Dear everyone: Being an asshole is not a crime

God, I thought I had said all I had to say about this, but the unending dipshittery of the American public in general and my fellow Bostonians in particular forces me to post on the arrest of Professor Gates once again.

Allow me to enumerate some of the asshattery:

• Last night, the president gave a long national address about healthcare. Today’s main headline on the Boston Globe? “Obama scolds Cambridge police.”
• The cop, Sgt. Crowley, went on a local conservative talk radio show to give his version of events (Summary: Gates just would not shut up!), and said he thinks it’s “regrettable” that the president or anyone else would comment on the story without knowing all the facts. A Globe blogger basically calls Crowley a hero for not voicing full-throated agreement with the hosts’ bilious criticism of Obama, instead just demurely refusing to disagree. (So much more, after the jump.)

Being angry and black is a crime in Cambridge

I mean, it’s a crime most everywhere, but Professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., is certainly the most high-profile person to get arrested for it in a while.

For those who haven’t yet heard the story, Professor Gates, director of Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, was returning home from a week-long trip to China and discovered that his front door was stuck. He and the driver from the car service he was using attempted to force it open, and the sight of two black men trying to break open a door prompted a neighbor to call the Cambridge police. A cop showed up after Gates had gotten in through the back door, asked that Gates prove he lived there, and then, after some kind of unfriendly exchange, arrested Gates for “tumultuous” behavior.

The cop’s report, which the Boston Globe had made available but then took down without explanation, said that Gates accused him of racism, told him he didn’t know who he was messing with, and made some kind of incoherent “your mama” remark. Gates says he simply requested, repeatedly, the cop’s name and badge number, and when the cop left his house without replying, he followed the officer to his front porch, where he was arrested.

I think this is one of those instances where the truth actually does, in all likelihood, lie somewhere between the two versions. I think that Gates—tired, jetlagged, understandably outraged—probably said something not-nice to the cop, although it probably did not contain the phrase “your mama.” And I believe the cop did refuse to give Gates information, an explanation, or at least a cursory apology for inconveniencing him.

But even if we try to cast this in a light that is as friendly as possible to the police—for example, if Gates were belligerent and loud from the second they showed up, if he swore at them and refused to cooperate, if he threatened them with lawsuits and ignored protestations that they were just doing their jobs (none of which I believe to be true)—the Cambridge PD is still clearly guilty of, at the very least, abusing its power. Cops really, really don’t like it when they think people don’t respect them, and Gates probably was guilty of insufficient asskissery. But we have laws against throwing people in jail for saying shit that the authorities don’t like, so it was the cop’s duty to swallow his anger, bid Gates a polite goodbye, and leave. But he didn’t do that; he decided to teach Gates a lesson about how you talk to cops.

And, realistically, his decision was almost certainly affected by Gates’ race. I can’t read the dude’s mind, obviously, but even if he weren’t thinking anything so blatantly racist as “I’ll put this uppity black dude in his place,” he probably would have been a little more willing to believe Gates’ statement that he lived there if Gates were white. He probably would have found it a little easier to ignore his anger and wounded pride at not being deferentially sucked up to. He probably would have been less inclined to see Gates’ heated remarks as disturbing the peace rather than justifiable anger that will pass when its cause is removed. He probably would have been less likely to think he could get away with arresting a Harvard professor if that professor’s wealth and powerful connections were written all over his pale skin.

That’s the kind of racism many people face and many of us perpetuate today. There are still people in white hoods, yes, and people willing to say out loud and without apology that Mexicans are lazy and black people are thieves and Asians are emotionless mathbots, but there are also a lot more people whose opinions have been shaded by these stereotypes in ways that can be hard for their holders to detect. All of us have received these messages from our culture, and all of our thinking has been, in varying degrees, shaped by these messages. Even those of us who fight against discrimination and work to eliminate our own prejudices whenever we can identify them.

The Cambridge police and prosecutor’s office have announced they will drop all charges against Gates. In a few days they will probably release a statement about how they don’t engage in racial profiling, and some of that officer’s best friends are black. But even if no one involved in the situation thought they were treating Gates any differently than they would treat a white man, their actions still seem racist, and they need to be called on it.

Charges against Professor Gates dropped

I just saw a breaking news report on TV announcing that the Cambridge PD was dropping all charges against Professor Henry Louis Gates, who was arrested yesterday for trying to get into his own house.

Update: Finally! A linkable source. This post will be updated when I have a source to link, and I’ll put up a real post later today.

Life imitates satire

So a few days ago I saw Senior Black Correspondent Larry Wilmore’s bit on the Daily Show about how Black History Month is really more like Black Trivia Month.

posted with vodpod

Last night, this email shows up in my college email inbox:

The [student newspaper, student council] and the Black Student Center are proud to present the “Black History Month Trivia Superbowl.”

What: A trivia game show all about black history featuring [campus] celebrity contestants. Prizes will be awarded to the winners.

I could not make this shit up if I tried, people.

Quick debate post

I really don’t want to talk at length about the debate. In fact, I could only bring myself to watch about a third of it. But I did notice something I’ve been mulling over ever since.

How many times did McCain say, “I don’t think Senator Obama understands…”? Because I heard it several times in my incomplete viewing. And, particularly in light of what I think is astute analysis of the racist overtones of McCain’s refusal to look at Obama, it really bothers me.

The problem lies in the difference between “understand” and “know.” If Senator Obama didn’t know, for example, the difference between strategy and tactics, this is merely a gap in knowledge, which is easily corrected. But if he doesn’t understand the difference, it implies that he may or may not have been told what it is, but regardless his brain is incapable of processing that information.

I’m going to accept the most charitable interpretation of this that I can. I will assume that McCain was simply trying to change people’s perception of one of Obama’s main strengths—his intelligence. It’s insufficient to paint Obama as merely ill-informed, because he has now and would have as president dozens of staffers briefing him daily on everything he needs to know to run the country. Painting Obama as straight-up stupid, however, creates in the minds of voters both a problem with no real solution and a connection between Bush and Obama. This is a smart, if somewhat sleazy, campaign tactic. (Or it would be, if it hadn’t backfired so spectacularly.)

But of course one of the classic tropes of racist propaganda is that black people are simply incapable of understanding the complex issues most white people deal with easily—literacy, finances, naming their kids. So even if saying that Obama didn’t understand the problems being discussed wasn’t intended as a dog whistle, it surely must have caused a few ears to perk up. And being ignorant of, or turning a blind eye to, the racist implications of your tactics is a much worse sin, in my opinion, than making the mistake you just wrongly accused your opponent of making.

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P.S. All spelling and grammatical errors in this post brought to you by my vicious head cold.

Westmoreland’s “uppity” comment is even more damning than you think

I think we’re looking at Rep. Lynn Westmoreland’s “uppity” quote all wrong. I don’t think he meant to say it, and not just in an “Oops, I forgot that’s not a word I use in front of the microphones” kind of way. I’m not letting him off the hook, though, so bear with me.

I’m a writer by trade and a copy editor by vocation, so I think a lot about language. I often find myself trying to figure out where a writer lost the thread of her sentence and rewrite it so it says what she meant to say. This involves looking a sentence that doesn’t make sense and deciding which clues to pay attention to and which to ignore. In my opinion, the structure of the sentence suggests that Westmoreland was going to end his sentence with a word like “superior,” but his brain misfired while he was speaking and substituted “uppity.”

Look at the whole sentence: “Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they’re a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they’re uppity.”

Doesn’t make any sense. People don’t consider themselves uppity. So there are, as I see it, three possible interpretations.

1. “Thinks” doesn’t belong; “uppity” means “uppity.”
In this interpretation, the sentence gets mentally rearranged to become “Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they’re uppity, elitist individuals,” ignoring the word “thinks” altogether. This is the conclusion most people reached, and it’s not unreasonable. Westmoreland clearly forgets how he started the sentence by the time he gets to “individual,” which can easily lead to problems like a lack of subject-verb agreement or unnecessary repetition. However, that “thinks” bothers me. There’s no reason for it to be there. Furthermore, the phrase “thinks they’re uppity” is at the end of the sentence, short, and unitary, so it seems unlikely that that “thinks” is an artefact of some would-be sentence structure that got changed on the fly.

2. “Thinks” belongs; “uppity” means “uppity.”
In this interpretation, the sentence gets mentally rearranged to become “Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they’re members of an elite class that thinks that they’re uppity.” In other words, “Even other elitists think they’re too elitist.” This makes perfect sense grammatically, but zero sense contextually. The Republicans are trying to sell themselves as Joe Six-Packs who wouldn’t have a clue what their cronies upper-class people think, and even if they did they would disagree. There’s no way they’re approvingly citing the opinion of the snooty upper crust.

3. “Thinks” belongs; “uppity” means “superior.”
In this interpretation, the sentence gets mentally rearranged to become “Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they’re members of an elite class [or "they're elitists"] who think that they’re superior.” This seems likeliest to me. It explains how the “thinks” got there, and also his casual affirmation to a reporter that he used a word with such obviously racist overtones. He was totally convinced, at the moment, that he’d said nothing more controversial than “superior” and didn’t see why he would need to deny it. This kind of substitution happens all the time—The other day I said something about the “Bush pregnancy” and even when someone called me on it it took me a full minute to realize what the problem was.

If that last is what happened, I think there are three possible reasons he got the words confused:

1. He never knew what “uppity” meant.
This is basically his defense. Westmoreland does come off as kind of dense and terrible with language, so if I were going to believe that anyone had no idea what the word meant and had guessed a definition, badly, based on context, it would be Westmoreland. But I don’t buy this at all. The dude’s from Georgia, he’s of an age to have grown up with segregation, he knows what “uppity” means.

2. Freudian slip.
He meant to say “superior” because it’s safe, but wound up saying “uppity” because that’s what he really thinks. Not hard to believe, and I have no doubt that this is his attitude toward the Obamas, but the fact that he casually affirmed to the reporter that he used the word suggests that he didn’t hear the problem, either at the moment or immediately afterward. On purely anecdotal evidence, I think people tend to quickly realize their mistake in the case of Freudian slips.

3. He’s said or heard the word “uppity” so much recently it’s become disassociated from its meaning.
This is the one my money’s on, and this is why I felt it was important to write this post. I believe that in that moment Westmoreland couldn’t properly define “uppity.” The same way I mentally swapped “pregnancy” and “presidency” and couldn’t see the problem, he swapped “uppity” and “superior” or some synonym. This is entirely different from being completely innocent of any inkling that there’s a problem with using the word, as he claims to be. This is a temporary state, and induced by a very specific set of actions.

And that’s why this matters. I think it’s actually more damning if he said “uppity” because he had momentarily ceased to assign it any real meaning. Whether you think he meant to say “uppity” or not, any way you interpret his remarks he’s expressing the same sentiment, it’s just a matter of whether he’s bothering with the pretense of veiling it. In that case, whether he used the word or not is almost irrelevant—his meaning was clear. But if he used the word because that’s what he’s been saying and hearing every day for weeks, that means something. That means that this is considered acceptable discourse in Republican circles. That means that these are the conversations they’re regularly having behind closed doors. That means that open racism is widespread and tolerated among Westmoreland’s associates.

And that’s my point. Westmoreland saying racist things can be dismissed as one bad apple. Westmoreland repeatedly saying racist things to all his compatriots means that a significant contingent of the Republican party* holds ideas about race that date to about 1937. This is not exactly a news flash to anyone paying attention, but still, people need to be called on their racism. And so far the criticism of Westmoreland has let dozens of other people off the hook who at best tacitly condone his attitude and at worst share and propagate it themselves.

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*NB: Of course this does not mean that Democrats are all peerless allies and pillars of anti-racism activism. But I doubt Westmoreland is talking about how uppity the Democratic candidate is to other Democrats, so his particular remarks don’t indicate anything about them.

Smacking down Michelle

You know, I try not to be shy about using the word “patriarchy” around here even though I tend to be in real life. In real life, people hear you say “patriarchy” and what they think is “radical feminazi impervious to reason.” While I personally can’t muster a fly’s crap worth of caring what they think of me, I do hope to occasionally reach someone with my arguments, so I back off the big scary P word. When I think about how much I use it on the blog, I start to wonder if I throw it around too much. But dammit, when it’s the right word, I’m using it

Michelle Obama’s fame is providing dozens of lovely examples of the patriarchy in action.

Her speech at the DNC a couple nights ago unsurprisingly moved a lot of assholes to express their discomfort with the fact that she was using her mouth for something other than… maintaining close-lipped smiles to pretty up the place while she stands three steps behind and slightly to the left of her husband. (What? Where did you think I was going with that?) Normally what they’d do in a such a situation is to dismiss her speech as badly written and delivered, her arguments as poorly supported, and her ideas as trivial. A lot of people would look at these criticisms of women and be willing to shout down anyone who pointed out the misogyny by saying, “It’s not about her, it’s about her speech. And you have to admit there were certain weaknesses.” But Michelle Obama is fucking with the templates of their anti-woman form letters because no one can deny that she rocked the house. So all of a sudden it is about her. Her and her uppitiness.

Which is why you get articles like this one, wherein some dude makes some completely incoherent argument about why Michelle Obama needs to start wearing burlap sacks so he can be less intimidated by her and her all-around awesomeness. After trying to make some kind of “Ma’am, you’re no Jackie Kennedy”-type statement he doesn’t even bother trying to support, he critiques everything from how her dress “appeared to follow the curve of her buttocks rather than dropping at the curve” to her “pointy eyebrows, which give her countenance a stern expression.” Then this fuckneck has the audacity to say,

No one is suggesting that Michelle Obama change who she is.

No one is suggesting that she wear flats instead of heels to make insecure people feel less intimidated by her height (nearly 6 feet).

No one is saying she should look dowdy, matronly, or even conservative to accommodate tradition or to fit in with what Washington has come to expect from a president’s wife.

YOU ARE, SIR! THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE SAYING, YOU USELESS NUTS-FOR-BRAINS!

But the thing is, he must say it. He probably feels driven to say it without even really knowing why. He must say it because otherwise, some woman somewhere might think that it was OK to pick an outfit based on what she felt like wearing and what she felt good in, rather than what outfit properly accessorizes what her husband (who did not consult her on his wardrobe choices, natch) is wearing, and what provides the proper degree of titillation for any men who might happen to cross her path—enough to make them want to hit that without coming off slutty. (There is, for the record, no such thing. The patriarchy never lets you win, whether you play its game or not.) Women who have independent thoughts and openly don’t give a fuck whether doodz approve of those thoughts or not MUST BE STOPPED! They might give other women ideas.

This is also why you get articles like this one, passed along by helpful reader juldea, where random delegates talk about how happy they are that the tribute to Michelle and her speech focused so much on her family life instead of her, y’know, thoughts and ideas.

She allowed us to see her as a mother and as a wife, and not so strong-willed and independent.

“Uppity bitch,” this comment says, “the only thing I want your opinion on is which version of Tickle Me Elmo is the best value for my money.” And this is coming from a nominally progressive woman.

The patriarchy requires constant reinforcement. Whenever a woman steps out of line, someone must step in to deliver a smackdown and put her back in her place. Women are inculcated in the patriarchy too. Women can be policemen too.

Ill Doctrine on racism

If you’re not watching Ill Doctrine already, you should be. Jay Smooth is funny, relevant, and thoughtful, and always finds a way to break down complex issues to their easy-to-understand essentials. Here he is talking about how to tell someone they’re doing something racist:

We slur, you decide

Everyone on the internet has covered the unapologetic racism of this Fox News chyron, so I’m going to point out that this is also a really sexist slam against Michelle Obama.

Baby mamas, as even my grandparents know at this point, aren’t just single mothers who don’t have a close relationship with the fathers of their children, they’re also usually portrayed as golddiggers who are using child support to fund their own expensive habits. Although both parts are exactly the opposite of true in the case of the Obamas, it’s the second part that really bothers me. Michelle Obama is an intelligent, well-educated, independently successful woman who has a strong, equal partnership with her husband. She is, in short everything a black woman is not supposed to be. Calling her a “baby mama” is a lot like telling Senator Clinton to “iron my shirt”—it’s a silencing tactic, meant to put her in her place, because everything about her is threatening to our racist, sexist status quo.

Maybe the sexist aspect of the slur seems minor in comparison to the evident racism, but I expect this is just the beginning of the unbelievable pile of shit Michelle Obama will be subjected to during this campaign now that it’s down to just her husband and Saint Barbecue. She’s just as outspoken and opinionated as Elizabeth Edwards, but more obviously fails to conform to the politician’s wife mold by A) having her own career and B) being black. And if Hillary Clinton’s campaign taught us only one thing, it’s that the media still hates a woman who breaks the mold.

It’s okay! We’re in a post-racial society!

New York Magazine blogger Micheal Idov has a post up called The Summer of Brownface, about what he sees as an upsurge in white actors playing people of color, whether or not they wear makeup to darken their skin. To his everlasting credit, he calls out the fact that a minstrel show without the makeup—most notably, Mike Meyers in The Love Guru—is no less a minstrel show, but I think he misses an important distinction in including Fred Armisen’s Barack Obama impression in his list.

The key element of minstrel shows is that they mock the people and culture being portrayed, sometimes hiding behind pretending to target a specific person while audiences know that the character is merely a stand-in for a group of people. The butt of SNL’s joke when Armisen plays Obama is exclusively Barack Obama. They have never, that I’ve seen, devolved into stupid racial stereotypes or anything else that would imply they were attempting to make Obama represent all black or biracial people. Armisen’s Obama impression is no more a minstrel show of blackness than biracial Maya Rudolph’s impression of the ridiculously overtanned Donatella Versace is a minstrel show of whiteness or Italianness.

But this kind of cross-racial casting, both in jokes like Armisen’s skits and in serious movies like Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart, is nonetheless seriously problematic. It erases the accomplishments of actual people of color; it takes roles away from actors of color, who are shortchanged as it is, which also means that the set will lack the insights that actor could provide on racial issues; and it can come off as arrogance for privileged white people to take on such a role as if they are capable of fully understanding the challenges people of color face. Clearly, SNL’s creators need to carefully examine why they have to resort to darkening up a non-black cast member to play all the African-American roles Kenan Thompson can’t take on, and think about the harm they’re causing by doing so, but calling the skits minstrelsy when they are clearly not covers up all the more subtle but equally pernicious ways in which they are actually hurtful.

They’re not even trying to hide it anymore

OK, let’s play a game. Which is running for president, and which ran the Kentucky Derby?

Not that hard, right? So why is the press having such a tough time with it?

(Screencaps in case they come to their senses at some point.) This is what three and a half minutes of Googling on Eight Belles’ tragic demise gets you. And those are just the ones that mention Clinton in the headlines — I didn’t count the ones that mentioned her in the lead (most of them) or in later in the story (all of them). I can just hear the He-Man Hillary Haters Club press drooling over this story: “The primary is already covered like a horse race, see, and Hillary’s girly pick lost to a Big Brown boy, and then died! It’s so perfect! How can we possibly resist!” Sometimes they’re not brave enough to spell it out for you outright, and sometimes they totally fucking are.

Shoehorning Hillary Clinton into this story, which has nothing to do with her, comes from a deeply misogynistic desire to revel in her death-by-proxy that’s nearly laughable in its transparency. Furthermore, if Hillary’s the dead-loser-horse in this metaphor then, logically, Obama is the winner, the “powerful stallion.” Comparing a black man to an animal is such an obvious and commonly-discussed racist trope that even I, Whitey McPrivilegepants, am well aware of its nasty implications.

Please, media-types, stick to talking about the candidates in the context of actual political news. Your disgusting prejudices are slightly less obvious that way.

Racism at Fenway: News to no one but me

I don’t intend to blog about race issues much here because I am not very well informed, and because there are dozens of people of color doing amazing work, but this story, found through Racialicious, was a swift kick in the ovaries. Torii Hunter, an African-American baseball player, says that when he’s played in Boston he’s heard people call him the n-word and even throw beer and batteries at him.

Obviously, this is horrifying. My first instinct was to defend Red Sox fans, Not My Nigel-style. I’ve been to Fenway dozens of times, and I’ve never heard anyone utter a racial slur, much less seen someone throw something at a player. “Surely,” I thought to myself, “the people who used to count out Pedro Martinez‘s strikeouts in Spanish, who made up Japanese signs to welcome Daisuke Matsuzaka to Boston, who still won’t let Dave Roberts buy his own drinks, who celebrate Manny Ramirez’s ever-changing hair, and who so readily embraced David Ortiz’s decidedly Latino nickname — surely they couldn’t really be hurling hate speech and projectiles at opposing players?”

But being dismissive of reports of racism is, obviously, a symptom of and a method of perpetuating a racist system. So when I thought about it for, oh, half a second, I realized that of course these people could be doing these terrible things. Because, first and foremost, why would anyone lie about that? What does Torii Hunter gain from exposing racist treatment? And thinking for another half second made me realize that all my objections are stupid. So I personally haven’t heard anyone use that term or seen anyone throw anything. So what? I’m white, no one would say it to me; there are thousands of games at Fenway that I don’t attend, and thousands of fans out of my ear- and eye-shot when I do. So fans love minority Red Sox players. So what? It’s easy to love the home team, but much harder to respect the opposition. Furthermore, Torii Hunter plays center field, which, at Fenway, is directly in front of the cheapest, drunkest, rowdiest seats in the house, and he is renowned for making amazing leaping catches that turn sure home runs into the world’s longest outs. Do I believe that if he made one of his astounding defensive plays in a close game that the Fenway Faithful might curse him and even throw things? If I’m honest with myself, yeah, yeah I do.

I’m not trying to mitigate the offense. No matter how happily Sox fans embrace the racial diversities of our own team, or how frustrated and drunk were the fans who assaulted Hunter (and other opposing players over the years), nothing excuses their abominable behavior, because nothing lessens the hurt it causes or erases the hateful attitudes it reveals. But I have the urge, however misguided, to defend Sox fans not just because I have been trained to turn a blind eye to racism and attempt to discredit those who point it out, but also because I really believed that in a city famous for its continued de facto segregation and racial tensions, there was one oasis where Bostonians would unreservedly accept people of all colors. I was naive; I was wrong. But losing that illusion is breaking my heart, because I love this city and I have no idea how to reconcile that with my horror of its racism, if that’s even possible.

While I try to work this out, I resolve to stop living in denial of the racism under my own nose, and to work harder to confront and change those attitudes, including my own. And I will keep hoping that things really are getting better, however slowly.