From Emmitt Till to Skip Gates
Black victim, white oppressor. It’s a narrative we know well.
By SHELBY STEELE
If the Henry Louis Gates imbroglio makes anything clear it is that, in 2009, the mere implication of racial profiling in the arrest of a black professor on the nothing charge of disorderly conduct is sufficient to trigger a national (if not international) furor involving even the president of the United States. This incident shows us an America so chastened by its racist past—and so determined to overcome that past—that, at least for a moment, the national politics (health care, Iran, recession) stopped as the country combed over a six-minute encounter between a black academic and a white policeman.
I remember when another racial incident riveted the nation. It was the mid-1950s. I was just old enough to be sent to the barbershop on my own, and there one afternoon I noticed the men passing around a magazine. There were hushed whispers. “Don’t let him see it.” And then a booming voice, “Go ahead. He needs to see it!”
And suddenly, there before me was a photograph of the worst thing I had ever seen: the bludgeoned and mangled body of Emmitt Till, the 14-year-old black boy killed by whites in Mississippi for supposedly looking at or whistling at a white woman. He was a Chicago boy (like me) who had gone South to visit family and had simply walked into this terrible fate.
Emmitt Till had walked into a cultural narrative in which his role was already tragically written. It was a narrative designed to preserve white supremacy. So it gave power—the right to kill—to any white claiming to defend the honor of white women. Whether Emmitt Till whistled at or stared at the woman, or did nothing at all (there is much debate here), he somehow affronted white supremacy and annihilation was his punishment. His murderers were exonerated. Everyone in America knew this cultural narrative. Anyone could have told him not to whistle at that white woman.
We all know these cultural narratives, which is to say that we all know exactly where racial power abides in a given situation. When a white woman pointed her finger at a black man in the old South and cried “rape,” everyone knew a black man would die. But it wasn’t the innate innocence of white women that brought them this imperial power. It was the role their “innocence” played in the preservation of white supremacy and all the social, economic and political advantages that grew out of it.
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.
But this is not really the point. Many a Southern belle would have known she was being ogled by an uppity black man. She would have known that a cultural narrative—heated up by the nuclear taboos of sex and race—put the power of life and death at her disposal. But when would she have actually pulled the cultural trigger and set into motion those forces that would surely end in the annihilation of a black man? The great question in the Gates story is why he put himself so quickly into the cultural narrative, why he screamed “racial profiling” more quickly than a Southern belle might have once screamed “rape?”
The answer may be as simple as Mr. Gates’s fatigue after international travel—a physical depletion that may have darkened him into seeing a tormentor where there was only a protector. After all, here was a white policeman—crisp and confident—demanding ID of him inside his own home. There are moments when one wants one’s station in life—hard earned in Mr. Gates’s case—to be a buffer against indignity. Who is above this?
Yet—if reports are correct—Mr. Gates challenged the initial request for ID by asking if it came because he was a “black man in America.” Most blacks would have stopped at the word “black.” But Mr. Gates is an intellectual, a man ever aware of cultural and political resonances. “Black man in America” was a grab for historical resonance. If you are just Skip Gates (as he is known to friends), then you have only a citizen’s power. But if you are a “black man in America” confronted by a white cop in your own home, then you can frame the moment as an echo of history. Your humiliation at the hands of this unwitting white cop becomes a cruel historical redundancy.
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.
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?
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 sal 57a ute—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.
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.
