This is the part of summer I hate. It's gotten sweaty-balls hot here in NYC the past week or so. Too hot to make you feel like doing anything. So hot, in fact, that I'd rather be in my office working than walking the streets surrounded by scantily clad women. (Can I write that now? Will she get pissed? Guess I'll find out.) And writing about BEING hot is so lame, but I just walked home from the subway, and it's all I can think about. Woe unto me.
If you've never been to New York, I can't describe for you how disgusting it feels to drag yourself into the bowels of the Brooklyn Bridge subway stop in the middle of 80% humidity and then be blasted in the face by a wave of impossibly hotter air originating from God knows where. (Mercury, maybe?) For some reason that stop has no air conditioning, or even a fucking fan, and I have to encounter it every day on my way to work. "Bloody hell," as they say in the Olde Country.
So where were we? Ah yes, The Dog Days. In the dog days of summer, a black Harvard Professor of African Studies gets mistaken for a burglar in his very own home. Then, when the cops show up and ask him offensive questions like "Do you live here?" and "Is there anyone else in the house?" and "Could you please step outside?" said black Professor of African Studies at Harvard gets arrested when he gets angry and starts acting all disorderly and shit. Problem: said professor is a personal friend of one Barack H. Obama, who happens to be El Presidente of Los Estados Unidos, and who, reportedly, is also African-American. Oh sights and wonders, what fun ensues!
Without knowing all the facts, El Jefe Barack says at a press conference that the police acted "stupidly," and promptly immerses the country in another racial crisis. How many crises is that now? Let's see. We've got the Health Care Crisis. We've got the Economic Crisis. We've got the Iraq War Crisis. We've got the Afghan War Crisis. We've got the Illegal Immigration Crisis. We've got the War on Terrorism Crisis. We've got the Social Security Crisis. We've got the Bailout Crisis (though that's linked to the Economic Crisis, so it probably shouldn't be treated as a separate crisis.) If you're a conservative, you need to add the Socialism Crisis, the Government Gun Theft Crisis, and the Liberal Supreme Court Crisis. That's a lot of crises we're dealing with here in America. And now, throw on top of it all this silliness with Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department and Professor Henry Louis Gates of Haaaahvid University.
If you're looking for my opinion on this -- and why else would you be here? -- my view is that Crowley was doing his job, but that Gates had a right to be pissed about being questioned as to what he was doing in his own house. But before I can fully judge these two gentlemen, it's necessary to keep a couple of things in mind. First, I'm not a cop and I'm not a black man, and I think the life experiences of both men in these respects were critical to what happened. Objectively, I think Gates let his anger get the best of him and was unnecessarily hostile to a guy who, from all that I've heard and read, was just doing his job, responding to someone who called about a possible burglary. Crowley didn't know who else was in the house and he followed protocol. The caller referred to two people. I don't think Crowley said anything to Gates that warranted the reaction he got.
So where did Gates' reaction come from, then? From his own experience as an African-American man in the 20th and now 21st Century, first of all. Who knows what he's been through in his life? Who knows what many law-abiding black men go through when the first thing people assume about them in a given situation is that they have bad intent? That must get old after awhile. And for someone to question his right to be in his own house, well, put that together with maybe one or two or three or ten shitty experiences with white people or cops in his sixty-plus-year old life, and maybe then one can begin to comprehend his overreaction. I'm not saying that what Crowley did was wrong, but that his questioning and intrusion may have been PERCEIVED by Gates as racist. And if you've read Blink!, you know that this situation presented a classic case of instantaneous perception run amok. It wasn't about objectivity; both men were going on their instincts -- instincts that have racial edges to them -- and this is where it led them. Gates' reaction was OBJECTIVELY unreasonable, but SUBJECTIVELY, I can understand it, though I don't condone it. If any white person had acted that way with Officer Crowley, said those things about his mama, you have to think that they would run as high a risk as Professor Gates of being cuffed and stuffed. But maybe not. Maybe Crowley would have been more patient with a white person, not because he's a racist, but because of the primal, instinctive biases we all carry around, the ones that Blink! talks about. And maybe Gates would have been more patient if he was confronted by a black cop, instead of a lily white Irish guy like Crowley.
I also think that Gates' potential arrogance came into play here. He's a Harvard Professor who has a personal relationship with the President of the United States. You don't think that gave him some intestinal fortitude in this situation? That it contributed to Gates' thinking that he could shoot his mouth off in a situation where most people would have shut up as soon as it was clear that he belonged there? I think Gates' arrogance and self-perception had as much to do with this incident as his race.
As for Crowley, I think he was too touchy himself and could have Gates' tirade go, even with all the bile and disrespect coming out of Gates' mouth. If he was that pissed off at the end of it, he could have warned Gates once more and written him a nice fat ticket. Hit him in the wallet. To arrest someone in their own house when they were minding their own business before the cops showed up, seems excessive to me, and unnecessarily escalated an already hot situation. But maybe someone else got in his face recently. Maybe he was annoyed to be there at all. Maybe he heard one too many insults from a civilian that day. Or that week.
And how about the neighbor? The concerned citizen who reported the incident in the first place? I originally thought she was a racist busybody, but the facts don't bear that out. I listened to the call she made to 911, and she actually came off pretty sane. She didn't live there and called on behalf of someone else, an old lady in the house who thought she saw two people breaking into Gates' home. On the call, she expressly said that it could be nothing, that it could be people who live there who are having trouble getting inside. On the other hand, before you go and call the damn police, don't you observe awhile and try to get some more information? Or maybe you go out there and see what's going on. It was broad daylight for goodness sakes.
And doesn't it beg the question: Does anyone in this country know their fucking neighbors anymore? We've become a nation of shut-ins who play video games, write blogs, watch t.v. and who only associate with our close friends and family. What happened to community? Where have the neighborhoods gone? No one knows anyone anymore. I can understand that somewhat in New York where everyone's crammed together like sardines and anonymity is a means of escape (and safety), but in the suburbs? In Cambridge? Even my parents in New Hampshire, who live in a super rural town, don't associate with their neighbors much. Only the ones across the street, that's about it. I'm not sure what this means, but you have to believe that if people interacted more and recognized each other's face, maybe we'd not only have safer neighborhoods, we'd avoid stupid misunderstandings like the one between Officer Crowley and Professor Gates.
After removing his foot from his mouth, Obama, to his credit, tried to turn this into a "teachable moment," by having the feuding fogles over to his house for a beer. Forced to pick an American brand, Obama went with Bud Light. Pathetic. Gates chose Red Stripe, which is brewed in Jamaica. Shocking. [UPDATE: turns out it was actually Sam Adams - a last minute change.] And Crowley went with Blue Moon, a favorite of mine, which he sipped with a slice of orange in his glass. And Joe Biden joined them, because he had nothing better to do. We'll never know what was said. From the pictures I've seen, it doesn't look like there were too many smiles around that table.
We know that no one apologized. God forbid. It seems everyone expects an apology these days. Contrition. I wonder why that is? Why do the words "I'm sorry" carry so much weight? They're just words. If you go punch someone in the face and then a month later say you're sorry, does it change the fact that someone got punched in the face and got hurt? How many "I'm sorrys" could Bernie Madoff dish out right about now? And yet, everyone WANTS an apology. They want to hear one. Obama should apologize to Crowley and the Cambridge Police Department. Crowley should apologize to Gates. Gates should apologize to Crowley. I'll tell you what's behind it. The people calling for an apology usually have no personal involvement in a situation, and they do it because they perceive the act of giving an apology as a form of weakness. A concession. A chipping away at the veneer of pride that carries us all through life. I've never viewed apologies that way. I actually see them as evidence of strength and power, not the opposite. If you're so fragile that you can't survive an apology and learn from the circumstances that led to it, then to me, that's evidence of weakness, not power. Try telling that to Bush, who never apologized for anything. And now Obama, who won't apologize for anything in this situation. He's so verbally proficient, though, that he can throw enough words at something to make it SOUND like an apology. He's just that good.
So what have we learned from all this? Fuck if I know. It's so damn hot in here that I'm totally rambling. I have no idea what I just wrote.
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