Columnist - Real issues in Gates case lost in the racial divide
Some years ago, in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., a friend of mine — let’s call him “Leroy” — got stuck near the scene of a car crash. A white police officer was responsible for directing traffic, but nobody was moving. After waiting a while, Leroy rolled down his window and yelled, “Can we go now?”
The officer didn’t like that attitude, so he scurried over to Leroy’s window window (abandoning his post at the intersection) and proceeded to charge him with $700 worth of traffic violations. Leroy, suddenly feeling as if he was living through one of the early, black-and-white episodes of “The Andy Griffith Show,” just looked at the cop and said, “You’re a Barney Fife.”
Leroy was handcuffed, stuffed in the back of a cruiser, and taken to jail.
Later, after learning that Leroy worked for a member of Congress, the officer raced red-faced to the jail to apologize for the misunderstanding. He even offered to give Leroy a ride back to his car.
The next month, when Leroy appeared in court to answer the bogus traffic charges, Barney Fife never showed. He knew that, in America, it’s not a crime to insult a cop.
Considering the recent unpleasantness emanating from Harvard, I should probably mention that Leroy is white. Sometimes bad policing is colorblind.
Yet if Leroy had been black – that is, if he had looked like Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. – a certain set of pundits would insist on viewing the incident through a prism of race. They would pit whites against blacks, ignore every shade of gray, and, as a result, lose the real story in a superficial narrative of their own creation.
That, at least, is what they’re doing with Professor Gates.
We’ve heard fire-breathing commentators declare that Gates was arrested for “housing while black.” Rev. Al Sharpton said, “I have heard of driving while black and even shopping while black but now even going to your own home while black is a new low in police community affairs.” These denizens of the left refuse to consider the possibility that Leroy, in the same situation, might well have received the same treatment.
With the debate thus polarized along politico-racial lines, elements of the right have felt compelled to offer their own defective analyses. Fox News contributor Mike Gallagher said that people should “give the police the benefit of the doubt,” which is, of course, exactly wrong. In criminal cases, the benefit of the doubt always goes to the citizen-defendant, not to the prosecutor-government.
It’s easy to understand why blacks are sensitive to allegations of racial bias among police. In the 1990s, an NAACP chapter recognized Gazette Editorial Page Editor Wayne Laugesen, working as a reporter in Kansas, for exposing the abusive racial profiling practices of a major Kansas police department.
It’s also easy to understand why whites are sensitive to allegations of racism. Only a few weeks ago, the Supreme Court had to reverse a decision which wrongly assumed that a Connecticut firefighting exam had discriminated against blacks.
These sensitivities might help to explain all the colorful rhetoric swirling around Professor Gates, but they should also serve as a warning against the impulse to project simplistic racial motives onto complex, multi-dimensional scenarios.
Imagine, for example, that my friend Leroy was black. In that case, left-wing commentators, keenly conscious of America’s lingering racial disparities, would accuse the police of racial profiling, and right-wing commentators, driven half mad by the left’s obsession with race, would argue that Barney Fife should get the benefit of the doubt.
Both would be wrong, and the real story, along with its attendant constitutional questions, would slip unnoticed into the country’s deepening racial divide.
Cole is a writer, translator and political organizer. Readers can reach him at dancoloradan@yahoo.com.
