorist paranoia is, sadly, par for the course for these cretins.

Sorry dude, but you are not “thinking loudly.” You’re not thinking at all.

See also: Virus Brings Swine-Hearted Lobby into Foreground