It sometimes seems that the most intense hope of some people in this country is that the nation will soon experience some really, truly grievous racial incident, some horror of horrors.
That will enable them to say that, yes, things may have improved a smidgen since slavery, lynchings and segregation, but just a smidgen. Underneath the pretense of vast betterment, they will then triumphantly declare, is seething white vileness.
No such occurrence? Why then they will have to settle for the next best thing, such as taking the unfortunate but far from horrific arrest of a black Harvard professor, surrounding it with unproved, hyped-up assumptions and then parading it back and forth as an example of cops doing what they would never do in the absence of racial motivations, stripping someone of both his rights and elementary human dignity.
The theory has already received a body blow. Supposedly, the calling of cops in the first place had been an instance of “racial profiling,” of someone seeing a couple of black guys in a mostly white neighborhood and supposing they must be up to no good, a prejudgment widely considered unfair even though statistics do show black men commit a hugely disproportionate share of violent crimes in urban areas.
It turns out, however, that the person who saw Henry Louis Gates Jr. and his driver pushing on the front door of his house made no mention in her 911 call of anyone being black.
As tapes verify, she did not even mention race until asked, and then said that one of the two might be Hispanic. This citizen did everything right, it seems to me.
Gates did not do everything right. He seems to have gone very nearly berserk when police showed up. The white arresting officer actually teaches classes on the avoidance of racial profiling. His partners that night were black and Hispanic.
The arresting officer did ultimately go too far, I think, but don’t police go too far with whites sometimes as well? Of course they do. It was not an arrest, but I once suffered a comparable kind of abuse at the hands of police, a violation of my rights as a judge later agreed. I happen to be white.
Still the Gates affair led to a veritable Niagara Falls of pontification with any number of somber voices informing us that we have not yet arrived at post-racial America, as if great hordes of people were running around saying we had.
The election of President Obama – who briefly joined in the Gates outcry only to later back up – did not mean all discrimination is done, although as Obama has himself repeatedly said in so many words, we’ve come a long way from the bad old days.
As he also recently said in a Bill Cosby-style speech, black parents must discipline their children into educational achievement and accomplishing other important goals. “No one has written your destiny for you,” he said, addressing the children themselves. “Your destiny is in your hands, and don’t you forget that.”
It is true of all groups and all individuals that we should deal firmly with injustices but should also be wary of that easiest and least productive of excuses for our failures – that others did us in.
Some rejoice in the victimhood argument and constantly search out ways to bolster it no matter how little it concurs with reality or how much it discourages people from the crucial self-rescue of looking to their own behavior. The purpose of the argument is no doubt to help people, but it doesn’t.
Examiner Columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected].
