Liberal> Alexander Cockburn> Progressive Illusions

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Progressive Illusions

White America is never more vividly and comically racist than when trying to excuse impromptu racist utterance or deny the racism of American society, which is manifest in every number, every graph and scatter plot in the annual Statistical Abstract of the United States.

It was a former governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, regarded as an impeccable progressive in matters of race, who denied any racist motive for launching his final presidential drive in 1988 by appearing at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in the 1960s and where Reagan wooed the white south in 1980. The great and courageous black attorney, J.L. Chestnut, one of two black people in the huge audience, recalled Ronald Reagan crying that "'the South will rise again and this time remain master of everybody and everything within its dominion.' The square came to life, the Klu (sic) Kluxers were shouting, jeering and in obvious ecstasy. God bless America."

So eight years later, Dukakis visited the fair, to give the white voters a tacit message. It didn't do him any good. His campaign blew up amid race baiting first by his Democratic rival Al Gore, who denounced Dukakis for giving a weekend furlough from prison to a black criminal called Willie Horton. George Bush Sr. soundly whacked Dukakis using the same charges.

White progressives have been cheering Barack Obama's "tough love" homilies to delinquent black dads, content that he spares white or Hispanic dads any such reproof. Maybe the support for Sgt. James Crowley and the vilification of Obama and Henry Louis Gates will come as a wake-up call, though I doubt it. Bill Clinton was probably the most disastrous president for blacks in postwar history, in terms of criminal justice policies, removal of social safety nets and systematic vilification of young black mothers for having babies (at an optimal time for the babies' care and survival). Yet if you call Clinton worse an effective racist than Reagan, they'll quack with incredulous raillery and remind you that it was a black writer, Toni Morrison, who called Clinton "our first black president." So?

In retrospect, we can see what a lucky fellow Obama was to have had, during his run for the presidency last year, a radical black pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, as his opponent in an argument about race and racism in America. Obama scored big with whites for his measured put-down of Wright as the embittered voice from an angry past, now being thankfully overtaken by a mellower and more sensible age of racial reason. And in an added irony, the most supportive black voice for this hopeful posture was that of the Harvard prof Gates, who shot into the headlines last month after being arrested by a white Cambridge cop, Sgt. Crowley.

The irony stems from the fact, as Ishmael Reed, author of two marvelously acrid and funny pieces on the Gates affair on the CounterPunch website, points out, that Gates had become the darling of white liberals for putting down blacks in exactly the same manner as Obama had adopted with Wright.

In the New Yorker and kindred outlets, Gates would serve up anodyne pottage about race being "a social construct" and would whack deadbeat black dads, cuing Obama to the same sort of grandstanding, all of which fell like music upon the ears of white opinion-formers always receptive to black people prepared to utter "difficult truths" — viz., that African-Americans had and have only themselves to blame for most if not all of their problems.

The presiding deity over this nonsense for many years was the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who won hundreds of admiring editorials in the New York Times for his supposed courage and intellectual integrity in serving up "difficult truths" to white Americans eager for scholarly reassurance that they had nothing to apologize for.

Then suddenly here were Gates and Obama both catching a torrent of abuse from whites for shouting at white cops and calling them racists and stupid. We can safely stipulate here that plenty of white cops are violence-prone racists by assigned role, since they are the whites' first line of defense, furnished with awesome firepower, complicit prosecutors, indulgent forensic laboratories, mostly white juries and a mostly white press in the endless battle to keep the dangerous classes generally and the blacks specifically in their place. If the job requires you to be "stupid" — by overreacting to the level of shooting an elderly black woman holding a cell phone on the grounds you thought she was armed and about to shoot to kill — then so be it.

Crowley became the overnight darling of the right-wing talk radio and roundtable TV hosts, just as Joe the Plumber did last fall. Obama's senior aides, aghast at the uproar that took the big battle over health insurance off the front pages, successfully urged Obama to say that Gates might have acted unreasonably and to recapture the high ground by inviting Gates and Crowley to the White House for a manly beer and constructive chat, duly hailed in its aftermath last Wednesday by the president as "friendly, thoughtful and positive." It would have required Gates and Crowley to be carried out on stretchers after bloody combat for Obama to have said anything else.

It was Gen. Colin Powell who stepped up to criticize Gates and thus endorse Crowley. Can we hope Gates has learned a lesson? Nope. He's back at his crowd-pleasing antics, pledging more beers with Crowley and seeing what he can do about getting his kids into Harvard. Ishmael Reed asked caustically here, "Maybe the officer who killed a black man in Oakland the other night should send in her children's application to Gates. Is Gates a candidate for the Stockholm Syndrome?" Scarcely a candidate, Ishmael. Stockholm Syndrome captured Prof Gates long, long ago and did his career no end of good. The entire event was positive only for Crowley.

Alexander Cockburn is co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of the new book "Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils," available through www.counterpunch.com. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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This piece is a work of incoherence. It only adds to the current American compulsion to see race at the bottom of everything, and of course everyone but Cockburn fails the test of political correctness when it comes to that. Sometimes you nail it Cockburn, but not this time.

For one thing, it is perhaps more racist for someone like you to perpetuate the notion that race was entirely at the bottom of the Gates/Crowley incident, as well as the entire history of civilization leading up to it, than it was for Crowley supporters to back their man. All they were doing was supporting their own, as cops and their fellow travelers tend to do, regardless of the sin committed.

The Gates/Crowley incident was only about race because racists of all stripes were looking for yet another event to label as a racial incident. You of all people should know this.

Gates mouthed off at his own home as he had every right to do, whether or not it was a prudent thing to do. Crowley had no business taking Gates in when he knew Gates had committed no crime. It was all about Crowley's pride, and it was an incredibly poor example of cop behavior for a cop trainer of all people to be modeling. But none of that had to be about race, and we will never really be able to tell if it was.

The fact is, the same thing could have happened white on white, black on black, or even black on white. What would the racial political-correctness quarterbacks have done with any of those scenarios? The issue was abuse of power and lack of professionalism by the cop exercising it, not race. Until Gates and the rest of the pilers on made it the issue, that is, and they succeeded in doing so to the point that all the racial claptrap obliterated any chance for those trying to make sense of the news to get the real point.

Gates was entitled to be a hothead at the moment, when he had just gotten home and was under no obligation to be rational or polite. But once he had been released and had an opportunity to cool off, he kept it up and turned the whole thing into a false national finger-pointing contest about racism, when it should have been about something very different.

What if he had exercised some leadership and said something like: "Folks, this was not really about race--it could have happened to anybody. Maybe I lost my cool when I shouldn't have, but I was in my own home and I committed no crime. When a person is in his own home he has no obligation to act like a professional, be polite, or frankly to anything else as far as the police are concerned other than refrain from breaking any law. The officer in this case was a professional and is trained and paid by our tax dollars to act like one while on duty, just as I am expected to act like a professional when I'm on duty. Do we really want a police force that will arrest someone in his own home just to get even when there is no evidence that a crime has been committed? How many times does this kind of thing happen to someone without the clout to make it a national issue?"

What a lesson this all is in how immature and self-destructive folks can get when they decide they just don't want to act like adults.

Comment: #1
Posted by: Masako
Fri Aug 14, 2009 11:57 AM