On Racism in America

I live in the South. In my town there is a park named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, that has a really big statue of Forrest in the center of it, and his body underneath the statue. Earlier this year in Tennessee, my home state, Chip Saltsman, the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party sent out a Christmas CD to members the of RNC which included a song called “David Ehrenstein’s ‘Barack the Magic Negro.’” The song was written by Paul Shanklin, a native of Memphis, my hometown. Some call the song daring, while others call it racist. I fall into the latter category. I won’t repost the song on this page, but you can find it pretty easily through a google search. I invite you to make up your own mind. I’ve heard white people use the “N” word rather liberally. If you try to correct them, they’ll say, “Why can they call each other that, but I can’t?” One thing I can tell you for certain, it sounds a lot different when they say it, than it does when Dr. Dre says it in one of his songs.
I’ve been around a lot of racists in my day. Society has not been purged of it. Some might even argue that it has gotten worse. Post 9/11, little white boys and white girls joined hands with little black boys and black girls, but not in the way that Martin Luther King Jr. would have ever dreamed. Content of character was forsaken for color of skin. Arab Americans became the target of violence. Of course, it still hasn’t been clear sailing for African-Americans, even with the election of Barack Obama as the first black President. Sadly, both races are to blame.
As I write this, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was recently arrested. Lucia Whalen, Gates’ neighbor, observed him and his driver attempting to forcefully open his front door, which was stuck. Believing the two men to be intruders, she called the Cambridge police. From this point, I don’t really want to continue the story, partially because the American news media has reported extensively on it and partially because I do not want to risk bias. Gates apparently accused Sgt. James Crowley of being a racist. Sgt. Crowley claims that Gates was being irate and refused to cooperate with him. Crowley’s police report on the incident is available on The Smoking Gun, and while it is only Crowley’s version of the events, I encourage everyone to look at it. A few days later, President Obama accused the Cambridge police of acting “stupidly” during their arrest of Gates.
I imagine it is pretty frustrating to have to deal with the police simply for trying to get into your own home, especially after you have just returned from an overseas trip. If you have ever seen one of Henry Louis Gates’ documentaries on PBS, then you know he usually exudes a rather calm demeanor. It is probably also frustrating to have deal with someone screaming at you and accusing you of being a racist, when you were simply trying to do your job. I applaud President Obama for inviting both men to the White House for a beer so they could talk it out, and I applaud both men for accepting the President’s offer.
As we have sat distracted by the incident involving Gates and Crowley, Judge Sonia Sotomayor sits in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. After making a statement about “a wise Latino woman,” and a ruling on a case involving firefighters in Connecticut (that I actually disagree with her on), she is now facing nuanced accusations of racism by men like Lindsey Graham and Jeff Sessions. She’s not the first Supreme Court justice nominee to face these accusations. In 2005, Justice Samuel Alito’s wife left his confirmation hearing crying, no longer able to face the accusations of racism hurled in her husband’s direction.
We are definitely living in a world were Affirmative Action is still needed, but what do we with the current predicament that we are in when every race now seems to have their very own race card? As the Republicans ponder how bad Sonia Sotomayor will be for white Americans, and Henry Louis Gates accuses Sgt. James Crowley of racial bias, our society rapidly moves into the direction of chaos. I feel like we should be over this by now.
Maybe we went wrong in the 90s. There were two cases that seemed very clear cut: Rodney King and O.J. Simpson. Sure King’s behavior prior to the events of that video that all of us who lived through the 90s have etched into our brain was unnecessary, but so was the officers continued beating of him once he was already on the ground. I have no doubt that their job was stressful. Maybe race had nothing to do with their attacks on Rodney King, but for years we had heard of the African-American’s quite tumultuous relationship with the Los Angeles Police Department and that video seemed to be evidence that that these stories were not simple folklore created by rappers. Three of the five officers were acquitted leading to the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Then there is the case of O.J. Simpson. Throughout his trial, he never seemed to show sadness or remorse for the passing of his ex-wife. A bloody glove was found on his property that matched another bloody glove found at his ex-wife’s condo. Blood was also found in his car which he claimed was from shaving. By 1994, O.J. Simpson was hardly an A-list celebrity. He claimed that he was framed by the police. His attorneys even implied that one of the detectives who investigated the case, Mark Fuhrman, was a racist, and might have framed Simpson for those reasons. They did produce tapes with Fuhrman using the N-word, but reason still stands that O.J. did it, and a civil case as well as a book Simpson attempted to publish seem to imply the same thing.
I understand that Simpson and King’s cases were two entirely different ballparks, but what they did share in common was that an entire community who was oppressed had their eyes on both of them. The other thing the cases shared in common was that they showed a flawed judicial system. O.J. had the money to be found innocent. Rodney King was a nobody, so in the eyes of the powers-that-be it really didn’t matter. In both cases, though with different results it seemed that color of skin was chosen once again in favor of content of character. Though if we are to be honest, the idea of race in the Simpson trial was simply a distraction. It was really all about class. In 2008, forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in my hometown, we saw our first black president take office. David Ehrenstein’s L.A. Times piece that inspired Paul Shanklin’s song implied that Obama was not Black enough. He was a “Magic Negro” like Will Smith who made white people not feel guilty. He wasn’t scary like Al Sharpton or Snoop Dogg. Some claimed he wasn’t a true African-American. His father wasn’t descended from slaves, but was a Kenyan immigrant. Others worried he was too Black, because of Jeremiah Wright.
Obama won because he did leave race out of it. He tried to keep the discourse focused on his platform, and Sonia Sotomayor also seems to be handling herself quite well with the Senate Judiciary Committee. What I think the majority of American voters liked about Barack Obama was where he was not willing to take the conversation. Maybe that was what Jessie Jackson and Rush Limbaugh could not understand. As the liberals in the media tried to attack Sarah Palin because her daughter Bristol had become an unwed mother, Obama cried foul. A candidate’s family was off limits. This may have nothing to do with race, but it does have everything to do with a change in the discourse, and though Obama may have slipped when stated that the Cambridge police had acted “stupidly,” he has been quick to try to put out any fires that could relate to the Henry Louis Gates case. This, I believe, is the change we voted for.

The Smoking Gun'spolice report concerning Henry Louis Gates' arrest:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/0723092gates1.html
David Ehrenstein's column "Obama the Magic Negro"
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ehrenstein19mar19,0,5335087.story