Noemie Emery: Prisoners of their own narratives
By: Noemie Emery
Examiner Columnist
August 5, 2009
Second only to the words "teachable moment," the term "narrative" has become central to the great Cambridge dust-up, as the explanation of how one's behavior is formed. In other words, one responds less to events than to the frame in which one sees them, which is based on expectations, and prior experience. When the expectations and the experience have been intense, the narratives are often compelling and powerful. But this does not mean they should always be trusted, as they can often be terribly wrong.
In 1963, as explained by James Piereson in his book on the JFK murder, the meme was created that he was in danger from segregationists and/or Right-wing extremists, as violence had greeted his efforts to enforce civil rights laws, and members of the John Birch Society (which had called Eisenhower a Communist) had turned their wrath upon him.
When in fact he actually was shot while in Dallas, blame fell on the Right, and a "climate of violence," which the emerging fact that he was killed by a communist because of the Cold War did nothing whatever to change.
In 2006, the press looked forward to the collapse of Iraq, based on the much-loved Vietnamese model, citing hubris and arrogance, a dim Texas president, and the wise advice of the press and pundits, which was being so sadly discounted. When the war turned around, the press simply ignored it, unable to deal with emerging reality.
After the fact, it stopped saying the war was lost, but always had trouble saying we won it, much less that Bush did, and against the advice of itself and the experts. As in the Kennedy case, people did know the facts, but could not seem to absorb, much less to admit, them. The narratives that they had established were much too important to drop.
The Cambridge affair, as much as these others, is an example of narrative running amok. In the Henry Gates narrative, he was in his own home minding his business when James Crowley showed up for no reason, and stunned him by asking for proof of his residence. "It's clear that [Crowley] had a narrative in his head," Gates would write later. "A black man was inside someone's house, probably a white person's house, and this black man had broken and entered, and this black man was me."
Left out of Gates' narrative was the fact that he had broken and entered, which was the proximate cause of police being present. In Crowley's real narrative, he had been called to the scene of a possible break-in, which made anyone found there a possible suspect, and he was doing his job according to protocol when the suspect unleashed a stream of abuse. "He acted very irrational," Crowley said later. "There was references to my mother, something you wouldn't expect from anybody that should be grateful that you're there investigating a report of a crime."
Gates' fears, it turned out, were not wholly misplaced, as one Cambridge policeman was fired for having made bigoted comments, but they did not apply to the conduct of Crowley, who had an impeccable record as regards race relations, and was warmly defended by two black associates. (The narrative therefore had some plausibility, but not in the setting in which it was used.)
Each narrative struck a nerve in those most conditioned to sympathize with it: The Black mayor, the Black governor, and the Black president all supported the Harvard Black-studies professor, while law enforcement officials all over the country said the president had just made their jobs that much harder. Gates thought Crowley was racist, while Crowley seemed to think Gates was demented. Each had a narrative that made its owner the hero and victim, but Gates took the game one step further, by assigning to Crowley a mindset that didn't exist.
Kennedy was killed by a Communist because of Cold War, not by the Right-wing or a "climate of violence;" Bush was not Lyndon B. Johnson, and Gates and his friends didn't have a clue as to what Crowley was thinking. Perhaps the best thing we can take from this "teachable moment" is to put this narration fixation away.
Examiner columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of "Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families."
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