THE LOUIS GATE'S INCIDENT:FROM A EUROPEAN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE

All the media ingredients were there: an African American male, a neighbor with stereotypical glasses thinking ‘black equals criminal,’ The African American suspect becomes belligerent towards police found breaking into his own home. Mind you, this was after it was determined that it was the African American’s home.

Louis Gates, well-known scholar, writer, professor at Harvard, gets put into a cop car, I can imagine his head held down so he doesn’t hit the top of vehicle frame; it’s obvious that when Gates is accosted by police at his own home, that he gets angry at the police force’s unpleasant etiquette of arrest on a black man. White law enforcement on black homeowner. There’s your story for the front page.

Some social scientists have called these kinds of daily harassments and biased actions towards people of color ‘microaggressions.’ Each day many people of color are assaulted with these ‘microaggessions,’ and they add up. Their sum is health problems, and emotional consequences. A chiropractor will tell you that all of the countless traumas that have been perpetrated against our bodies finally reach a traumatic place of breakage, finally our pain yells its devilish invectives, so that we take action and go seek a solution.

Louis Gates is probably no exception to the affects of ‘microagressions.’ Whites never have to think of these actions because, for the most part, we are not victims of them. And due to our whiteness, most of us don’t possess the art of empathy to place ourselves in similar dilemmas. Most whites never have to even think of racism or police work gone awry, because we don’t deal with it every day, as do people of color.

In the coverage I read in the New York Times there definitely, in my observation, was a pro law enforcement bias; there were accompanying articles about the courage of police persons every day when they put on their badges and guns, and confront the obnoxious behavior of citizens. I would admit that probably the majority of the time, they do their jobs, do them well, and protect the community. But the story about Louis Gates had little to say about the unprofessional work of the police in checking out first who Gates was, where he lived, and questioning with more specificity the caller who reported this so-called “crime.”

It’s no secret that incidents of police (especially white officers) brutality, negligence and plain old unprofessional police work, have been a consistent problem in communities of color for as long as I can recall. There is a huge credibility gap between those who ‘protect and serve’ and the residents of communities, mostly in the inner cities. Our culture still idealizes law enforcement, because it gives us the illusion that we are safe and secure, when we know we aren’t really. In general, my assessment is we want to give a “bye” to law enforcement departments, systems, and personnel so the white population can bury its head in its own blindness to the problem.

President Obama’s first statement about the Gates’ incident was most likely from his heart. The President said that the police department acted ‘stupidly,’ which it did. Then after the police department organized a formal protest, Obama made another statement which was much more apologetic and conciliatory. This one was from his political know-how and ingenuity. Like myself, many people who are keenly aware of racism in this society hoped for a stronger stand against an infraction by police that has become a regular part of our nation’s social injustices. I can imagine as well, that some African Americans will view Obama’s action as ‘uncle Tomish.’

At some point, with the power, influence and the platform, Obama will need to bring racial issues to the fore, and plant them squarely in the middle of the table. As a European American, I hope this happens. I’m ashamed for the Euro demographic in showing such ignorance and omission about the roots of its own white supremacist history, and how it continues to be perpetuated into our own time, i.e., the Louis Gates incident is just another example of racism with a new pair of clothes. It saddens me to see the incomprehensible gap between knowledge and action that exists as a part of our own social disease today.

© Christopher Bear Beam, M.A. July, 2009