Author, research fellow at Hoover Institute of Stansford, African-American conservative Shelby Steele, applies his brilliance to the Gates/cop imbroglio:
"From Emmitt Till to Skip Gates: Black victim, white oppressor. It’s a narrative we know well."
"If the Henry Louis Gates imbroglio makes anything clear it is that, in 2009, the mere implication of racial profiling in the arrest of a black professor on the nothing charge of disorderly conduct is sufficient to trigger a national (if not international) furor involving even the president of the United States. This incident shows us an America so chastened by its racist past—and so determined to overcome that past—that, at least for a moment, the national politics (health care, Iran, recession) stopped as the country combed over a six-minute encounter between a black academic and a white policeman. ...
"And suddenly, there before me was a photograph of the worst thing I had ever seen: the bludgeoned and mangled body of Emmitt Till, the 14-year-old black boy killed by whites in Mississippi for supposedly looking at or whistling at a white woman. He was a Chicago boy (like me) who had gone South to visit family and had simply walked into this terrible fate.
Emmitt Till had walked into a cultural narrative in which his role was already tragically written.
"It was a narrative designed to preserve white supremacy. So it gave power—the right to kill—to any white claiming to defend the honor of white women. Whether Emmitt Till whistled at or stared at the woman, or did nothing at all (there is much debate here), he somehow affronted white supremacy and annihilation was his punishment. His murderers were exonerated. Everyone in America knew this cultural narrative. Anyone could have told him not to whistle at that white woman...
" But then Skip Gates was tired. What was President Barack Obama’s excuse? Why did he step into the same cultural narrative that Mr. Gates had tried and failed with?
Where race is concerned, I sometimes think of the president as the Peter Sellers character in “Dr. Strangelove.” Sellers plays a closet Nazi whose left arm—quite involuntarily—keeps springing up into the Heil Hitler salute. We see him in his wheelchair, his right arm—the good and decent arm—struggling to keep the Nazi arm down so that no one will know the truth of his inner life. These wrestling matches between the good and bad arms were hysterically funny.
"When I saw Mr. Obama—with every escape route available to him—wade right into the Gates affair at the end of his health-care news conference, I knew that his demon arm had momentarily won out over his good arm. It broke completely free—into full salute—in the “acted stupidly” comment that he made in reference to the Cambridge police’s handling of the matter."
Here's the rest: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204619004574322054186035002.html#mod=rss_opinion_main
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