Thursday, July 30, 2009
Seeing racism where it's not
Linda Whitlock
Recent columns
- Sanford could still be a hero
- Skeptics or traitors?
- School freedom is elusive
- Murder can't be an option
From the RoundTable blog
The contretemps over white Cambridge police officer James Crowley's arrest of black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. reminded me of something that happened in my own neighborhood some years back.
When one set of neighbors petitioned Salem City Council for a zoning variance for a day care in their home, other neighbors expressed concern that the day care could increase traffic and disrupt a quiet neighborhood.
To get the facts, my husband attended the city council meeting where the variance request was discussed and concluded the day care would be no big deal. That allayed our concern.
But the petitioning neighbors were black and the concerned neighbors -- in a predominately white neighborhood -- were mostly, if not all, white. Just before city council was scheduled to vote on the variance request, The Roanoke Times ran an article wherein the black neighbors seemed to suggest the white neighbors' concern might be racially motivated.
No doubt our neighbors did believe race was a factor, and racism may have driven the concerns of some. But the allegation tarred innocent and guilty alike. And the article's timing made it appear a none-too-subtle attempt at pressuring city council into voting in their favor.
City council did approve the variance -- as it probably would have even without The Times article. The day care came and went without incident.
We're still on friendly terms with our neighbors. Beyond the loss of a little good will, no real harm came from our neighborhood affair.
The Gates/Crowley affair is another matter. By insinuating in last week's press conference that Gates' arrest was linked to racial profiling, President Obama made a national issue out of what should have stayed a Cambridge issue -- Gates' prominence notwithstanding -- and generated needless anger and resentment in the process.
While we may not know all the details of Gates' encounter with Crowley, what we do know suggests racial profiling played no part in the incident. Which makes the president's insinuation all the more unfortunate. The country has enough problems right now without the president's inciting racial enmity with ill-considered comments.
"Race consciousness," writes Abigail Thernstrom at National Review Online ("The Obama we need," July 24), "is the enemy America seems unable to defeat." With Obama's election, pretty much everyone, whether they voted for him or not, wanted to believe that was no longer true.
According to Thernstrom, Americans hoped Obama "would be above and beyond race" -- "the all-America president" who would "relieve [them] of ... their inability to escape the twin burdens of guilt and anger." Obama's response to the Gates affair has, at best, tarnished that hope.
Still, we've come a long way in race relations in just my and Gates' lifetimes -- coinciding as they do to within a couple of months of each other. Gates and I probably don't view that progress in exactly the same way, but no one who's lived as long as he and I could fail to recognize that it's happened.
Yet, as much progress as we've made, it still doesn't live up to our expectations. It's been nearly half a century since the civil rights movement, and both blacks and whites alike think it's time our society was racism free. But given the nature of human nature, such a time will likely never come. Like poverty, some measure of racism will always be with us.
Strange as it seems, if we could drop our expectation of a racism-free society -- an expectation that will never be realized anyway -- we might be better off. Not to say we should just accept racism. On the contrary, we should always work to change hearts and minds -- and laws, if necessary.
But we get the most frustrated and angry when reality and expectations don't match up. And since reality never matches up to unrealistic expectations, we stay poised on the edge of frustration and anger waiting for something large or small to push us over. The goal of perfection we can never attain, in effect, becomes the enemy of the good we've already achieved.
Whitlock, a Roanoke Times columnist, is an adjunct English professor who lives in Salem.
