September 2009
Monarchists, including the great 19th-century English constitutionalist Walter Bagehot, have always understood the importance of spectacle to monarchical systems of government. Modern democrats prefer a form of national drama adapted from the countercultural street theater of the 1960s and 70s, adapted to the needs of middle-class audiences and the networks of mass communication. The latest example of this phenomenon was the recently enacted drama involving Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. of Harvard and the Cambridge, Massachusetts Police Department, a major media non-event that dominated the national news for the second half of July until it was superseded at last by the uproarious debate on a national health care plan.
Street theater by its nature is didactic, and this aspect of the Gates drama was pressed to the hilt by politicians and the media. President Obama declared the confrontation between the black historian and the white police officer who arrested him last July 16 for disorderly conduct on the steps of his own house “a teaching moment,” from which the American public could learn a valuable lesson concerning racial bigotry and stereotyping. Yet Obama’s first instinct on learning of the arrest was that of racial solidarity, not pedagogy. Before he had all the facts of the case, the President publicly accused the officer of having “acted stupidly” by arresting Gates, following a phone tip by a passing white woman who had just observed two black males in what she thought might be a break-in attempt at a Cambridge house. In fact, the two men were Gates, home from a trip to China, and his cab driver seeking to unstick a stuck door. The tipster made no mention of race in her call, and the officer (who had taught a course in racial profiling at Lowell Police Academy) seems to have arrived at the house with no previous conception of the suspects’ racial identity. One month later as I write, it seems generally agreed that, as between the professor and Sergeant James Crowley, it was Gates who lost his self-control and berated the officer, attributing the request for identification to the fact of of his being “a black man in America.” The charge was taken up and boomed by black politicians, including Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, and racial mountebanks and demogogues like the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, all of whom presented the incident in Cambridge as proof that the supposed post-racial America ushered in by the election of the first black American president exists in supposition only.
While they are wrong on the immediate issue, these gentlemen happen to be right on the wider one. Post-racial America in indeed a myth, as the behavior of Professor Gates and the President of the United States attests.
What both men, who are social friends, have in common besides their pigmented skin is a shared obsession with race and enduring racial resentment, despite their being, to a greater or lesser degree, beneficiaries of affirmative action. Both are authors. Obama’s two books are Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, whose subjects are himself and his fear, as a mulatto, that he might not be “black enough” to represent the concerns of black people in America. The title of the second volume is borrowed directly from a sermon by his former pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, the Reverend Dr. Jeremiah Wright—an unabashed and unrepentent racist. Gates, who teaches courses in black studies at Harvard, is the author of a number of books, including Lincoln on Race and Slavery; Finding Oprah’s Roots: Finding Your Own; Colored People: A Memoir; The Future of the Race; Black Literature and Literary Theory; The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism; and a book of essays advocating multiculturalism in the academy at the expense of the Western intellectual tradition. As a young man, Barack Obama toured Europe for several weeks and went home early, convinced that Europeans were not his people and that European civilization had nothing to show, or to offer, him. If Professor Gates has an idea in his head that is not connected with black racial identity, his academic output fails to suggest what that might be.
Obsession is the mother of hypersensitivity. Sergeant Crowley, Gates wants the world to believe, acted on a stereotype when he challenged his presence behind his own front door. But condemning a word for bigotry is like condemning a gun for violence. The statistics are there for Professor Gates, the well paid professional researcher, to look up. How does the percentage of black men convicted of such crimes as breaking and entry compare with that of white men sentenced for the same offense? Or any offense of burglary and violence? We all have a rough idea of the answer, even if we can’t come up with the exact percentages. Policemen, like anyone else, react from experience. Whether or not Sergeant Crowley half-expected to find two black men on that front porch when he arrived on the scene, no officer could rationally be faulted for doing so. The same goes for Lucia Whalen, the woman who called the police in the first place and who later gave a televised interview in which she denied having mentioned race in connection with the suspects and went on to deliver a tearful soliloquy on the evil of racial profiling in particular and politically incorrect attitudes in general, as if racial identification of any suspect were not routinely requested when evidence is being given in a court of law.
The politics of street theater ignores such matters in favor of government by moralistic soap opera. Wringing every last nuance from his “teaching moment,” Obama attempted to mend fences with Cambridge’s finest, while never actually apologizing for having jumped the gun with his “acted stupidly” remark, and invited the principal antagonists for beer at the White House. (Beer, like time, heals all.) The charade was further enhanced when corporate America, represented by various brewing companies and compliant as usual with the government propaganda mill, recognized an opportunity to serve as the free corporate sponsor of Obama’s racial reconciliation soap, while demanding that only American-made beer be served on the White House lawn. Lastly Professor Gates, back home in Cambridge-on-the-Tallahassee, sent flowers to Lucia Whalen. (The media weren’t certain what species of flower.) And behold!—that particular teaching moment was over, the street theater concluded, the American public enlightened and morally improved, though still divided along racial lines on their understanding of what actually happened on July 16 in Cambridge.
Future teaching moments will include the President’s appearances at townhall meetings and other venues around the country on behalf of a national health care plan, followed perhaps by a series of new “Harry and Louise” commercials regretting the couple’s opposition to President Clinton’s own plan in 1993 and boosting Obama’s, whatever that may turn out to be. If so, will anyone notice that the principals are paid commercial actors reading from a script, not real-life personages in a staged reality show, like the “James and Henry” performance? ###
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Chilton Williamson, Jr.