Posted on 07/27/2009 6:10:59 AM PDT by Tolik
From time to time, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Clarence Thomas have naturally talked about growing up African-American under far less tolerant conditions than those we take for granted today. Yet their biggest contributions to American race relations have been their admirable abilities to transcend such racial intolerance to make being black incidental, not essential, at least in public, to their sterling characters and impressive achievements.Obama has unwittingly made his real beliefs clear.
http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/lose-lose-when-you-talk-about-race/
Why the Gates Affair Bored Us
President Obama and the subject of race remind me of the proverbial camels back and straws: the American people shrugged off typical white person, then forgave the clingers speech. They bristled a bit about No more disown Rev. Wright than and started to become concerned about downright mean country and Michelles never before being proud of the good old U.S. Sotomayors wise Latina and self-referencing as a Latina ad nauseam did not help. Nor did Attorney General Holders slur that we were cowards. And now the Gates affair. Minor of course. But it is the proverbial straw that finally seems on this issue to really be breaking the back of the American people, who are not only tired of racial evocation, but tired of Barack Obama and those elites around him using race for self-serving sermonizingespecially given their former confidence in Obama to lead us to racial transcendence. So read on
Psychodramas
African-American professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested in his own home by a white policeman for disorderly conduct (I think mostly for insulting a cop) and then subsequently released. Such misunderstandings happen all the time. Many in the Civil Rights community, however, were outraged at the arrest. And they cited Gates treatment as proof that racism was still very much alive in the age of President Barack Obama.
America Snoozes
But as details emerged about the incident, the outrage of the African-American self-appointed leadership oddly failed to ignite even liberal America. And why it did not tells us much about a changing United States. So let us list the ways in which we did not much care whether or not Professor Gates had to go down to the station for screaming epithets at an investigating police officer.
Race is Not So Simple
1) America is no longer a white/black country. Due to liberal policies, tens of millions of Asians and Hispanics have recently immigrated to the United States. And far from seeing themselves, along with blacks, as a unified people of color, they split along various class and racial lines on almost every issue.
Intermarriage has created millions of Americans who dont consider themselves part of any race. Gates maybe a professor of white/black racial bias, but millions of nonwhite Americans have evolved beyond his easy dichotomies. Tens of thousands of Koreans, Filipinos, Mexicans, Hondurans, and Punjabis living in America are no doubt mystified by Gates furor. Most in their own lives perhaps instantly profile those on the streets of their neighborhoods not by race, but in rough accordance with their perceptions of prevailing crime statistics. From my travels in Hispanic, Arab, Asian, and European countries, I would speculate that those of African ancestry are treated most equitably (by far) in the United States.
No More Monolithic Poor
2) There is now not only a black middle class, but an elite one as well. Professor Gates is one of the highest paid professors in the United States. As soon as he was arrested, the African-American mayor of Cambridge, the African-American governor of Massachusetts, and the African-American president of the United States all weighed in on his behalf.
When he sneered at the arresting officer You dont know whom you are messing with, Gates was quite rightand so was released almost immediately once the calls came pouring in. In contemporary America, the wealthy and influential Gates, and his close political friends, are part of the establishmentand Sgt. Crowley who arrested him a member of hoi polloi without capital or chums in high places.
America shrugs that when an elite like Gates, a zillionaire like white-faced Michael Jackson, or an Bruno-Magli shoed O.J., gets caught in their own self-induced legal jams, they will too often immediately revert to racial victimization and try to convince America that they are living in Mississippi circa 1930. Good luck with that in the multiracial 21st century.
Living is Stereotyping of some sort
3) Gates accusations of stereotyped racism, the Presidents assertion that blacks are unfairly profiled by police, and Governor Patricks claim that the arrest was the nightmare of every black manall failed to register with the American people.
Why? Because such allegations, even if they were true and some may well be, are only part of the complex 21-century story of race and the police. Attorney General Holder may call the American people cowards for not engaging in a national conversation on race. But the Gates incident, and the reaction of the Massachusetts governor and the president of the United States, reminded them why they dont welcome these melodramatic conversations. Such therapy sessions never involve questions of personal responsibilityspecifically why African-American males commit crimes at rates both higher than the general populations, and at levels higher than other minority groups that likewise struggle with poverty and unfairness.
I know a number of Punjabis in rural California. Most are much darker than Henry Louis Gates. They lack his money, influence, and contacts. English is not their first language. Their turbans and clothes set them apart from the Mexican-American majority establishmentand they are the objects of jokes and worse. But so far I have not heard a single one complain that as persons of color they either cannot make it in a racist America or they need affirmative action as remedy for our collective sins.
Do As I Say, Not As I
4) There is an official truth that our elites mouth, and a private one that 300 million live by. If Americans regret that a young African-American male might be unduly pulled over while innocently cruising Beverly Hills (and they bristle at such unfairness), they also regret that a white person who took a wrong turn and began biking or driving into Watts or South Central might well be assaultedor worse. So profiling means different things to different people.
Yet these are private angsts that are never voiced. A John Edwards, Robert Kennedy, Jr. , Barrack Obama, or Al Gore may lecture us on our assorted racial, class and environmental sins, but we suspect that in the past they have chosen to live in rather aristocratic fashion, well away from the failing and often dangerous schools and neighborhoods that the objects of their disdain often struggle within. If Al Gore jets back and forth from his mansion to cash in on global warming, Rev. Wright leaves his white enclave and three-story new mansion to rail about white privilege. No wonder most Americans snored about Gates-gate as a tiny flare-up involving more class than race.
Crying Wolf
5). Most Americans simply do not believe Gates or a Governor Patrick or a President Obama that they experience much racial discrimination in their lives. They may, but again most tend to think their class mitigates it. To the extent race is raised by the well-heeled, it is more likely by such African-American elites themselves, and proves to be of career advantage (as I can attest after serving on nearly a dozen hiring committees in the California State University system. One Dean once brazenly called to demand, Just dont dare send me up a white guy, period!).
Most elite African-Americans I know are not worried so much that the police will profile their children (although many will publicly attest that), but privately are far more worried that their sons upper-middle class tastes, accents, and acting white assimilation will incur fury from the black underclassand with such disdain real physical danger as well. That is a tragedy that remains unmentioned.
Postscript.
I talked to a number of people about the Gates mess. None were really sympathetic to his writ. And I noticed two other general reactions among friends. One, almost everyone had stories of being pulled over or visited by police in which a wrong word might well have earned them a trip to the pokey. (My own is being pulled over a few years ago by a young hot-shot highway patrolman on a motorcycle (flattop hair, bulging biceps, tough-guy persona) for going 65 in a 55 mile per hour zone. When I pointed out that the car ahead was going 80 mph, he said So what if he was? (good point). And when he snarled that I had presented him the insurance form rather than the registration (I had not), I suggested that he read it more closely before speaking. The result was that I waited 20 minutes in the sun while he sat smiling behind my car, oh-so-slowly writing out a ticket. Moral: you just smile and do what the cop says).
Two: almost everyone (minorities included) I talked with could recall one or two personal incidents of some criminal action committed by a minority male against their person or property. Call that profiling or stereotyping. I could attest at least four (other than the near yearly crash into my vineyard and fleeing driver and abandoned vehicle): 1976, walking to the 7/11 in East Palo Alto and being attacked by an African-American male; 1978 riding down university avenue in Palo Alto near 101, and having two black males ride by in a truck, get out and try to steal my bike with me on it; 1990 having three Mexican nationals burst into our home intent on robbery; 1998 having three police cars rush into my driveway in pursuit of fleeing Mexican national local drug lords, 2006 having an African-American burglar break into my house, waking my daughter as he ran out with her purse. And so onall incidents of no statistical import, but the sort of anecdotal remembrance that millions share and which unfairly or not make them at least understandable of why individuals make choices in where they drive, live, and work.
Is such recitation racism? Were not, after all, those who depleted my AIG 401(k) account probably wealthy whites on Wall Street? Was not the broker who took my fruit and shorted me $1000 most likely a white professional? Perhaps.
But my point is only the publics perception (born out by crime statistics) is that while financial and business elites may rob more from one, minority males in urban contexts engage in violent crime at higher than national averages and are more likely to use violence against one than the suspicious fruit trader or stock broker. That is an empirical fact, not a racist slur. Again, like it or not, crime soared in the 1970s-1990s and millions of Americans were the victims of robberies, break-ins, and assaults, and they have made the necessary adjustments in the way they shop, walk, visit, and driveoften all concealed beneath a veneer of denial.
And that unspoken fact too was in the background, when the President lectured us on the injustice of police supposedly profiling by race. (I think the President took one look at the Washington DC public school system, and made the necessary profiling and generalizations to put his kids in the exclusive Sidwell-Friends prep school, as do many of the DC liberal elites.) All in all, a sensitive issue, made worse by the sort of uninformed presidential grandstanding that we have witnessed all too much in these last six months. (Since assuming office, the president has managed to slur in generic fashion those in the Special Olympics, surgeons, the elderly, vacationeers to Las Vegas, and the police (more no doubt as well), building on his campaign stereotyping of typical white people and the middling classes of Pennsylvaniais there not a sensitivity trainer somewhere?)
Next postings will be more observations on Europe and the past, as I leave today overseas to give some lectures on Mediterranean history.
Just a partial list. Much more at the link: http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/victordavishanson/index
A lose, lose for Obama is a win, win for America.
Let me know if you want in or out.
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Vote for me and I will offer you instant exemption from all prior racial guilt and yet allow you to live your rather secluded lives as usual.
This says it all. Great article....
And likely a descendent of slave traders.
OUTSTANDING article by VDH highlighting some of the telltale signs of half-frikken American Barry Barack. One half militant one half marxist combines to make something more of a monster than a man.
Polarizing and racial identity politics are bad for America.
In this case it’s bad for Obama - when more and more people will see that the Emperor has no clothes, but it’s also bad for America - when racial relationships get worse.
I’m glad more people are talking honestly about Obama’s background, which is NOT “African American.” I hope this registers on blacks in some way, but I doubt that it will.
In Dinesh D’Souza’s book, “What’s so Great about America”, there is an incident that I can’t forget. Mohammed Ali went to Africa to fight George Foreman. It was called the Rumble in the Jungle.
Upon returning to the United States, Ali was asked by a reporter “Champ, what did you think of Africa?”
Ali replied, “Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat”.
The problem with talking about race is that both sides want to monopolize the conversation.
What you said has nothing to do with known facts and cheapens the argument brought by our side. Sorry, I am saying like I see it. We have more than enough ammunition without bringing in something that can be easily ridiculed as lunacy (and properly so).
4) There is an official truth that our elites mouth, and a private one that 300 million live by. If Americans regret that a young African-American male might be unduly pulled over while innocently cruising Beverly Hills (and they bristle at such unfairness), they also regret that a white person who took a wrong turn and began biking or driving into Watts or South Central might well be assaultedor worse. So profiling means different things to different people.
Exactly what happened in New Bunswick, New Jersey a few years ago. A young man made a wrong turn and ended up dead. It got damned little coverage, and nary a mention of "hate" crime!
The flap over the arrest of the Harvard professor in Cambridge reveals that the country is beginning to clear its head from the Obama Pathology. The reaction of the people to this really insignificant incident should warn Obama that he is breaking the deal which put him in the White House and might strip him of his moral stature. Here is the post:
Yes Obama is an empty suit but he is actually more than that, he is a candidate who is African American and this racial reality entirely disguises the fact that the suit is empty. In fact, it was always better for Obama's campaign for the suit to be empty.
The American left, indeed the international left, is a hodgepodge of mutually inconsistent plans and programs which history has demonstrated cannot work. Leftists persist in their leftism because they believe that they are smarter than everybody else. Which really means," I am smarter than all the leftists who've come before and failed with this idea." The glue which holds leftism together when it should splinter apart because of its mutually inconsistent precepts, because it has shopped the entire country to ravening special-interest groups, is their meme that Republicans/conservatives are racists and they are not.
As long as we are racists and they are not, the left need not face up to its own looniness. This is why the left reacts so vehemently to politically incorrect racist remarks.... The coin of this political race card is white guilt.
Now comes Obama. As one black writer has pointed out, he has made a tacit deal with white liberal America: you support me blindly and I will in turn refrain from rubbing America's nose in its history of slavery and segregation. You can expiate your white guilt by voting for me. But Obama has to hold up his end of the deal, he must not rub our noses in our sins like Jesse Jackson or Reverend Al. As long as he was seen to be an empty suit-offering no reproach to America-we were comfortable with him.
Now comes The Right Reverend Wright. He has broken the deal. This is why Obama had to disown him. Wright rubs our noses in racism. To a conservative his crazy allegations are so bizarre that it makes not much sense and doesn't change the equation. We don't buy into this AIDS in Africa business, for example. But for a liberal, Reverend Wright's allegations are not bizarre but actually within the realm of intellectual respectability. We can dismiss them, but the left cannot because much of it comes right out of their own catechism.
What about the great mass in the middle? The moderates, the undecideds, the people who don't follow politics until after Labor Day, the folks who permit the likes of Barbara Walters or Oprah Winfrey to persuade them, what about them, the people who actually decide our elections? These decent folks don't want to be racists. They are always looking for a savior because they will tell you, "I always vote for the man." They shrink from the very idea of voting based on ideology. So an empty suit is no problem for them as long as he is also a savior. Obama was a savior. More, he was an empty vessel into which we could pour all of our yearnings and our simplistic hopes about the political process.
Now this illusion has been shattered by the right Reverend Wright and it remains to be seen whether the mainstream media can put Humpty Dumpty's pieces back together again.
Bump for later
Great article!
It’s most unfortunate that the POTUS uses race as a tool. It’s most unfortunate that he hates America, the country that gave him an opportunity to strive; instead he is chose to destroy; not for one American; but all.
This points up, I think, the weakness of the current African-American grievance. It's an entirely theoretical construct based on looking into the rear-view mirror of American History. It simply is not applicable to the real world. In order to stay relevant they must do ridiculous things like adopting Bill Clinton as "The First Black President."
This is why the Gates-Crowley affair will move to hearings in the House of Representatives. This is where you can treat the facts of the case lightly while feeding the predjudices of the Left. It'll be a dorm room Bull-Session writ large and the Media will roll in it like little pigs.
*VDH Bump*
If VDH is going to bring up Holder and race issues, he needs to mention Holder’s dismissal of the Black Panther voter intimitation case dismissal.
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