God Is Still Spanking... Lou Dobbs? Sargeant Crowley?

For many people, God is not still speaking. God is still spanking. Setting up too high a bar. Telling us we are bad. God is still sneering. You are bad. Racism... needs a spanking. People don't.

Fumbling a way beyond racism is a lot like fumbling for your keys. Someone must be to blame because the keys aren't there. Perhaps it is I? Others look on, wondering if you really belong in that home. Maybe you don't. The beat of the mastering narrative goes on, owning us when we really should own it. The master narrative: right and wrong. Me right, you wrong. You right, me wrong. This story is as spacious as any plantation. It also pays out the same wages in oppression, self-loathing, and planter power. Blame is its game and blame is its name.

When Henry Louis Gates, an African American Harvard professor, was arrested while fumbling for his keys to get into his own house, small became large. The nation remembered racism. Black people don't have the same freedom that white people do to fumble. My (white) husband went to the wrong house one night to stay at a friend's house. The friends had given him a key but he had gone to 27 Trout Lane not 27 Trout Brook Lane and there, mistaken, with the (white) cabbie and (white) cop whom he had called to intervene all but broke into the wrong house. No arrests were made.

The master narrative tells us that Crowley, the officer, was wrong and Gates was right. Even if Gates got angry or was insulting to the cop, still, the cop was wrong to arrest a man on his own steps. So far, so good. I mean bad. I can't imagine being anything but insulting to a cop who was trying to arrest me on my own property. I can barely imagine not slugging him. I can surely imagine making it a full time job to gain retribution, not just his badge number either but his badge. If Gates got angry or insulted the cop, mazel tov. Of course, he did. How could he not? And Officer Crowley no doubt had his own justifications and didn't need a Harvard Professor telling him how to do his job, especially given that it probably paid a third of Gates' salary. Justifications abound for whatever their behavior was on the porch.

The problem only starts here. It doesn't stop. The cop made a mistake. Is there any end to wrong? I mean, when do we get out of it? This goes for many white Americans like myself, who are willing to participate in the planter's mistake, the slave ship mistake, and all the others that have followed to make up for the original theft of a people from its land.

Immigration narratives complement this story. We now blame and criminalize immigrants, the same way we objectified and turned black slaves into sexpots and stupid legs. We hired, says the farmer, 18 pairs of legs today to pick these strawberries. We have to have hate speech and we have to reduce people to their legs in order to use them. We make them wrong to make ourselves right. Now we have a near deportation frenzy, sending away perfectly decent people who committed crimes decades ago and went to jail for them and came out with their "debt" to society fully paid. When people tell me there is no racism, or we live in a post racism world, just ask them to listen to Lou Dobbs, who actually gets paid by CNN, a large and often respected US company, who sneers at immigrants on the air, reducing them to bad bodies so that they can be exploited for low wages. So racism is wrong. Hate speech is wrong. Making people into their bodies is wrong. Making people into objects is wrong.

But it is also wrong to objectify or hate a Cambridge cop. He was wrong. Repeat, he was wrong. But that is the cul de sac of the mastering narratives. Right and wrong aren't going to help us. Something has to melt first.

I am as missionary (I am so right I have to convert you to my way) as any one else. I can point fingers with the best of them. I actually believe that congress should do what is right with comprehensive immigration reform and pay the political price. Who cares that the majority of Americans have figured out, with Dobb's help, how to hate and dehumanize immigrants? Still, we should do what is right. I love that word should. Cambridge policeman Crowley should be fired. Again, what do we get out of this plantation of right and wrong, in which we are all shoulded to death?

Off the plantation, we could imagine Gates and Crowley having a conversation. One could imagine apologies being exchanged, laughter resulting at what a crazy world we have made for each other. I see a movie called Threshold, where fumbling becomes a high art. We could have a new dance, "The Fumble." Forgiveness would be its forte. People would not be allowed to say, "I'm not a good dancer." Nor would they be able to discuss the class/race dynamics between professors and police. That would be considered tiresome. Both police and professor, white and black, criminal and immigrant, even and especially terrorists would be understood to be human beings with bodies and brains. CNN would put Lou Dobbs on plantation probation. Once he figured out how to get the sneer out of his voice, he could come back on the air. Same goes for all who sell hate and that goes for we missionaries in the clergy as well.

When I figure out how to stop hating Lou Dobbs for the hate he promulgates, we will have found our keys. When anti racists figure out how to have less fun with this story of Gates' porch, we will open doors. When Gates and Crowley figure out how to talk to each other, not as objectified representations of different oppressed classes, the mastering narrative will crumble and a new story will take its place.

Comments

[maquignon]

Gates is guilty of precisely what he accused Crowley of: racial profiling. His expecting every white cop to be, and treating him as a racist is racial profiling. I know that it happens (racial profiling) and it is unconscionable but it sounds like Gates jumped the gun.

[SanFernandoCurt]

At one time, racism in this country meant the contention of white supremacy was officially certifed. Segregation was legal, lynching was tolerated; non-whites were circumscribed to second-class status, almost as violently oppressed as, say, modern-day Palestinians in Israel. Things have changed. That kind of racism, in this country, has retreated to society's outer fringes, to tiny extremist groups so politically radioactive no intelligent politician would get near them.

Racism is different, but our paradigm for it is the same. Sgt. Crowley has been called out of hand, in the progressive press, a "racist cop", putting the definition of racism at its most fundamental: Racism = white. In this perspective, within all white people, there's a Klansman yearning to bust out; we're a step away from reinstalling slavery (if we could) and limbering our bullwhips.

In a nation reeling from economic collapse, and struggling to bring our healthcare system into the 20th century (much less the third millennium), this story has all the heft of dryer lint. This is a story that allows chest-beating about eternal suffering and historic grievance; and it allows all those who deride Sgt. Crowley the self-affirmation that they're anti-racists - progressive and morally superior. ...All self-aggrandizing delusion.

The charge is losing all its power to intimidate white people. It's used too cheaply, by too many self-serving clowns. But the reality racism hasn't. It's changed. But it's still a fact - but a good part of the nation isn't listening anymore.

[LetUsReasonOn]

I like this post and the responses.

I found a sense of hopelessness though, in all the responses to this issue. One of the reasons for this is because mankind cannot and HAS not been able to come up with a solution to a problem that is propogated within the hearts of "mankind."
Prejudice- according to a basic definition of what I learned in psychology class ;-) - is when you have peopel who stereotype but add an Emotional atttachment to the information which then DOES NOT allow them to be changed by mostly any knowledge that comes to the contrary. What has to change in the person is their feeling/ou­tlook/view­point/circ­umstances.­.. and that is very hard to do for a large group.
There is too much damage on each side for either sideS at this point to condescend to the level needed to change the others view.... People who are hurt by prejudice in all its forms- just find it hard to make amends... so again- mankind just cant do it on their own. Thats understandable of course, because the concept of prejudice DID NOT start with man. The thought was introduced by the one called Devil and Satan himself. He was the first to think himself superior to another, while having NO RIGHT to that feeling/ti­tle/positi­on/viewpoi­nt...

[Nezua]

Yes...tiresome to talk about...but what does this post suggest? Stop enjoying that finally we are talking about racism, its harm, & how it pervades our culture—and from loud pulpits instead of the usual?

I read a bit of "I'm a good white person who does admit to the whole slavery thing, but I'm tired of this."

But talking about this is just the start of getting to that land you dream of. It will get more tiresome (and dangerous) before it's done.

There is poetry in this post. But by the end, I'm left feeling the author has communicated a sense of exasperation with the process...lines about "anti racists enjoying" the story of Gates...and that feels a little too Unaffected By It All for me, when people like Gates, who don't have his cash/reach, end up dead for daring to fumble with a wallet in their own doorway. So yes, we "anti racists" *are* glad that it didn't end up that way, and that NOW we get to talk about the wrongness of this type of bullying by the law (disproportionately leveled against people not like you, by your own admission). That is pleasing because it is progress!

What to do to get to the land of the Dance of Fumble? Fight the power. Until then, better that people are bored than bullied, tazed, killed, deported, etc. Does this post Fight the Power?

http://theunapologeticmexican.org/elmachete/2009/07/25/the-melting-pot-chapter-2009/

[waltsimsjr]

There is absolutely no amount of dialogue, no beer blasts, no meetings no matter how constructive, that will endure, that will sustain, that will have a learning effect, a positive impact, make a damn bit of difference, as long as we maintain an America where the likes of Lou Dobbs holds down the primetime airwaves. No Obama moderations, no appropriate apologies, no shaking hands with black professors and white police sargeants, no Michael Jackson "Heal the World" songs and none of that "We Are the World" stuff either. No not none of this stuff will amount to more than nonsense should we continue to permit the likes of Lou Dobbs to infiltrate the minds of ours and more worse, worser, worst, and most worstest, the minds of our youth. It can be safely said that the spirit that lives in Lou Dobbs is the axis of evil, that being an independent perspective, mine!

[Sweetbay]

This is a great post.