Steele: Obama was the Real Problem in the Gates Affair
By LisaB on August 3, 2009 at 10:45 AM in Current Affairs
I was hoping that Shelby Steele, a “self-described black conservative,” would eventually weigh in on Gates-gate. The WSJ published an op-ed, “From Emmitt Till to Skip Gates,” by the “author, columnist, documentary film maker, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, specialising in the study of race relations, multiculturalism and affirmative action.”
Through the story of Emmitt Till, Steele reminds readers of black Americans’ inescapable, unforgettable memories of America’s history of racism, and describes the lingering effects on Professor Gates of the murder of the 14-year-old Till because he supposedly whistled at a white woman. Steele says Gates acted according to a “cultural narrative” that is both well understood in society and difficult to escape under certain circumstances.
On July 16, 2009, after a tiring and long trip home from China, Professor Gates found himself in a stressful situation with a white police officer and, rather than thinking things through, fell back on a cultural narrative he both knows well and understands thoroughly: Black victim, white oppressor:
And didn’t Mr. Gates—jet-lagged and vulnerable—know exactly where to find power when he was confronted in his home by Sgt. James Crowley? Didn’t he—a lifelong student of African-American culture—know precisely the cultural narrative that would serve him best? Moreover, don’t we all know this narrative? Black victim, white oppressor. Here he was, no longer young, slight of build, professorial in look, and still he was under suspicion of being a common burglar in his own home. Add to this the fact that he knew himself to be utterly innocent. Out of these simple facts a sense of racial victimization could have easily developed within him. Few blacks would not at least wonder at this point if they were not being racially profiled.
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The great drama at the core of American race relations is always the same: Can black Americans ever be truly equal—are they capable of achieving it and are others capable of accepting it? Mr. Gates put himself inside a cultural narrative that said blacks could achieve it but whites could never accept it. (His 50 honorary degrees did not save him from having to produce ID in his own house.) This narrative sees whites as incorrigible bigots and supremacists. It was once true and it gave blacks great moral power. But it doesn’t work so well in modern America, as the Gates affair makes clear. Handcuffs were Sgt. Crowley’s answer to Mr. Gates’s moral muscling.
Steele obviously feels that Gates made an all-too-easy, fatigue induced error when confronted with police at his home and I think he’s got a point. Had the incident not gone further, perhaps everyone could have taken a breath and smoothed things over.
The real trouble began when BO waded in and made a hash of things.
But then Skip Gates was tired. What was President Barack Obama’s excuse? Why did he step into the same cultural narrative that Mr. Gates had tried and failed with?
Steele then makes an absolutely on-the-nose observation about Obama. It is absolutely brilliant, IMO.
Where race is concerned, I sometimes think of the president as the Peter Sellers character in “Dr. Strangelove.” Sellers plays a closet Nazi whose left arm—quite involuntarily—keeps springing up into the Heil Hitler salute. We see him in his wheelchair, his right arm—the good and decent arm—struggling to keep the Nazi arm down so that no one will know the truth of his inner life. These wrestling matches between the good and bad arms were hysterically funny.
When I saw Mr. Obama—with every escape route available to him—wade right into the Gates affair at the end of his health-care news conference, I knew that his demon arm had momentarily won out over his good arm. It broke completely free—into full salute—in the “acted stupidly” comment that he made in reference to the Cambridge police’s handling of the matter. Here was the implication that whites were such clumsy and incorrigible racists that even the most highly achieved blacks lived in constant peril of racial humiliation. This was a cultural narrative, a politics, and in the end it was a bigotry. It let white Americans see a president who doubted them.
Using Steele’s labels, I’ve often thought Obama is really a “challenger” wearing the mask of “bargainer.” A “challenger” is someone who says to whites, “you’re a racist until you prove you are not.” Some, like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, personify this type of AA approach to whites. Whites are forever on the hook.
A “bargainer” is someone who says, “I’ll assume you’re not a racist if you don’t hold my race against me.” Steele says people like Bill Cosby, OJ Simpson (presumably BEFORE the trial) and Obama himself are bargainers. Whites love bargainers because they feel they are not automatically on the hook.
But it has always seemed to me that Obama’s background, church and associations over the years, rather than being “post-racial” are more in the style of challengers. Whatever the case, and Mr. Steele no doubt has a more nuanced argument to make, he finishes his article with an admonition for the president and those who would assume he makes all the right steps.
Mr. Obama’s “post-racialism” was a promise to operate outside of tired cultural narratives. But he has a demon arm of reflexive racialism—identity politics, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and now Skip Gates. You can only put a demon like this to death by finding out what you really believe. We should hold Mr. Obama to his post-racialism, and he should get to know himself well enough to tell us what he really means by it. As for the odd triad of Messrs. Gates, Crowley and Obama, only Mr. Crowley seems to have functioned outside his cultural narrative.
All things considered, I think Steele’s thoughtful commentary on the Gates affair is the best I’ve read. Do go and read the entire article, it’s worth your time.
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