Heckling right-winger Joe Wilson has become quite the cause celebre on both sides of the debate. In the course of this heated discussion, one of the things that has been discussed is Wilson's status as one of only 7 legislators to vote in favor of keeping the Confederate flag flying over the South Carolina capitol building.
Being a son of the South puts you in a different position when it comes to the Confederate flag. It means something entirely different to the people who have ancestors who fought in the Civil War on the south side of the Mason-Dixon line.
Ya know, that's true. For sure, those who fought in favour of slavery and oppression of black people come from a differnt point of view when it comes to this flag.
But I would think that this would be something you would be decently ashamed of, rather than using as, ya know, an argument in favour of continuing to be disrespectful of black people.
So maybe you've been following the hullabaloo over Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, who was arrested last week in his own home, and President Obama's straightforward comment that the officers acted "stupidly". You can watch the President's original statements at the end of his press conference on health care reform (remember that?) here:
Now predictably there was hue and cry over this - how could the President call a police officer stupid? How could he be sure there was a racial element, as he implied? What was he doing weighing in on a local matter anyway.
Obama, to his credit, seems to have thought the matter through and decided he could have handled it better on the whole, therefore on Friday he held a follow up brief press availability to address the matter one more time.
He was speaking shortly after getting off the phone with the police officer involved, who he described as an outstanding officer. He also said, "My hope is that as a consequence of this event, this ends up being what's called a teachable moment where all of us, instead of pumping up the volume, spend a little more time listening to each other and focus on how we can generally improve relations between police officers and minority communities. And that instead of flinging accusations, we can all be a little more reflective about what we can do to contribute to more unity."
Wise words and good advice.
So I thought I would take this opportunity to put down on paper my somewhat complex thoughts about the role of the police in society. Please bear with me as I try to get this right - it may take me a few paragraphs here to hit my groove.
First of all, there's a certain conventional wisdom - perhaps a conventional wisdom specific to the kind of white, reasonably affluent community I grew up, that says the police should get the benefit of the doubt.
"The police do incredibly difficult jobs, they face down bad people every day on our behalf. If they occassionally screw up, go too far, behave badly, the community should have their back. They should get special prviledges because they put their lives at risk for us."
On the other hand, in a lot of minority communities, the police are seen very differently. The blogger Ta Nehisi Coates (read him, if you don't already) recently shared another way of thinking about the police.
"My basic perspective is that cops are men (or women) with guns and the legal right to shoot you, without the usual repercussions. I tend to use a lot of discretion when it comes to introducing that kind of element into a situation. It's just no way to tell how things will go down."
I don't know about you, but I find those words both completely understandable (Coates had a friend who was shot dead by a police officer, without cause) and utterly chilling.
Chilling because I'm fortunate enough - sheltered enough, maybe - that I call the police to feel safer. Something bad is happening, or might be happening, and I always know that if things get really stressful there are trained and armed men ready to step in.
It takes my breath away to think how awful it would be to not have that as a recourse. To believe, for rational reasons, that calling the cops is likely to make the situation worse, not better. Or to believe that calling the police wouldn't achieve anything at all - because they won't come to your neighborhood.
So here's my own thinking.
The police do, in fact, do an incredibly difficult and necessary job. We hire them to go places we wouldn't go and deal with people we are afraid to deal with. In fact, it's one of those jobs where I think it's reasonable to say that anyone who does it reasonably well is genuinely heroic.
But I do NOT agree with the theory that because their work is hard, even heroic, in some way that we should cut police officers some slack when, as happened here, they make a very bad error of judgement.
In the particular case in question, my suspicion is that Gates didn't behave very well. My understanding is that he had just returned from a trip to China - what's that, a 20 hour flight? - after which he discovered that he didn't have his keys and wound up having to break into his own home. Shortly afterwards, he's confronted by a police officer who accuses him of breaking into the house.
OK, now in this circumstance I'm pretty sure what I would have done. I've locked myself out of the house a few times myself, and inevitably I get very jumpy and nervous because I KNOW I look suspicious. I tend to over-explain, telling any stranger who looks at me funny what's going on. I'm pretty sure that if confronted by a police officer I'd be super-quick to fish out some ID (Gates did so eventually, but belatedly and grumblingly).
So Gates could probably have behaved better, sure.
But the role of the police isn't to protect citizens who behave impeccably, who aren't tired and grouchy, and who cooperate fully. The role of the cops is to be at their best at the moments when we are at our worst. That's the job. That's why it's herioc.
Yes, there's a whole history around failed relations between minority communities and the police. There's also, by the way, a certain tension in Cambridge, MA between the "townies" and the Harvard people. And sometimes, too, there are just flat out personality clashes.
A cop's job is to get over it. The citizen is allowed to be grouchy. The police officer is required to be above the fray. Why?
Because he's too powerful. We gave him a gun, a badge, and powers of arrest. Even a license to kill in certain situations. The cop is a human being, but he is required to behave in a manner beyond human grudges and grievances - because he's not acting on his own behalf. He's acting on mine. And yours.
So I do agree with President Obama that the cop acted "stupidly." Not evilly, not cruelly, just stupidly. He responded as a human being, angry to have been spoken to disrespectfully - which is understandable. But he used the powers of his office - the powers we invested in him - to assuage that frusstration. Which is not acceptable.
I know that the standard that I am setting out for the police is almost insanely high. I know that asking them to be equally capable of storming into a gunfight and sensitively defusing racial tension is a lot to ask.
But I do ask a lot of these people. That's why I say that doing the job reasonably well is almost inevitably heroic.
So what do we do when police officers fail to live up to this almost impossibly high standard?
I think we have to give them a chance to improve, encourage them to think through honestly where they might have gone wrong, get them talking to the members of the community, not just their fellow officers (a wider perspective on Obama's "let's have a beer together" strategy), they should go in for more training, and also I think that if ultimately they decide police work is not for them, I think we should commend their self-knowledge rather than stigmatising it. There should be an opportunity for a highly honourable discharge - rather than the current situation where leaving before retirement puts police officers at a massive social and economic disadvantage.
One of the greatest of all possible websites during the 2008 election was Nate Silver's outstanding work on www.fivethirtyeight.com (go there! Read it! Good stuff).
Recently, Nate did a presentation at TED about race as a factor in the election.
Shorter version:
Bad news - racism did exist in the election, and played a role in the outcome of some states.
Good news - it is possible to predict and understand where and how racism will appear, and therefore it is possible to design ways of reducing it.
(Cross Posting this from the EurObama blog, where I am now guest blogging...)
Just a few days ago I returned from a dizzying trip to DC where I was able to both attend the inauguration events and to hang out with my family. Both of those things have got me thinking about the meaning of race in this election, and this Presidency.
Throughout the campaign, I always tried to walk a delicate balance in talking about Obama’s race - acknowledging the historic nature of his candidacy, but also making it clear that the election was about a wider range of issues, and that we wanted to appeal to the widest possible range of voters. Personally, I always felt awkward about the issue. As, let’s face it, a white northern girl who is younger than the Civil Rights movement, it seemed like anything I could say would be potentially inflammatory, condescending, or just tone deaf.
But I was very struck by the reactions I had from so many strong Democrats - folks who really wanted Barack to be President - who nevertheless felt that it was simply impossible: couldn’t be done. One Party stalwart told me flatly that America was too racist to elect him. These people always astonished me, not only because I never saw the country that way (sure, there’s racism in America, lots of it, but I just don’t think they make up a majority in this day and age) but also because I didn’t see Obama that way. Sure, he was black, comfortably and confidently African-American - despite his mixed race heritage - but I never looked at him and saw him exclusively or even primarily as a black man. There seemed to me something de-humanising about this determination to look past his intelligence, his obvious sense of empathy, and his sheer talent to see primarily his race.
The people who said these things to me are the opposite of racists - some of them were active in the civil rights movement themselves, and all of them care deeply about achieving social justice in America. But their insistence upon the racism of those “other people” - the ones who were going to make it impossible to elect him - despite all evidence of Obama’s high favorability rating, his ability to win over white voters across the country, his own eloquent speech on race in which he acknowledged the hard legacy of race but also talked of an america that can change… The stubbornness with which some of my friends continued to see him as first and foremost a black man frustrated me.
But my thoughts on this have evolved a little bit since my trip - not because of anything I saw on stage at any of the inaugural events, but because of the faces in the crowd watching it with me.
Now, I should say - before I moved to London I lived in Washington, DC for a lot of years. It’s a great town - walkable, with a thriving cultural scene, good restaurants and great public transport. But there are a few obvious disadvantages to life in the District. Crime is one. Homelessnes. But also, in a more general sense, the prevailing sense of disconnection between the citizens of the city (90% African American) and the Federal Government, which not only works there but has a bizarre amount of legal control over the city. The citizens of DC co-exist uneasily with the Federal City. Not necessarily angrily, but distantly, and for all the year that I was there it felt like there was an almost palpable sense of Us and Them. A certain distrust, not unjustified, that the federal people had anything like the best interests of the District in mind. And bear in mind - I’m not talking about the Bush administration. I lived in DC under Clinton, who as you may recall was at the time talked of as “the first black President”.
Except, of course, he wasn’t. Barack is, and the difference was astonishing to me. Looking around the faces on the Mall, it was clear that many of them were locals - not something I remember from previous big DC events. On the Metro I got into a friendly dispute with a young African American man who insisted on offering me his seat (”Please, take a seat.” “Oh, no really I’m fine. You take it.” “No, go on…”). The elderly African American man and his twenty-something daughter who were sitting behind me during the ceremony struck up a friendly conversation and exchanged phone number with the two cowboy-booted white Texans next to them. At the sandwich bar, when I accidentally took a seat that one African American woman was saving for her friend, she brushed off my apology and together we found a third chair. Collectively, the folks I met in DC seemed more confident, less defensive, and absolutely bursting with pride and joy. They acted like they OWNED their country. Because they do. It was beautiful to see.
My aunt lives in Lynchburg Virginia, hotbed of the Old South. When she first moved there an acquaintaince chastised her for her friendly relations with the African Americans she worked with, saying, “you don’t know how to treat your blacks.” She was, obviously, appalled. And saddened, as she realised that the black people around her had a habit of not making eye contact, not striking up conversations with the white folks around them.
Well I saw my aunt this week, and she is amazed at the transformation in the people around her - especially in the African-Americans who, she tells me, are holding their heads high, making eye contact, intiating conversations.
It may be that this change is because, when they look at Barack Obama, the primary thing that THEY see is a black man. And if so, then good. It’s about damn time.
The fact that Barack Obama is African American (in the most literal sense, half African and half Kansan) has always been incidental to my persona support for him. Like many, I see him as primarily an excellent politician, a strong candidate and a purveyor of good ideas about policy (especially foreign policy). Although I don't think I completely agree with the crowds in South Carolina who chanted "race doesn't matter" - I thought it mattered in the same way his time in Indonesia mattered. As just one part of his story.
So why then do I find myself constantly getting choked up when I read articles like this?
Yet the amazing thing isn't that there were instances of overt, old-style racism during this campaign, it's that there were so few. The amazing thing is that so many Americans have been willing to accept -- or, indeed, reject -- Obama based on his qualifications and his ideas, not on his race. I'll never forget visiting Iowa in December and witnessing all-white crowds file into high school gymnasiums to take the measure of a black man -- and, ultimately, decide that he was someone who expressed their hopes and dreams.
Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when "all gods children" would be judged "not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character."
The idea that we live in that day - that farmers in Iowa and steelworkers in Missouri and ranchers in Texas looked at this man and asked not "can I vote for someone who looks like this?" but rather, "does this man have the vision, the judgement, the talent and the dedication to represent me?" is amazing. That they answered, "Yes he does" has shaken me up a little.
It doesn't matter that he is black for how good a president he would be. But that it doesn't matter, matters enormously.
