Roger’s Rules

July 28th, 2009 1:01 pm

The Idiot’s Guide to Historical Revisionism. Chapter 18: Smile when you take that chip off your shoulder

They almost got away with it. Professor Henry Louis Gates and President Obama, I mean. As late as yesterday afternoon, I thought they were on the threshold of transforming an enormous embarrassment into a a public relations coup.

I suppose they still might succeed. The President is not stupid. He had hardly finished declaring that the Cambridge police department “acted stupidly” for arresting Professor Gates for disorderly conduct than he began to back and fill. I thought his “I-should-have-calibrated-my-words-differently” speech was a disgusting piece of political evasion, but its seems to have gone down pretty well with the liberal end of the commentariat. And then there was the “call me Jimmy,” “call me Barack” moment when the President rang up Sgt. Crowley to the White House for a “teachable moment” and a beer with Professor Gates.

For his part, Professor Gates had moved suddenly from threatening to sue Sgt. Crowley, accusing him of being a “rogue policeman,” agreeing with the President’s “acted stupidly” remark, to offering to “educate” Sgt. Crowley (and the rest of us!) about the history of racism and agreeing to join the White House beer fest with his friend, the President, and his arresting officer, Sgt. Crowley. Big hug, what?

Not quite. Who knows how that little pow-wow at the White House will go. But there is a bad case of disillusionment going around, and it’s affecting the public’s perception of both Professor Gates and the President. Until yesterday, it looked as if the racialist Left was going to succeed in rewriting this tidbit of American history. Now I have my doubts. Barack Obama was to be the hero of the new script, with Henry Louis Gates in a major supporting role. Sgt. Crowley was to be the (somewhat) lovable villain who Saw the Error of His Ways. I don’t think that scenario is going to wash. The just-released tape of the conversation between Sgt. Crowley and Lucia Whalen, who phoned the Cambridge police to report a possible break-in, puts paid to any question that the report, or Sgt. Crowley’s decision to investigate, was racially motivated.

Then there is the embarrassing conjunction of Professor Gates’s statement that he had devoted his career to “attempting to bridge differences and promote understanding among all Americans, especially between blacks and whites,” and the statement in his Yale College application that “As always, whitey now sits in judgment of me, preparing to cast my fate.” How’s that for promoting understanding?

But the event that will forever spoil the Obama-Gates effort to co-opt the moral high ground in this controversy was policewoman Kelly King’s testimony on behalf of her colleague Sgt. Crowley, against Professor Gates, and very much against President Obama. Race had “nothing to do” with Professor Gates’s arrest, Officer King said. The issue of race was just a “smokescreen” erected by Professor Gates to deflect the blame away from himself. As for President Obama and his comments about the Cambridge police: Kelly (who is black) was withering: “I supported him. I voted for him. I will not again.” I suspect that’s a litany that will be repeated in many, many households as the reality of this nasty little effort to rewrite history gets around.

Update: On the tape, Lucia Whalen is talking to the 911 dispatcher, not Sergeant Crowley.

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14 Comments

1. Mrs. Jackson:

Officer King was spectacular, wasn’t she?

Jul 28, 2009 - 3:05 pm 2. John E:

Regarding Kelly King’s comments (BTW what is her actual job/rank etc.?) I don’t know about “many, many households”. But I can tell you that litany has already taken hold in THIS African-American household as well as others I know about.

Jul 28, 2009 - 4:28 pm 3. David Thomson:

“the President rang up Sgt. Crowley to the White House to for a “teachable moment” and a beer with Professor Gates.”

I am all for a “teachable moment.” Barack Obama should teach Henry Louis Gates that he shouldn’t act like a racist fool when a white police officer is simply doing his job. Harvard University professors are not entitled to special privileges. Gate should then get on his knees and beg Officer Crowley for forgiveness.

Jul 28, 2009 - 7:22 pm 4. arhooley:

John E, you’ve got a teachable moment now. I am truly, sincerely curious: why did you vote for Obama? How did you view Jeremiah Wright? Why did you not believe the many, many people who said that what little we knew of Obama was not good?

Disclosure: I stopped voting Dem on September 11, and I’ve subjected myself to a similar inquisition.

Jul 28, 2009 - 9:08 pm 5. Robyn L:

Who will be teaching whom & what is the lesson?

Jul 29, 2009 - 2:05 am 6. firefirefire:

maybe Barry will give Jimmy Crowley the “I Won” speech?

Jul 29, 2009 - 5:07 am 7. martinofm:

My, my, aren’t you folks angry.
Of course, Gates acted like a jerk.
Of course, Crowley was pissed at the uppity nigger.
Of course, Obama got suckered into a swamp he ought to avoid.
And of course, his detractors and defenders will spin the whole pathetic soap opera to get maximum benefit.
Hurray for the First Amendment.

Jul 29, 2009 - 7:43 am 8. Professor Guvinoff:

#1, Mrs. Jackson.

Yes, she stood up for what she believes. At a time when the protocol made it impossible for her white colleague to speak up, she stepped up to the mike, so to speak. Her disappointment with the president was also very illuminating.

Jul 29, 2009 - 11:06 am 9. Dissenter:

“On the tape, Lucia Whalen is talking to the 911 dispatcher, not Sergeant Crowley.”

Correct, and people like the blogger shouldn’t spin the fact that Whalen never mentioned “two black men with backpacks”-as Crowley did in his police report-to keep saying the Sgt. was in the right. Until the gap between what the witness didn’t say and what the officer wrote is addressed, I’d say there is a problem for Crowley.

Jul 29, 2009 - 11:14 am 10. biblio44:

“…puts paid to any question that the report, or Sgt. Crowley’s decision to investigate, was racially motivated.”

Nice try, Roger. As if any police officer “decides” whether or not to investigate a report of a break-in in progress.

“But the event that will forever spoil the Obama-Gates effort to co-opt the moral high ground in this controversy was policewoman Kelly King’s testimony on behalf of her colleague Sgt. Crowley….”

One cop supporting another’s testimony — unheard of! I guess even race doesn’t trump what Michael Connelly (a wonderful novelist, btw) calls the “Blue Religion.”

Jul 29, 2009 - 12:08 pm 11. biblio44:

#4: “I stopped voting Dem on September 11….”

Who could blame you? I remember Bush’s first 8 months in office, when he made anti-terrorism his No. 1 priority … or was that tax cuts? I can’t quite remember….

The fact is that Bush put off meeting with security people about the al qaeda threat until August, despite repeated entreaties by those security people to do so (not to mention the memo delivered to his Texas ranch, the title of which he tried to have classified as secret — alas, to no avail).

Jul 29, 2009 - 12:17 pm 12. BARB:

Please see Ishmael Reed’s CounterPunch.org article on H. L. Gates:

How Henry Louis Gates Got Ordained as the Nation’s “Leading Black Intellectual”
Post-Race Scholar Yells Racism

By ISHMAEL REED

Now that Henry Louis Gates’ Jr. has gotten a tiny taste of what “the underclass” undergo each day, do you think that he will go easier on them? Lighten up on the tough love lectures? Even during his encounter with the police, he was given some slack. If a black man in an inner city neighborhood had hesitated to identify himself, or given the police some lip, the police would have called SWAT. When Oscar Grant, an apprentice butcher, talked back to a BART policeman in Oakland, he was shot!

Given the position that Gates has pronounced since the late eighties, if I had been the arresting officer and post-race spokesperson Gates accused me of racism, I would have given him a sample of his own medicine. I would have replied that “race is a social construct”–the line that he and his friends have been pushing over the last couple of decades.

After this experience, will Gates stop attributing the problems of those inner city dwellers to the behavior of “thirty five-year-old grandmothers living in the projects?” (Gates says that when he became a tough lover he was following the example of his mentor Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka as though his and Soyinka’s situations were the same. As a result of Soyinka’s criticisms of a Nigerian dictator, he was jailed and his life constantly threatened.)

(snip)

“Henry Louis Gates Jr. has never been shy about speaking up for affirmative action. Indeed, the prominent Harvard professor insists that he wouldn’t be where he is today without it. Odd, then, that when it came to assembling a staff to compile an encyclopedia of black history, Gates hired a group that was almost exclusively white. Of the up to 40 full-time writers and editors who worked to produce Encarta Africana only three were black. What’s more, Gates and co-editor K. Anthony Appiah rejected several requests from white staffers to hire more black writers. Mother Jones turned to Gates for an explanation of this apparent inconsistency.

“Did the staff members who expressed concern that the Africana team was too white have a point?”

Gates responded:

“It’s a disgusting notion that white people can’t write on black history–some of the best scholars of Africa are white. People should feel free to criticize the quality of the encyclopedia, but I will not yield one millimeter[to people who criticize the makeup of the staff]. It’s wrongheaded. Would I have liked there to be more African Americans in the pool? Sure. But we did the best we could given the time limits and budget.”

Jul 29, 2009 - 5:22 pm 13. John E.:

arhooley – in response to your questions:

Why did I vote for Obama? Two reasons: (1) he was better than the alternatives (not enough room here to elaborate properly), and (2) his election would represent an historical moment of some import.

How did I view Jeremiah Wright? A bit wacko but generally taken out of context in most of the sound bytes I heard. Representative of his generation but not the hate-monger the sound-bytes suggested.

Why did you I believe the many, many people who said that what little we knew of Obama was not good? See part (1) of my earlier reply concerning why I voted for him. Also, as evidenced by the election, many, many more people thought he was good enough to be elected.

But all the above notwithstanding, I believe in lifelong learning.