Racism

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The Police, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Racial Profiling

I know the controversy is just beginning.  Volumes will be written about the incident in Cambridge.  Both sides will defend themselves and blame the other side.  Everyone will play the race card.  People who already mistrust President Obama because of his skin color will use his remarks as proof they are right.

The best commentary I’ve seen on the incident so far is from Joan Vennochi writing this morning in the Boston Globe.  In her regular op-ed column Vennochi wrote

The arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. by a Cambridge police officer is playing out along racial lines. But it’s also about power and machismo – on both sides.

Machismo.  That’s the key.  Gates, whether true or not, felt he was being treated differently than a white man would be in his own home.  Years of disparate treatment combined with the ego that comes from being an important and respected person in your field, caused him to lose his temper.  The police sergeant, James Crowley, faced with a potential break-in and a tired angry man reacted, not by backing down, but by arresting him.

Gates was in his own home when a Cambridge police officer responded to a call about a possible break-in at that address. The professor had just returned home from filming a documentary in China. His front door was stuck shut and his taxi driver helped him pry it open. Then, Sergeant James Crowley appeared at his door and demanded to see identification. Gates provided it, although some facts about how and when are in dispute.

The police report states that Gates was arrested after exhibiting “loud and tumultuous behavior, in a public place, directed at a uniformed police officer who was investigating a report of a crime in progress.’’ Gates disputes some information provided in the police report, but does acknowledge that he responded with anger.

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Human beings of all races have a tendency to react as Gates did, especially when they are tired, frustrated, and privileged. Police officers usually don’t like it. The question is whether this police officer responded more harshly because of skin color.

The answer isn’t obvious, but both men could use some sensitivity training. Gates shouldn’t have yelled at the police officer; still, what he did was irritating, not criminal. Once the officer determined Gates did live in the house, he should have left, no matter what the professor was shouting.

Harvey Silverglate, a criminal defense lawyer, civil liberties defender, and Harvard Law School graduate, believes Gates’s arrest should be investigated, but not only because of its racial implications: Was Gates arrested and held as a way to teach him a lesson? If so, asks Silverglate, “Is this acceptable, regardless of whether the citizen is white or black?’’

In an ideal world, no. When it happens to a black man, racism may be the easy explanation, but that doesn’t make it the only explanation. Life and power in 21st-century America are more complicated than that.

President Obama at his July 22 press conference offered this

Wednesday night’s press conference seemed to be a different deal as the president leaped into a highly charged controversy that has ignited passions across talk radio, the blogosphere and the old-fashioned water cooler.

But in fact, racial profiling was a major issue for Mr. Obama when he was in the Illinois legislature. He was the chief sponsor of a bill, which became law, that requires police to record the race, age and gender of all drivers they stop for traffic violations and for those records to be analyzed for evidence of racial profiling.

Mr. Obama, asked Wednesday what the incident said about race relations in America, noted up front that Professor Gates is a friend and that his comments might be biased. He said “words” had been exchanged and added:

“Now, I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that, but I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number three, what I think we know, separate and apart from this incident, is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. And that’s just a fact.” He added later that the incident was “a sign of how race remains a factor in this society.”

He also used biting humor, grinning broadly as he imagined being in Professor Gates’s seemingly preposterous circumstance of being arrested after trying to get into his own home.

“Here, I’d get shot,” Mr. Obama said, referring to his new address of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The whole racial profiling question becomes curiouser and curiouser as we learn that the officer involved spent time at the police academy teaching racial profiling.

I heard a discussion this morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe in which Joe Scarborough talked about the serious question of racial profiling and admitted that he would have probably had a similar reaction to Dr. Gates’ and likely would not have been arrested.  Perhaps what we need is a discussion of racial profiling and we can begin with a civil dialogue between Sergeat Crowley and Dr. Gates – an expert police profiler and one who has been profiled.  They both need to lose their machismo and have a serious talk.  No one would have to lose face and no one needs to apologize. Oh and yes, as Joan Vennochi suggested let’s throw in some sensitivity training.

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Lessons from the Sotomayor Hearings

Over the weekend two very interesting pieces appeared.  One was Frank Rich’s column  in the New York Times, the other Melissa Harris Lacewell in the Nation.  Both approach the subject of Senatorial attitude toward a Latina woman.  One writer is a middle aged white male and former New York Times theater critic, the other a young, African American professor at Princeton. 

Here is Rich

Yet the Sotomayor show was still rich in historical significance. Someday we may regard it as we do those final, frozen tableaus of Pompeii. It offered a vivid snapshot of what Washington looked like when clueless ancien-régime conservatives were feebly clinging to their last levers of power, blissfully oblivious to the new America that was crashing down on their heads and reducing their antics to a sideshow as ridiculous as it was obsolescent.

The hearings were pure “Alice in Wonderland.” Reality was turned upside down. Southern senators who relate every question to race, ethnicity and gender just assumed that their unreconstructed obsessions are America’s and that the country would find them riveting. Instead the country yawned. The Sotomayor questioners also assumed a Hispanic woman, simply for being a Hispanic woman, could be portrayed as The Other and patronized like a greenhorn unfamiliar with How We Do Things Around Here. The senators seemed to have no idea they were describing themselves when they tried to caricature Sotomayor as an overemotional, biased ideologue.

And here Harris-Lacewell

The hearing was a performance of a broader set of social rules that govern race and gender interactions in American politics. Women, and most especially black and brown women, have to prove their fitness for public life by demonstrating the ability to endure harsh brutality without openly fighting back. The ability to bear up under public degradation is a test of worth. America’s favorite black woman heroine is Rosa Parks, a woman who is remembered as silently enduring the humiliation of being ejected from a public bus for refusing to comply with segregated seating.

Sotomayor passed the test. She met the Senators’ questioning with thoughtful responses. Her voice did not quiver. Her face did not scowl. Many women of all races feel inspired by her. But I wonder about this lesson that continues to teach women that we can only have space in the public realm as long as we control all emotion.

They are both describing what Harris-Lacewell calls “the politics of public humiliation.”  The practice of this kind of politics in the year 2009 says more about the Republicans than about Sotomayor – or the current status of women of color.

Rich ties the Republicans to the Class of  1994, the Class of the Contract with America, the Newt Gingrich class.

That the class of ’94 failed on almost every count is a matter of history, no matter how hard it has retroactively tried to blame its disastrous record on George W. Bush. Its incompetence may even have been greater than its world-class hypocrisy. Its only memorable achievements were to shut down the government in a fit of pique and to impeach Bill Clinton in a tsunami of moral outrage.

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…Today the G.O.P.’s token black is its party chairman, Michael Steele, who last week unveiled his latest strategy for recruiting minority voters. “My plan is to say, ‘Y’all come!’ ” he explained, adding “I got the fried chicken and potato salad!”Among Sotomayor’s questioners, both Coburn and Lindsey Graham are class of ’94. They — along with Jeff Sessions, a former Alabama attorney general best known for his unsuccessful prosecutions of civil rights activists — set the Republicans’ tone last week. In one of his many cringe-inducing moments, Graham suggested to Sotomayor that she had “a temperament problem” and advised that “maybe these hearings are a time for self-reflection.” That’s the crux of the ’94 spirit, even more than its constant, whiny refrain of white victimization: Hold others to a standard that you would not think of enforcing on yourself or your peers. Self-reflection may be mandatory for Sotomayor, but it certainly isn’t for Graham.

Harris-Lacewell puts it this way

All Supreme Court nominees endure tough, ideologically driven questioning. It’s as true for white male conservative justices as for Sotomayor. But this public display took on different meaning as white men repeatedly asserted that Sotomayor was capable of making legal judgments based only on her personal experience and ethnic identity.

I was proud of Sotomayor’s restraint, but I also wanted her to counter attack, to punch back, to show anger. She couldn’t do so in part because she is bound by the rules of judicial decorum. She also couldn’t do so because of the racialized, gender rules of political engagement that allow white men, from senators to firemen, to express outrage, indignation, and emotion, but disallow those same expressions from women of color.

So what have we learned?  We have learned that maybe Lacewell-Harris is right when she compares Sonia Sotomayor to Little Rock Nine student, Elizabeth Eckford.

One of the most enduring images of the Civil Rights Movement is of Elizabeth Eckford. She is being harassed and taunted by a group of white students, parents, and police on her way to desegregate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. On that morning Eckford missed connecting with the eight other African American students of the Little Rock Nine and their NAACP leader, Daisy Bates. Eckford was alone when the angry crowd surrounded and confronted her

Only now the mob is the composed of white, mostly southern, Republican Senators.

We have learned that women, regardless of race, regardless of how successful they may be,  still have to behave differently than men, that there is still a double standard.

We have learned, again, that the Republican Party is mostly clueless when it comes to race.  And I believe that their fear and dislike of Barack Obama will drive most of their behavior over the next eight years.

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Sotomayor: Day One

It was the first day of confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor.  She didn’t get to say much and it is a good thing she has all that experience on the bench where she learned to listen because the Senators all got to make opening statements.  And when she did speak, she was short and to the point as she talked about her background and her judicial philosophy “assuring senators that she believes a judge’s job “is not to make law” but “to apply the law,” as the two parties used her nomination to debate the role of the judiciary.”

Al Franken made his debut as a Senator,

“As most of you know, this is my fifth day in office,” he said, as a few people laughed. He then turned somber, saying that he took his oath of office very seriously.

I thought he was clearly a little nervous as he said he represented the common person, the one who is not a lawyer.

But the real kicker was Senator Jeff Sessions.  I think he resented the fact that he never made it though his district court nonination hearings and now had to be the ranking Republican on a Judiciary Committee about to confirm an Hispanic woman to the Supreme Court.  He came off as a bitter, sour old white guy.

Eugene Robinson writes in this morning’s Washington Post

The only real suspense in the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is whether the Republican Party will persist in tying its fortunes to an anachronistic claim of white male exceptionalism and privilege.

Republicans’ outrage, both real and feigned, at Sotomayor’s musings about how her identity as a “wise Latina” might affect her judicial decisions is based on a flawed assumption: that whiteness and maleness are not themselves facets of a distinct identity. Being white and male is seen instead as a neutral condition, the natural order of things. Any “identity” — black, brown, female, gay, whatever — has to be judged against this supposedly “objective” standard.

Thus it is irrelevant if Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. talks about the impact of his background as the son of Italian immigrants on his rulings — as he did at his confirmation hearings — but unforgivable for Sotomayor to mention that her Puerto Rican family history might be relevant to her work. Thus it is possible for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to say with a straight face that heritage and experience can have no bearing on a judge’s work, as he posited in his opening remarks yesterday, apparently believing that the white male justices he has voted to confirm were somehow devoid of heritage and bereft of experience

Amy Klobuchar captured the diversity issue in a different way in her statement as quote in the New York Times live blog on the hearings

In describing their varied experiences, Ms. Klobuchar notes that sitting near her is Senator Whitehouse, who grew up in Laos and Cambodia as the son of a diplomat while she worked as a carhop at the A&W Root Beer stand. In addition, she pointed out, while Senator Hatch is a gospel music songwriter, Mr. Leahy is quite the Dead-head and once had difficulty taking a call from the president because he was onstage at a Grateful Dead concert.

Eugene Robinson again

The whole point of Sotomayor’s much-maligned “wise Latina” speech was that everyone has a unique personal history — and that this history has to be acknowledged before it can be overcome. Denying the fact of identity makes us vulnerable to its most pernicious effects. This seems self-evident. I don’t see how a political party that refuses to accept this basic principle of diversity can hope to prosper, given that soon there will be no racial or ethnic majority in this country.

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There is, after all, a context in which these confirmation hearings take place: The nation continues to take major steps toward fulfilling the promise of its noblest ideals. Barack Obama is our first African American president. Sonia Sotomayor would be only the third woman, and the third member of a minority group, to serve on the nation’s highest court. Aside from these exceptions, the White House and the Supreme Court have been exclusively occupied by white men — who, come to think of it, are also members of a minority group, though they certainly haven’t seen themselves that way.

Judging from Monday’s hearing, some Republican senators are beginning to notice this minority status — and seem a bit touchy about it.

Sotomayor confirmation hearing

Day Two, coming up.

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The Strange Story of Lloyd Gaines

Never heard of Lloyd Gaines?  I hadn’t either until about 2 hours ago when I read the story in today’s New York Times.  Buried on page 19, is the story of a Supreme Court decision I had never heard of and the mystery surrounding the plaintiff, Lloyd Gaines.

Mr. Gaines left his apartment in Chicago on the night of March 19, 1939, three months after the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Missouri had to admit him to law school.

On Dec. 12, 1938, the Supreme Court ruled that the segregated University of Missouri Law School had to admit Lloyd Lionel Gaines, who was qualified except for the color of his skin, if there was no comparable legal education available to him within Missouri — and there was not.

Despite his victory, Mr. Gaines was troubled. He had told relatives and friends he was having trouble finding steady work to earn money for school (apparently one reason he went to Chicago), and he was ambivalent about being in the spotlight.

“As for my publicity relative to the university case, I have found that my race still likes to applaud, shake hands, pat me on the back and say how great and noble is the idea,” he wrote his mother in St. Louis days before disappearing. “How historical and socially important the case but — and there it ends.” He added, “Sometimes I wish I were just a plain, ordinary man whose name no one recognized.”

For the 1930s, Missouri’s policy was enlightened: since there was no law school at Lincoln, the state paid the tuitions of blacks from Missouri who went to nearby states to study law. And the Missouri legislature had committed itself to establishing a law school at Lincoln someday, should there ever be enough demand.

But Mr. Gaines said he wanted to go to the University of Missouri’s law school, so in 1936 he sued in state court to gain admission. He lost, but lawyers for the N.A.A.C.P. saw his case as a way to attack the “separate but equal” doctrine laid down by the Supreme Court in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, which was used to justify public school segregation.

Mr. Gaines’s team was headed by Charles Hamilton Houston, chief litigator for the N.A.A.C.P., mentor to Thurgood Marshall and later dean of the Howard University Law School. The case reached the Supreme Court on Nov. 9, 1938. Houston argued that the state had blatantly failed to meet the “separate but equal” standard and that paying out-of-state tuition for black students from Missouri was not good enough. The court ruled 6 to 2 for Mr. Gaines. “The basic consideration here is not as to what sort of opportunities other states provide, or whether they are as good as those in Missouri, but as to what opportunities Missouri itself furnishes to white students and denies to Negroes solely upon the ground of color,” Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote.

Justices James C. McReynolds and Pierce Butler dissented, saying the State of Missouri ought to be able to set its own education policies. (There was one vacancy on the court.)

The ruling in Gaines v. Canada (S. W. Canada was the university registrar) would eventually open the doors of law schools for blacks in a dozen Southern and border states. And it was a steppingstone toward Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 decision that repudiated the “separate but equal” notion in outlawing school segregation.

So what happened to Mr. Gaines?  Was he murdered?  If so, by a mugger out to rob him or by segregrationists who had stalked him?  Or did he simply decided he did not want to attend the University of Missouri law school, didn’t want to deal with the pressure and just disappear?

Lloyd Gaines’s nephew George Gaines, a retired Navy captain who lives in San Diego, said recently, “We have never had him declared dead.” But Captain Gaines said he doubted that his uncle would have chosen to drop out of life, or end his life, given the perseverance he displayed.

In the early 1950s, the University of Missouri began admitting black students. Lloyd Gaines is now revered at the university, which awarded him an honorary law degree in 2006. That year, the state bar awarded him a law license, posthumously.

If he had lived, would we be celebrating Gaines v. Canada as we do Brown v. Board of Education?    Would Brown have come sooner?  Would Gaines have been the James Meredith of University of Missouri?  On the eve of the start of Senate hearings on the nomination of the first Latino Justice, it is interesting to think about.

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Michael Jackson and Race

It has been more than a week since Michael Jackson was found near death in his rented home in Los Angeles and was pronounced dead at the emergency roon. I haven’t written about Jackson because I couldn’t quite figure out an approach. I have to admit that I liked the Jackson 5, admired “Thriller” and “We are the World”, but never really got into his post-Thriller music. And like everyone else, I spent years watching the horror show that was his life.  Now we are all picking though the comments and observations of everyone who can get air time.

I don’t know for sure if he was physically abused or not. His father says not, but some of his brothers say otherwise and I’m sure they are right. He was clearly psychologically abused.  Jackson used to say he had no childhood because he had to work all the time but I heard Barry Gordy describe pick-up basketball and baseball games with the Jackson kids, his kids and other children of the Motown family. I’m not sure we will ever know the truth. But we did watch him have extensive facial surgery so that his nose almost disappeared and we watched his skin turn paler and paler. (I don’t believe anyone who says he had a skin condition – no one else in his family seems to have a similar problem.) He tried to make himself Caucasian.  I couldn’t look at him anymore.

I heard someone say he sheltered his kids so they would not have a public upbringing. They point to Diana Ross as his role model – she raised kids and few people knew she had them. But he didn’t “shelter” them. He exploited them. The famous balcony scene with the baby, “Blanket”, being held over the edge; the kids – all white, by the way – being dressed up and paraded around. No one can tell me he was trying to shelter them. And now we learn that none of the three have any of Jackson’s DNA.

Patricia Williams  has put this all together for me.  In her column in the Nation, Williams writes

To me, the most arresting image of Michael Jackson was President George H.W. Bush citing him as a role model for young black men. It was 1990 and Jackson was at the height of his fame. “Man in the Mirror” had been released two years earlier. Jackson had not yet gone into full white-face disguise, but the handsome little brown boy of his first album had long since entered the bizarro phase of rhinestone gloves. I wondered then what on earth about Jackson could ever be a role model for anyone. Musical savant though he was, Jackson was, almost from the beginning, a tragic figure–so obviously trapped in that mirror, forever reflecting what others wanted him to be.

In the wake of his death, many have hailed his “crossover appeal.” There is no doubt that his musical acumen led to the integration of MTV; but that “appeal” had a more sinister undertone. If Elvis was “the White Negro,” so Michael fashioned himself into “the Negro Caucasian.” He literally erased himself before our eyes, his nose slowly disappearing, his skin fading to ghostly pallor, his voice growing higher and whispier, his body evaporating to a dry husk of barely a hundred pounds at the time of his death. It was hard not to be fascinated by him as he molted through all possible confusions of gender, race and sexuality. But his transgressivity was more than just theater; he mimed a narrative of constant paradox and infinite suffering.

I can understand the need to appear “lighter”, “whiter”.   I had one grandmother who despaired every summer when my sister and I turned browner and browner.  She believed, as many Japaneses did, that pale skin was a sign of upper classeness and dark skin of being a peasant.

Williams again

But in the longer term, the question of Michael Jackson’s children is challenging in other ways. Like his demands for plastic surgery or painkillers, their conception was accomplished as a made-to-order, cash-on-the-barrelhead commercial transaction. According to TMZ.com and other entertainment news sites, Jackson is not biologically related to any of his three children. Reportedly, the women who gestated them carried anonymously donated eggs fertilized by sperm from secret donors. Apparently the children were all crafted to be “white” enough to match Jackson’s artfully devised if pathetically alienated image of himself. Deborah Rowe, Jackson’s ex-wife and the surrogate who carried his oldest two children to term, describes being inseminated “like a horse”; she then received around $9 million to give up any claim to them. On the birth certificate of Jackson’s youngest child, the space for “mother” is left blank.

It’s hard to imagine that Jackson would have been found fit if he had attempted to adopt children. It is interesting to contemplate the eugenic ends to which in vitro fertilization and surrogate birth are being put these days, often as a kind of end run around the formal inspection of the adoption process. How much more common will the purchase of “the perfect child” become when bioengineering for specific physical traits becomes easier and less costly? It’s not a new problem: “colorism” (preference for lighter skin) is an old problem within the African-American community. Choosing trophy spouses is a cruder version of the same game. Nevertheless, it is troubling that the law of sales is about the only context for debating this rapidly developing area. Shouldn’t we think harder about the degree to which a free market for eugenics is enabled by easy-payment contract clauses conferring parenthood through the immaculate conception of biotechnology?

We can only hope that Michael Jackson leaves a legacy that is more than his music and that through his children we can begin a serious dialogue about genetic engineering.  This would be a very positive thing to leave behind.

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Mr. Robinson Wins the Pulitzer

Washington Post editor and columnist, Eugene Robinson, has won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for commentary for his columns about the 2008 election. 

One of his best was A Special Brand of Patriotism from July 4, 2008.  It begins

Anyone who took U.S. history in high school ought to know that one of the five men killed in the Boston Massacre, the atrocity that helped ignite the American Revolution, was a runaway slave named Crispus Attucks. The question the history books rarely consider is: Why?

Think about it for a moment. For well over a century, British colonists in North America had practiced a particularly cruel brand of slavery, a system of bondage intended not just to exploit the labor of Africans but to crush their spirit as well. Backs were whipped and broken, families systematically separated, traditions erased, ancient languages silenced. Yet a black man — to many, nothing more than a piece of property — chose to stand and die with the patriots of Boston.

Barack Obama had been criticized for failure to wear a flag lapel pin.

It is not common, in my experience, for sitting U.S. senators to be questioned on their love of country — to be grilled about a flag pin, for example, or critiqued on the posture they assume when the national anthem is played. For an American who attains such high office, patriotism is generally assumed.

It seems that some people don’t want to give Obama the benefit of that assumption, however, and I have to wonder whether that’s because he’s black. And then I have to wonder why.

Three Tuskegee Airmen -- from left, Charles McGee of Bethesda, Howard Baugh of Petersburg, Va., and Roscoe Brown Jr. of New York City -- stand for the national anthem at a memorial ceremony in Grapevine, Tex., in 2007.

What’s unpatriotic is pretending that the past never happened. What’s unpatriotic is failing to acknowledge that we’ve struggled with race for nearly 400 years. What’s unpatriotic is relegating “black history” to the month of February when, really, it’s American history, without which this nation could never be what it is today.

My father, Harold I. Robinson, served in the Army during World War II and has lived to witness this transformative moment of possibility. My father-in-law, the late Edward R. Collins, was a sailor who saw action in the South Pacific; he rests at Arlington National Cemetery. I have no patience with anyone who thinks that patriots don’t have brown skin.

Congratulations, Mr. Robinson.

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Rita Dove, Beethoven, and Bridgetower

This is another story I would have missed except for reading the print edition of the New York Times.

Haydn almost certainly encountered him as a child in a Hungarian castle, where the boy’s father was a servant and Haydn was the director of music, and Thomas Jefferson saw him performing in Paris in 1789: a 9-year-old biracial violin prodigy with a cascade of dark curls. While the boy would go on to inspire Beethoven and help shape the development of classical music, he ended up relegated to a footnote in Beethoven’s life.

Rita Dove, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former United States poet laureate, has now breathed life into the story of that virtuoso, George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, in her new book, “Sonata Mulattica” (W. W. Norton). The narrative, a collection of poems subtitled “A Life in Five Movements and a Short Play,” intertwines fact and fiction to flesh out Bridgetower, the son of a Polish-German mother and an Afro-Caribbean father.

Beethoven wrote what we now know as the Kreutzer Sonata for Bridgetower.  Originally titled Sonata Mullatica, Beetoven changed the name

…apparently in a fit of pique after a quarrel over a woman, Beethoven removed Bridgetower’s name from a sonata the composer had dedicated to him, Bridgetower being the mulatto of “Sonata Mulattica.” The two men had performed it publicly for the first time in Vienna in 1803, with Beethoven on piano and Bridgetower on violin.

By the time it was published, in 1805, it had morphed into the “Kreutzer” Sonata, dedicated to the French violinist Rudolphe Kreutzer, who disliked it, however, saying it was unplayable, and never performed it.

…

Bridgetower’s story is a corrective to the notion that certain cultural forms are somehow the province of particular groups, said Mike Phillips, a historian, novelist and former museum curator who contributed a series of essays to part of the British Library’s Web site (at www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/blackeuro) that profiles five 19th-century figures of mixed European and African heritage, including Bridgetower, Alexandre Dumas and Pushkin. He also wrote the libretto for “Bridgetower: A Fable of London in 1807,” an opera in jazz and classical musica performed by the English Touring Opera, which had its premiere in 2007 in London.

“Bridgetower flourished in a time when the world outside Africa was like a huge concentration camp for black people,” Dr. Phillips said in an e-mail message. He noted that while Bridgetower got a music degree at Cambridge and managed to earn a living as a musician, for much of his life the trans-Atlantic slave trade was at full throttle.

 I find it fascinating that Bridgetower, a mulatto, and Beethoven also presumed to be mulatto performed together.  Add to the mix Thomas Jefferson who was in Paris with Sally Hemmings and it becomes even more interesting.  It seems that we have long been able to hold contradictory ideas about race.  The “all [insert race or ethnicity] are scum except you and you aren’t because you are [my friend, superior, different, etc.] syndrome at work.  Is that, I wonder, how many feel about our President?  That he is an exception.

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Race and Corruption

Both the State Senator, Dianne Wilkerson, and as of yesterday, our City Council member, Chuck Turner, have been accused by federal prosecutors of taking bribes and then lying about it.  Both were caught on tape in sting operations.   Chuck is a neighbor.   I know both and have worked with them on various projects including constituant services.  I have supported their campaigns.  So this is a major shock.  I have mixed feelings and a lot of questions about the situation. 

First, there is the question of how much we can trust the Boston FBI office.  This is the office that had agents in bed with the Winter Hill Gang and James Bulger.  One agent has just been convicted of murder and will probably finish his life in prison.  So when they produce evidence that two black politicians representing the largest concentration of African-Americans in the City of Boston I have to feel to some degree that this is racial, a singling out of two office holders who are black and trusted by the community.

Second, assuming that this was a trap set by the FBI why would either of these two intelligent people walk into the trap?  Have they taken bribes all along and just happened to get caught this time?  Why didn’t they refuse the offered money?

Third, why are they being prosecuted when the current Speaker of the House, Sal DiMasi, is suspected of rigging a state contract bid so a friend could benfit?  I do know the answer to that one:  The investigation of that situation is on-going with it just having been turned over to the Attorney General.

Finally, I want someone to do a study of all the African-American officials nationwide and through the last 40 years who have been brought down by scandal.  There has to be more than selective prosecution because of race.  Is there some feeling of entitlement that develops once they have been elected?  And they are all smart people who should have been able to learn from history.

The following quote from Chuck Turner in an interview conducted prior to his arrest which will be published in the Boston Globe Magazine tomorrow as part of a column by Tom Keane  I find troubling.

From an ethical standpoint, I don’t think the vast majority of Congress should be allowed to sit. Ethics should include a commitment to the needs of the people of this country which the Congress has not displayed. Given the fact that all our state governments and the federal government is controlled by money, I think it is hypocritical to talk about ethics when you talk about our political leaders or our business leaders, religious leaders, etc.

Its time for Americans to admit that ethics never have had a significant influence on American politics. If Americans cared about ethical behavior, why did slavery last for two hundred years and neo slavery last for another two hundred? Why does America have the weakest laws in the Western World to protect a working person right to have a fair return on their labor. Why were the Irish treated as animals when they were driven to America by the politics of the English ancestors of the Yankees who treated them as if they were black when they were driven here. I’m surprised Tom. I didn’t think you were in denial of the reality of the moral depravity of this country.

Is Chuck really saying that because the political system is controlled by money rather than by higher moral principles a green light to take a bribe?  Is this the “everyone else does it” excuse?

Yes, there is money in government.  Money gets spent and contracts get let.  That is how governement gets things done.  If he is talking about the election/campaign system being corruptive, there is truth there.  But I’m not sure that money is the only reason slavery persisted and is not the only reason government often fails to act.  Is the real issue that Turner and Wilkinson are still trapped in a world that sees everything as racial, everything though the eyes of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s while the world has moved on?

The Boston Globe quoted several young men who are likely to run for Turner’s seat.  Ego Ezedi, Carlos Henriquez, and Scotland Willis have all run unsuccessfully for City Council.  All expressed the same general idea that maybe it was time to move on.  That maybe it was time to stop looking constantly through a racial lens.  Ezedi in particular looks to Barak Obama:

Ego Ezedi, the executive director of the Roxbury YMCA who ran unsuccessfully for the City Council in 2003, said: “I am not a black politician. I have never represented myself as that. I’m a public servant who happens to be black.

“This is not a black-white issue; it’s an ethics issue,” he said of the arrests of Wilkerson and Turner.

Ezedi added that he draws more inspiration from the way Barack Obama’s campaign energized younger voters. “It’s important for all of us to transcend boundaries of race when it comes to politics,” he said, “and what better time than now, especially when you look at what’s happening nationally?”

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Good-bye Manny and is McCain actually the racist?

It was a terrific run – Manny Ramirez in Boston.  But all good things must come to an end.  Manny is a Dodger now wearing the blue of my childhood heros – Koufax, Drysdale, Podres, Wills etc.   Live long and prosper, Manny.  All you Dodger fans, have fun with him.

Mcain is acusing Obama of playing the race card:  I think it is actually the other way around. I’m thinking back to Doug Wilder’s election to Governor in Virginia when the polls indicated he would win by a comfortable margin and the election turning out to be very close, I get anxious about the election.  Is there still enough residual racism that McCain will be able to play to it?  Is this the reason the polls are so close?  Is the talk about Obama’s arrogance really a code for “he’s an uppity black man.?  Things to think about.