Posted on 08/28/2009 4:06:52 AM PDT by Altura Ct.
Nodding to Professor Henry Louis (Skip) Gates Jr. at his Whaling Church panel discussion Achieving Equality in the Age of Obama last night, Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell shook her head and said: ”If you had told me this time last year, when we were all pretty emotionally up and excited, even though George W. Bush was still our President, that we would actually feel worse a year later, when Barack Obama was our President, about questions of race in America, I would have told you you were lying.”
Yet Mr. Gates acknowledged his part in bringing down the mood nationwide when he began by recounting his “bizarre” arrest at his Cambridge home; first getting the handcuffs moved from his back to front, then rolling down the window of the police cruiser and calling out to his secretary, “Call Tree,” meaning lawyer and Harvard colleague Charles Ogletree. He thanked many in the audience for their support, including for helping him get off the Vineyard for that White House beer though fog had grounded the planes. “How bad would that have been? Officer James Crowley had been there and we’d been up here at the Inkwell, sipping chardonnay, covered by Fox News. That was not going to be too good.”
But he acknowledged that his Ivy League connections worked for him at the jail. “This isn’t about me. I was in jail for a total of four hours . . . what about the people in jail for four days, or four months, or four years? It’s about fairness under the law, race-neutral application of the law.
“There are one million black men in jail or prison and on July 16 this summer I became one of them . . . what about all those men and women who languish unfairly in prison every day, who are racially profiled every day, who have no recourse, no hope of salvation no way to break that cycle?
“I hope to use my experience to work to address the overwhelming problem of the massive number of African Americans who are hopelessly caught in the web of the criminal justice system, a disastrous problem that is destroying the very fabric of our community.”
Panelist Lawrence Bobo, another Harvard professor, had the numbers: one in 100 Americans are behind bars, one in 15 African Americans; or one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34. Next to him, Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond noted that the United States had five per cent of the world’s population, but 25 per cent of the world’s prison population.
Most of these were nonviolent criminals, Mr. Bobo said. Arbitrary disorderly conduct charges — the initial, later dropped, charge against Mr. Gates — was part of the reason, as was drug use. Professor Bobo acknowledged NAACP president Ben Jealous, present in the crowd, for campaigning to turn “tough on crime” policies to “smart on crime.”
Yet New York Times columnist Charles Blow, also on the panel, got a more tepid response when he said he should never have invited Officer Crowley to the White House rapprochement.
“You don’t get an invitation for fabrication,” he said. “That created in my mind an awful tableaux which was that not even a black President can get away with speaking out of turn against white authority, and [Officer Crowley] did not have to be contrite.
“To put it behind you, that to me was not the message of post-racial reconciliation that I needed from that situation,” Mr. Blow said.
Moderator Charlayne Hunter-Gault had asked each panelist about whether the election of Barack Obama made America post-racial; answers ranged from “I don’t know what that means,” to “no,” to “There ain’t nothing post-racial about the U.S.A.” — the last from Mr. Bobo who cited three Vineyard bumper stickers” I’ll show as much respect to your president as you showed mine,” “Had enough change yet?” and “Don’t blame me, I voted for the old white guy.”
Though an African American was in the Oval Office, black kids suffered dramatic inequality in educational opportunities, said Ms. Darling-Hammond; the difference between public school spending per child varied from $40,000 per year to $4,000 per year in “apartheid schools” with 90 per cent minorities who lacked textbooks, music or art classes and where there was a 50 per cent teacher turnover rate each year.
So, she said, the U.S. now ranked 35th out of 40 industrialized countries in math achievement, 31st in science and at the bottom tier in graduation rates. The U.S. had slipped from first to 16th in higher education. “Almost all of this comes from inequality,” said the woman who was head of the Obama transition team in education. Depressingly, she said the country had work to do to implement the 1896 Plessy (“separate but equal”) Supreme Court mandate in schools, let alone the integration required by Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954.
Panelist Claude Steele, the first African American to be provost at Columbia University, explained integration wasn’t the only problem. Black kids, he said, suffered “stereotype threat anxiety,” of knowing that others didn’t believe they could do it. But this could be remedied, he said, by teachers who gave the right critical feedback: saying it’s a very demanding task but affirming the child’s ability to achieve.
Ms. Harris-Lacewell, who said her sense of hopefulness was largely dashed, did take heart from President Obama’s election in what she called a referendum on white supremacy. (She explained the Republicans’ choice of Sarah Palin for vice president as “Obama has out-whited us on white elitism so we’re going to go for, like, the hunting whites.”)
On election day, she said, “As African Americans have stereotype threat anxiety in the classroom . . . that they will under perform in intellectual tasks, any white Americans felt stereotype threat about the voting booth . . . what if they went in there and accidentally voted for the white guy?”
The Obama campaign, she said, responded as Mr. Steele suggested teachers should: “Ah, this is a difficult task for you — but you can do it!
“And sure enough we saw white Americans over performed and Barack Obama got elected,” Ms. Harris-Lacewell said.
There was discussion of how to have personal conversations about race, but Ms. Darling-Hammond said, systemic changes were critical: “When you make the investment, you change the opportunity structure. [Some seem to be saying] social action is futile and it’s not.”
Ms. Harris-Lacewell said it was not about how we all talk it out, but about how the state applies power. “All of us could of course work on making sure we are the most upright, uprighteous, pants on, name their kid Jason instead of Jamal . . .” but it wouldn’t change the power structure.
To a crowd packed with the so-called black elite, she said: “For me, one of the most exquisite benefits of the stupid Skip Gates arrest in his home, is the lie that it gives to the notion that respectability will make you safe.”
And whose fault might that have been? Hmmmm?
Sound like characters in a kids book.
You know what these racist miss: equality is here, and they can’t handel it......those mired in the old days can’t see that it’s already happened and now it’s the turn of the Latinos to come up into America....
And personally, I feel the blacks have been hurt by the bomb and his radical buddies, because he has now made it appear that blacks accept all this communist stuff, when they, just like everyone who comes to America, just want to be Americans and get on with living the American dream
These asshole communist left overs from the 60’s missed the opportunity to destroy the country, it was stronger than them, and now they are trying, with this one last grab, to over throw everything America stands for, and they have hurt the black cause for years.......blacks who just wanted to live their lives as equals, and millions and millions have already joined the ranks through hard work and doing the normal right things, are now tainted by these treasonous acts of the crook in chief, and those who pull his strings...
That is the first I heard that his secretary was there at his arrest as well. Why would they be there the second he returns from a long trip to China?
Maybe if they would stop breaking the law, they would not be in jail???????
I live in a northern city that until the 1970’s had only a handful of blacks. Now, with folks moving here from Detroit and Chicago (supposedly to get away from the scum there), their social pathologies have followed them up here. Now about one-half of all break-ins, assaults, murders, etc. are by black people.
They are not in jail for nothing.
LOL.
Charles Blow said:
““You don’t get an invitation for fabrication,” he said. “That created in my mind an awful tableaux which was that not even a black President can get away with speaking out of turn against white authority, and [Officer Crowley] did not have to be contrite.”
Hey, Chuck, the officer had exactly ZERO reason to be contrite!
Racial equality is a red herring.
The goal is PERSONAL equality of opportunity, where the chance to succeed is the same for every person, regardless of their creed, color, or gender chromosome.
To Skip gates, equality is measured as a group, regardless of merit, and the group is defined by the color of one’s skin.
Skip gates has a dream - that some animals should be more equal than others.
"Respectability" stands for "respectable behavior", not just a position on the faculty of a liberal bastion university (but I repeat myself). These rectal orifices appear to think having a "name" supercedes anything they might actually DO.
"Do you know who I am" is running amok!
LLS
LOL!
Yeah, it’s a long way off as long as these racialists continue to bequeath hatred to the next generation.
The reason people are in jail is because they broke the law, not because of their skin color.
Their real problem is that they don't like themselves. Wallowing in such hatred like pigs in their own filth, one can hardly blame them.
Just don't cross my path in anger.
All I can say to the esteemed Professor is that I’m a mid sized over 40 White guy who has a dream of playing professional basketball in the NBA. I can’t jump very well any more and my jump shot ain’t what it used to be. In the name of “racial diversity”, could you get me on the team?
If racial equality ever arrives, Gates will no longer have a job at Harvard.
Gates was put in a cell? I thought they would have at least let him sit in a chair next to a desk handcuffed. Oh well, don't yell at cops.
Exactly, gates strives to keep it alive by marxist crap flowing out of his mouth. Sure there is a huge black crime problem, the bulk of it is bad parenting and failures in them getting in the “system”. Others that have gotten in the system have done real well!
Africans in general fail to get in the system as they have never had civiiization in the whole of africa..... and they like, love and understand what we call corruption. My experience points to them remembering the tribal thing. Also, at home, as africans, they are very racist. Thats why the periodic rwandas. I have spent time in three countries and witnessed the my tribe is better than yours down to the violence that comes from it.
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