Almost every press conference that President Obama has held in his first 200 days as President of the United States of America has included a question on race. Obama, the quintessential deracialized statesman, has dealt with those questions in a deracialized context. At a previous press conference, he was asked if he were troubled by the staggering rates of unemployment in the black community and he answered by expressing his concern for all those who are unemployed and with the expectation that the administration's fiscal policies would eventually reduce unemployment.
At a press conference devoted exclusively to healthcare reform, the last question was on the Cambridge police and the arrest of the distinguished black scholar, Professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates of Harvard University. President Obama began his answer in his usually guarded manner stating that he did not know all the facts, but expressed his concern with racial profiling and declared that Sergeant James Crowley had acted stupidly, by arresting the black Professor on the spurious charge of disorderly conduct in the confines of his own home. The charges were subsequently dropped but the President's candid remarks created a firestorm and revealed that even though the American electorate in 2008 elected the first African-American president in the history of the Republic, there is still a high unbridgeable chasm that divides the white historical experience in America from the black historical experience in America.
The political opponents of Barack Obama had a field day. Glen Beck, the comedian at Fox News, ranted that Obama had a deep-seated hatred for white people. Other right-wing commentators castigated the President for speaking out when he did not know the facts and that he owed Sergeant Crowley an apology.
To put out the fire, the President backtracked on his remarks and invited the two combatants, Prof. Gates and Mr. Crowley to the White House for a beer. To achieve racial symmetry, the President also invited Vice President Biden to the "beer" summit.
Even before the summit, Barack Obama indicated that the incident was a teachable moment. What were the lessons on race that we could take away from what some presumed was a Presidential gaffe? In the Presidential election of 2008, race was under the radar. A large segment of the white electorate can transcend race and accept Barack Obama, a graduate of Harvard, as President of the United States, but the situation becomes exceedingly prickly if Barack Obama is perceived as being racially assertive as he did in the press conference on the issue of racial profiling. Any form of racial indignation is viewed with suspicion and tantamount to the abandonment of his deraicalized candidacy, which gave him that broad, conventional appeal.
A teachable lesson from the spark that triggered the racial prairie fire is that there are still demagogues in public life who will seize the moment to spread racial polarization. These are the same racist elements that made the Klu Klux Klan into a mass terrorist movement after the Civil War and constituted the lynch mobs that prevailed right up to the juncture of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Another teachable dimension to the Gates incident is the confusion regarding the role of the state in a democratic society. Most conservatives are strong advocates of laissez-faire economics and the limited role of government. Social Security and Medicare, which are popular governmental programs, are begrudgingly acceptable, but any attempt by government to expand its role in healthcare reform is perceived as sacrilege. Yet the same advocates of limited government are the major boosters of unchecked military spending and police powers.
The Warren Supreme Court expanded the rights of citizens in respect to the arbitrary use of police powers. Restrictions were placed on search and seizure and a suspect had to be read his "Miranda" rights. Under the Roberts Supreme Court, which prevails at present, the coercive arm of the state has become elongated and many of the civil liberties extended by the Warren Court have been rolled back by the conservative Roberts Court.
The Gates-Crowley confrontation is a classical example of this ongoing dialectic between the citizens and representatives of the state. A police officer does not have the legal right under normal circumstances to enter the house of a citizen. To enter one's premises, the police officer or federal agent requires a search warrant. In a democratic society, there is the need for democratic policing and that invariably means representatives of the state must respect the rights of citizens and function within the ambit of the law.
Once Professor Gates had made the case that he was in his own dwelling place, as former Secretary of State, Colin Powell stated, Mr. Crowley should have left the premises and returned to his normal patrol duties. Expressions of insulting words cannot justify a charge of disorderly conduct and is an example of a police officer abusing his power. That is why the Prosecutor dropped the charges because he or she knew the stupidity of the arrest.
Cambridge is a small town of approximately 100,000 people where there is petty crime but a dearth of major crimes. In 2005, there were 3 murders, in 2006 that was reduced to 2 and in 2007, there were no murders in the community. Burglars were more active than murderers. In 2005, there were 623 burglaries, 685 in 2006, 665 in 2007 and a decline in 2008 to 467. So there was plenty of legitimate work for the Crowley's of Cambridge.
Race in America has moved under the radar but a reluctance of the larger society to address the issue of race does not mean that racial injustice has disappeared in America. In a presumptive liberal city like New York City, where there has been a remarkable reduction in major crimes since 1990, there is very little appreciation for democratic policing. In 2007, 468,932 New Yorkers were stopped and likely frisked by the New York Police Department. In 2008, those figures ballooned to 531,091 stops. For the first three months of 2009, there were the unprecedented numbers of 171,094 stops. Of those, 151,000 were innocent.
A study by the Rand Corporation commissioned by the Commissioner of Police Ray Kelly in 2006 revealed that 89 percent of those stopped were blacks and Latinos. There have been class action suits taken out by the New York Civil Liberties Union, but there has been no large scale outrage. There is no sense of democratic policing and since crime has been driven down, this is a classical example of the bodypolitic and the larger civil society signifying that the means justifies the end. What the stop and frisk policy represents is an institutionalization of black community criminalization and a flagrant negation of democratic policing.
Of all the hue and cry on the President's statement at his July press conference, the public intellectual who has written most profoundly about the incident is the New York Times columnist Frank Rich, who has pointed out that part of the problem is the uneasiness among conservative aging whites and even some black conservatives that not only is there a black President but the Senate is about to confirm the first Hispanic to the Supreme Court and the third female to hold that privileged judicial position. And as Rich emphasized, part of the anxiety is that the Census Bureau is forecasting that before the middle of the twenty-first century, whites will join the rainbow parade of minorities in America.
The incident between Gates and Crowley became unnecessarily acrimonious. The President has used the teachable moment to bring a rapprochement between the Professor and the police officer. The country is in need of further racial healing and New York City could contribute to racial rapprochement by demonstrating a commitment to democratic policing.
