Barack Obama made a huge mistakeand I don’t mean by saying that the Cambridge, Mass., cops had “acted stupidly,” although that was mistake enough.
Obama’s real mistake was buying into his own rhetoric.
His big mistake was believing that we had reached a point in American history where he could dare to talk honestly about race as if, well, it was a subject we could actually talk honestly about.
Remarkably, he thought it was OK for the first black president of the United States to register some shock that a famous black Harvard professor was arrested and led away in handcuffs for the crime of mouthing off to a cop while at his own home.
Obama considered it self-evident that the Henry Louis Gates arrest fit into a racial context — apparently not understanding that, for many, Obama’s role as the so-called post- racial president is to pretend race doesn’t matter, unless he’s doing his responsibility-first Bill Cosby imitation in front of a black audience.
Naively, he believed he could get away with talking about Gates and the Cambridge cops, even while admitting he didn’t know all the facts and that Skip Gates was his friend, without helping to create an uproar.
As Obama has said since, this is what they call a teachable moment. And we’ve learned much.
We’ve learned, for example, that virtually nothing is self-evident when it comes to race. (See: Sonia Sotomayor, charged by Tancredo, Limbaugh et al as wise Latina racist.)
We’ve learned how easy it is to demagogue on race, in which some cops acting “stupidly” somehow turns into cops being “stupid.”
And Obama, famously a quick study, learned that it was better to defuse the situation before it overwhelmed everything else. And so he invited Sgt. Jim Crowley and Gates to have a beer with him at the White House, assuming that a kumbaya photo-op would put things right.
I’ll admit that I was stunned when Obama, in answering a reporter’s question, stupidly used the s-word. This is so uncharacteristic of Obama on race. During the campaign, Obama made it a point to rarely talk about race unless forced to, as in the Rev. Wright situation.
On the other hand, I wasn’t at all stunned when Obama walked into the White House briefing room to blame himself for “ratcheting up” the controversy, to say that Gates overreacted as well as Crowley, that he, Obama, should have “calibrated” his words better. This was Obama at his even-handed, nuanced best — if Sgt. Crowley was wrong, that didn’t mean Gates was blameless.
But in the first instance, Obama did the unexpected for a politician — he had reacted honestly. He clearly thought the arrest was an outrage. But if he’d calibrated — expressing his “concern” over the arrest — he wouldn’t have been open to charges of denigrating cops and we’d be talking about health care today instead.
In a New York Times piece, academic Stanley Fish shed some light on Gates’ reaction. Fish had hired Gates to be a professor at Duke in the 1980s. He said Gates bought a beautiful old house that he was renovating and was constantly being mistaken for one of the workers. He said that at Duke, Gates’ credentials were questioned by some professors, even though Gates is a brilliant scholar.
If you don’t think these things mark someone, well, you probably think empathy, as we heard in the Judicial Committee hearings, equals bias.
The facts of the Cambridge case, as we know them, begin with Gates, returning from a long trip, unable to open his front door. When he and the driver tried to force it open, a neighbor called the cops. The questions begin right away. Would we be more likely, upon seeing a middle-age black man with a cane jimmying a door, to call the cops than if we’d seen a similar-looking white man?
Crowley arrived just as Gates had gotten in the house. Naturally, he wanted ID. Gates must have wondered what else could go wrong that day and began berating the cop, asking if he’d be doing this to a white person. Eventually, Gates gave up his ID, which showed him to be a Harvard professor and resident of the house, at which point Crowley called the Harvard police.
It escalated from there. Gates was basically profiling the cop — who, in fact, had a history of teaching cops about the dangers of profiling — even while accusing the cop of profiling him. It’s an old, sad story.
In my job, you get to know cops. At the risk of generalizing, I know that even the best cops don’t like to be yelled at, by people of any race. A really good cop would have walked away. You guess that a cop puts Gates in cuffs, charging him with, in cop-speak, “loud and tumultuous behavior,” because he’s angry and to show that he can.
The Cambridge police dropped the charges almost immediately, expressing regret. Now, there are plenty of regrets to go around.
But, however regretful, Obama didn’t back down from having taken on the issue. “Whether I were black or white,” he said, it belongs in the presidential “portfolio.”
Maybe someday. Maybe just not yet.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
