muckefuck | This is where the party ends

Entry tags:

politics,
rant

This is where the party ends

So there I am having a pleasant conversation with my friend (who I'll call Coleman) and our new acquaintance. He's a bit theatrical, but engaging enough. We're all comparing notes on our religious upbringings and lightheartedly debating the merits of Catholic vs. Jewish services. If not for the presence of a television set in the room, the banter could've likely gone on indefinitely, much to the enjoyment of all.

But there is a television present, it's showing a news programme, and there's a portrait of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Coleman is distracted, chatting with Miss April, so I'm the sole beneficiary of the tirade this man launches into. No reason to reproduce it here; if been anywhere in the States this week (including the American blogosphere) you've already heard it a dozen times. But there eventually comes a point where I can no longer grit my teeth, and that point is when he says, "Gates' ancestors were freed blacks in the North so he's never experienced repression."

How does one respond to such vicious cluelessness? (Assume for the purposes of your response that simply decking the man is off the table.) The two choices apparent to me were to say, "What the FUCK would you know about it, you privileged white motherfucker?" and start a knock-down drag-out argument with biting and scratching or to say as little as possible and leave immediately. Out of consideration for Coleman, I did the latter.

Can we just call a moratorium on this shit? Anytime we have an cause célèbre involving race, can we set aside one day only for members of the dominant class to lecture the rest of us on what it's like to be a POC and then have them keep their supremely unedifying opinions to themselves forever after?

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In substance, yes. but also:

sorry, you lost me at "ancestors."

That "logic" doesn't even parse.

Even if it were true, didn't he teach at Duke before Harvard, and moved because he was sick of the crap people dished him there? So, yeaaahhh.

Also: born in West Virginia in 1950, and never experienced repression??

POC?

"Pirate Of the Caribbean"

In this weird story, I keep wondering about the woman who phoned the police. Apparently, she didn't recognize her neighbor. Is this just bad facial recognition ability (I have that), or not bothering to get to know your neighbors, or racism in the sense of people tend to be better at recognizing members of their own race and not others.

On the one hand, she didn't live in the neighbourhood, she only worked there. Her home is in Malden, which is about eight miles from Cambridge. On the other hand, she worked for the alumni magazine, which makes her inability to recognise one of Harvard's most famous faces particularly odd. Sure, her initial viewing may have been fleeting and from a distance, but she stuck around to serve as a witness. In the fifteen minutes or so of waiting for police to arrive, it never once dawned on her who the old man with a cane was? This has led some to speculate that she made the call knowing full well who he was, but I don't buy that. It's like once she decided she was seeing someone who didn't belong there, she couldn't "resee" him as someone known and trusted.

It turns out, she couldn't see well enough to identify the race of the men on the porch, let alone recognize an individual.

Gates told the Globe yesterday in an e-mail... he’s partial to Red Stripe and Beck’s. He may not get his pick, as they are foreign beers, which are not stocked at the White House, under a tradition dating to the Johnson administration.

Dirty elitist! At least Crowley drinks all-American Blue Moon (a Belgian-style faux-Canadian beer).
I wonder if the White House serves Budweiser these days.
(Sorry. I expended any energy I had for saying serious things about this topic a while ago)

According to that report, she could see well enough to determine their conspicuous lack of whiteness (reportedly speculating during the call that one might be Hispanic) at the time that she made the call.

And your point is what, that obviously her call was motivated by the fact that one of the men "might" have been hispanic rather than that they were visibly breaking into a home in a area that had had a lot of burglaries lately?

The rush to demonize this person for calling the police (as in my opinion she absolutely should have done) is the thing I hate the very, very most about this story. But that may be because I live in a high-crime neighborhood lousy with guilty white liberals.

Elsewhere, I've argued stridently against exactly such demonisation. In our CAPS meetings, the beat officers always stressed the point that we weren't investigators, it wasn't up to us to determine whether a crime was actually being committed or not. Our responsibility as citizens was simply to report all suspicious behaviour and leave it to the police to sort out which incidents warranted further investigation, which is why I fault them in this case for making an international incident out of what should've been a routine call.

At the same time, I find it hard to accept that the race of the men--even if imperfectly known--played no role whatsoever in the incident. Perhaps I'm being horribly unfair to Ms Whalen and she would've been every bit as conscientious in reporting the apparent break-in had it involved two ivory-skinned blonde women. But I've simply lived in our imperfect world too long to be entirely convinced of that.

Your attitude is schizophrenic. Either you call in suspicious activity to the police and let them sort it out, or you don't call anything in in case your motives aren't pure. Or you figure the odds of cops mistreating suspects is very high and don't call anything in for that reason (this behavior in very poor areas is easy to understand; it's not like police ever put things right enough to make a difference in your life anyway, so why ruin somebody else's day?)

Trust me, if the person across the street is worried about whether she's only worried about a black guy breaking into my house because he's black, my stuff will have already been fenced by the time she makes up her mind to place a call. Both times I've had my purse snatched, it was an occasion where a guy was making me nervous, but I decided to ignore the fear signals my gut was sending me because I thought I was probably just worried about him because he was black. The one minor sexual assault I've experienced in my life, exact same deal. Why do I feel so afraid of that group of black guys? Am I a racist? Well I won't cross the street, by gum, not me. Oh, oops.

Yeah, I saw that on the teevee today when I was at the gym. I wonder what the 911 tapes will produce.

I wonder if she couldn't tell that the man was old and had a cane.

What a mess! We'll see if the Prez can thread his way through the race-n-class stuff.

A couple of times I've walked by a man using a coat hanger to get inside a locked car. This was during the day and each man was plump and middle-aged. I didn't call the cops, since my prejudice is that people who break into cars do it at night and are young and skinny.

It's hard to make that judgment call about when to dial 911. When I hear a high-pitched scream, I have to decide whether it's kids playing or somebody in trouble. I do, however, always call 911 when men are screaming or fighting, even if they are plump and middle aged.

I'm just a bundle of prejudices! I should go to CAPS myself.

I'm just a bundle of prejudices!

We all are, IMHO. Which is one of the many reasons I don't want to insist that people must be spiritually perfect before placing 911 calls.

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