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How Henry Louis Gates Muted President Obama’s Voice on Race…

April 2, 2011 by  
Filed under News, Opinion, Politics, Weekly Columns

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(ThyBlackMan.com) I remember the summer of 2009 when I received the very first phone call from CNN about a black professor at Harvard University who’d been arrested on his front porch.  The professor’s name was Henry Louis Gates, a prominent black scholar in the field of African American studies.  Gates had been taken away in handcuffs by an officer named James Crowley, a man who apparently didn’t understand the political consequences of inconveniencing important Harvard professors.   

As a black public scholar myself and son of a police officer, I felt obligated to try to understand both sides of the situation.  Being close to police officers all my life, I know that officers can be incredibly abusive and disrespectful. I almost immediately saw the case of Professor Gates to be  more of a civil liberties issue than one of racial profiling.  One cannot presume that every arrest of a black man is the result of racism.  In the case of Gates, I found it confusing that he wanted to rally the troops of racial justice, but has almost never spoken out publicly in favor of other black men who’ve been shot by police or experienced more serious incidents in the past.

With that said, President Obama’s intervention into the Gates case was one of the most ill-timed, sloppiest manners by which any president has ever addressed the sensitive topic of race.  By stating that he didn’t know the facts, that he was admittedly biased and that the police acted “stupidly” in Gates’ arrest, Obama sent shockwaves throughout the world, angering white voters across the country.  When MSNBC asked me to write about Obama’s press conference on healthcare (where he made the Gates comment), they immediately changed my assignment to focus solely on what President Obama had said about his former professor.  

Since his bungled first attempt at even remotely addressing racial inequality in America, the president has remained as silent as a piece of bologna on nearly any issue that relates to black people.  President Obama has shown, however, that he is not above cronyism on other matters:  He shamelessly takes care of his friends from Harvard and it seems that his entire cabinet could be the Chicago City Council. But when it comes to his most loyal supporters, the African American community, we often hear that we’re just not important enough to be made into a presidential priority.   

President Obama’s words on the Gates case not only represented a wasted opportunity, it was the death of a president’s potential on the issue of civil rights.  To date, America has a slew of penitentiaries that are filled with hundreds of thousands of black and brown victims of a broken justice system, yet neither our president nor his black attorney general feels the least bit compelled to address this glowing problem that destroys black families and children all across America.  I could also mention the fact that black unemployment continues to go up while white unemployment is going down, and black kids are having their futures ruined by inner city schools that refuse to educate them properly.

I just received word that President Obama is going to attend the “Measuring the Movement” forum this week with Rev. Al Sharpton, Ben Jealous and Marc Morial.  I will be there as well, but I won’t be smiling and taking pictures with the president. There is a point at which black and brown people must demand consistent engagement and acknowledgement from our political leaders and stop trying to feed our children with pictures of the Obamas on the cover of Essence Magazine.  Black leadership must be tough leadership and we must be able to see tangible evidence that elected officials are representing the interests of our community.

The Amsterdam News recently reported that during President Obama’s visit to Harlem, those allowed to attend his key functions were not the black people from Harlem.  Instead, according to observers, the event was heavily attended by those who, according to State Senator Bill Perkins, represent “early money people and financial supporters.”  Most of us understand that one needs money in order to win elections.  But the last time I checked, money was not as important as loyal voters.

African Americans have caught onto a peculiar and uncomfortable elitism possessed by our nation’s first black president.  While America interprets the Henry Louis Gates debacle as one black man standing up for another, it was actually a Harvard alum standing up for a Harvard Professor. Had Gates been Sean Bell, the black man who was shot 50 times the night before his wedding, President Obama probably would not have said a word.  This is unfortunate, because the unconditional love that African Americans have shown toward the Obama Administration has not been returned by anything substantive.

Not long ago, hundreds of billions of dollars was taken from working class families in order to bail out the firms on Wall Street, and the unemployed nearly lost their livelihoods to tax cuts for the wealthy.  Well, African Americans have lost our chance to obtain real racial progress because the bulk of our political capital was spent on a front porch inconvenience of a wealthy Harvard Professor.  The wishes of blacks at Martha’s Vineyard have taken precedence over the matters that affect the rest of us, and this is highly unfortunate.

Staff Writer; Dr. Boyce Watkins 

Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition.  For more information, please visit http://BoyceWatkins.com.


Comments

2 Responses to “How Henry Louis Gates Muted President Obama’s Voice on Race…”
  1. AntBee says:

    @Martha,

    Would you please explain your comment/assumption that Mr. Obama lacks empathy for blacks?

    Thank you

  2. Martha says:

    You just gave America a reason to continue discriminating. It is natural for anyone to help out a friend. You have given racist America a whipping boy.

    The problem with Obama’s administration from the very beginning is that it had no “think tank” to provide minute by minute monitoring and policy recommendations. Every modern day president has had the use of such an apparatus.
    When Obama first go into office, I wondered which “think tank” organization would he choose.

    The purpose of “think tanks” are to analyze problems given to them by federal, state, city governments (and others) and come up with a report of findings and recommendations – this gives feedback before the requesting entity takes action.

    The requesting entity can use the information in the report , adopt the recommendations, push it back to the drawing board or reject it report findings completely – since the requesting entity paid for the report and has zero obligations to adopt anything in the report.

    So far no sign of any of this has happen in this administration.

    Previous administrations have used high powered “think tanks”, some conservative and some middle of the road. These organisations hire economists, mathematicians, statisticians, social scientists, educators, political scientists and more. These very “bright” folks come together, discuss the problems sent to them and collectively produce recommendations in the form a “report”.

    To use Mr. Gates as a “whipping boy” is unfair. There are so many other factors that have unpacked Obama from the black community that the Gates incident is just a “gnat in the bucket”.

    To explain a reasons for Obama’s lack of empathy for blacks, I leave for others, expert in human behavior or psychology to explain.

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