“I am a white man . . .”
“Hey idiot, I am a black man . . .” There are days, when I am in the process of writing, that I know what I am putting down is going to rattle a lot of readers. Writing of the arrest two weeks ago of Henry Louis Gates Jr. was one of them.
What I know: Readers, God bless them, will tolerate many things, even your off days, but they will not put up with my or anyone else’s assigning race as a cause for anything that happens in this world.
I have just gone through what the answering machine said was nearly 100 voice mails left on my machine after the Gates column.
It took me two sittings of about an hour each to get through them all. And once again, a little hint: If you start off your call with a racial epithet or some booze-soaked screeching and yelling, I’m simply hitting the delete button and moving on. My favorite in all of them, though, the one I still can hear, was left by a man praising me with the soothing, calming voice of a priest in a confessional.
“Bill,” he finally said, “please tell me the size of the chip so I can order more for your shoulder.” That was a good one.
I made the assertion that race was at the root of Gates’ arrest. I stand by it. That Colin Powell made virtually my same point on the Sunday news shows heartens me. “A white cop, even in your own home, man — are you crazy?” It is basically what the former general said, too. With no apologies extended, I will tell you our experience in this life leads us to no other conclusion.
With hindsight, I should have just stuck with the constitutional argument that so many are making these days, that there is no law against an innocent man losing his cool with a police officer in the confines of his home. This is a view Cambridge, Mass., prosecutors quickly embraced in Gates’ case.
Oh, but I caught hell. What I find extremely curious, though, is that virtually everyone who thankfully bothered to pick up the phone or write an e-mail prefaced their remarks by designating their race. That is simply curious to me. In a sense, I get it. There was a palpable sense in each of their voices that in their worldview, race is never a factor.
If I viewed their complaint through the prism of their race-neutral world, how could the color of Skip Gates’ or his now- beer-drinking police sergeant buddy’s skin even matter?
I must give you a sampling, not one inch of it scientific, but an indicator of where people are with this.
The best example came from a man named John, who I am certain penned it in an effort to tell me all skin colors have it bad.
“My wife,” it read, “is a 66-year-old white grandmother. Every time we travel, she is pulled out of line where she is subjected to a wand and patted down.
“Would it be a good idea for her to get in the face of the security people at DIA, claim she is not a terrorist and scream personal insults when we leave town this coming Tuesday?”
In a righteous world, John, your wife should do exactly that. She is no more a terrorist than George Bush. But screaming at a man with handcuffs and arrest authority, as I pointed out in the second paragraph of the column that incensed you so, is completely knuckleheaded.
You live with the indignity. And you try as hard as your might will take you to carry on.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
