Let’s End The Score-Settling
Jul 29th, 2009 | 10 responses
WASHINGTON — The problem with “teachable moments” is that the term sets up one group of people as teachers while another group is consigned to the role of pupils. In a democracy, that’s troublesome.
In the conflict between Henry Louis Gates Jr. and police Sgt. James Crowley over Gates’ arrest at his own home, all parties in the national conversation believe they should be the teachers. The theme is, “No, you listen to me!”
Everybody seems to want to teach the need for respect: the respect owed by white police officers to black men, and the respect Harvard professors ought to show to cops doing their jobs.
It was the perfect moment for professor Barack Obama to try to explain everything to everyone. That is why — after first stumbling into the controversy on Gates’ side — he backed off, arguing that there was plenty of right and wrong to go around, and inviting Gates and Crowley to sit down with each other at the White House.
Here’s a thoughtful reading all three men should consult. The writer, who happens to be African-American, insisted that “the task for black America is not to get its symbols in shape: symbolism is one of the few commodities we have in abundance.”
Instead, this writer warned about “a discourse in which everyone speaks of payback and nobody is paid,” and concluded that “the result is that race politics becomes a court of the imagination wherein blacks seek to punish whites for their misdeeds and whites seek to punish blacks for theirs, and an infinite regress of score-settling ensues.”
Exactly right, and Skip Gates won’t have to do the reading since he wrote those words in The New Yorker in 1995.
I use “Skip” because I have known Gates for about 35 years. I have long admired him for his prodigious work ethic and for the nuance and thoughtfulness of his writing and scholarship.
I want Gates to bring this story to an end, both for the reasons he laid out so well himself, and for another. He knows as well as anyone that there is nothing more destructive to the hope for justice and equality than a fight that rips across the lines of class and race.
Since everybody seems to turn autobiographical during these “teachable moments,” I will exercise my right to do so, too. From the time I was in college in the late 1960s and early ’70s, I have been incensed at the elitism so often shown by privileged liberals toward the white working class. And I felt this as someone on the left.
I wrote a doctoral dissertation inspired by that concern, and the current controversy led me down memory lane, through college newspaper archives, to see if my recollection of my earlier views matched reality. For what it’s worth, here’s what I wrote in 1973, the year I graduated from college:
“What is most disturbing about conservative attacks on the student left is that many of the charges were right on the mark. The student left often did come to be characterized by its own forms of elitism and intellectual arrogance. …
“Even more pernicious and divisive were race issues. It is clear, of course, that black demands for political and economic equality are justified … (but) the way these issues developed … served to estrange the working class white from the movement for equality. White workers rebelled because they felt they were being forced to pay an inequitable share of the costs of equality. … Sadly, whites who protested against being singled out were too often attacked as racists. … In the end, the losers were those who had the greatest stake in social reform — white workers, blacks and the student left.”
I risk the indulgence of quoting my younger self to suggest that we have been watching this same game for too long. It’s a game that always turns out badly for those seeking equality and social reform. At the time he was asked to comment on Gates, Obama was trying to make the case for universal health coverage — for the largest step toward greater social justice since civil rights and Medicare — and it took only the single word “stupidly” to send everyone scurrying back to that “infinite regress of score-settling.”
Sgt. Crowley should not have arrested Gates, as the police implicitly acknowledged by dropping the charges. But Gates knows that this police officer with a good record is not the enemy. Let’s end the score-settling right now.
This column is copyrighted and licensed to appear on TMV in full. (c) 2009, Washington Post Writers Group
10 Responses to “Let’s End The Score-Settling”
Dionne's flustering is tardy, but not surprising. Even liberals are getting tired of this nonsense and hype.
The problems with this are: a) Almost of us already know about racism and don't need teaching; b) there was nothing the nation needed to be “taught” about regarding what should have remained strictly a local and personal affair; c) “teachable moment” is a smarmy phrase that also reeks of elitism, and is repellent.
DLS – Since you already know everything there is to know about racism -maybe you could write a book and enlighten the rest of us dummies. What unmitigated arrogance.
Dionne — this was an excellent post, and I thank you for it.
The only reasons that the “teachable moments” phrase falls flat is that those who would be learning the most feel it difficult to admit there is nothing they don't already know (see DLS's perfect example), while those who are seeking out lessons in their own privilege and new things to learn about people whose experiences differ from their own often absorb those messages without them being called out as such.
The commentary and behavior arising from this event was not “racial,” but obviously political. Reporting that fact and disparaging the misbehavior spawned by it it is not ignorant or “arrogant” [sic]. [rolling eyes]
Get a goddamned clue.
And I wish the focus on this incident was more on general police abuse of power and less on race.
“And I wish the focus on this incident was more on general police abuse of power and less on race.”
The focus on this incident, sadly, is on how such events (which should remain local and personal, not hyped nation-wide by blatantly political as well as sensationalistic liberal media) are exploited politically. As I said before, CNN in particular I saw debase itself, hurling itself to ape its hype of Michael Jackson and putting on the air not only “dominant, privilege” nut-case white liberals but all kinds of people who said the cops were totally in the wrong, Gates a brutally mistreated innocent lamb, and all of us at fault.
I guess it made a nice diversion and gave a boost to the Dems as the public oppostion grows to their health care foolishness.
As to police power and profiling, Gates's age (as well as other facts about who he is and where he was) immediately made profiling a non-issue (and instantly shattered the credibility of the “racism” idiots). There was probably no abuse whatsoever of power by the police here, but yes, police can be abusive, and the scope of this (as I have witnessed _and_ experienced) goes far beyond mere profiling for likely criminals.
You declare as absolute fact that this issue is not racial; come to think of it, everything you say is presented as god-given truth, and you even take every possible opportunity to silence those who have the gall to disagree with the facts according to DLS by snarkily and cynically calling them stupid or clueless. That doesn’t come off as someone particularly willing to learn anything, nor even acknowledge the possibility that there’s anything you might not already know. It comes off as arrogant.
On the other hand, your preferred method of silencing disagreement are no more odious than the age-old technique of arguing against a person’s tone instead of his or her point.
In the interest of not using that silencing mechanism, I’d like to point out that the very fact that the incident in question touched off a national debate on not only race but also class, elitism, police overstep of power, and profiling seems to negate the point I think you were trying to make in your first comment.
I have to agree with DLS on the “teachable moment” term. It assumes the speaker knows something that the recipient is ignorant of, and due to that is inherently condescending. You rarely hear someone say “that was a teachable moment for me” (although I'm sure it happens) but usually when someone says it they mean a teachable moment for some person that they feel needs it.
It comes across as preachy, and by saying it you probably reduce the chance of a teachable moment actually occurring.
This isn't the perfect post for it, but I wanted to add that Obama, Crowley, and Gates don't have to get together and find love. In fact, they don't even need to agree when they leave. Getting together to simply air things out and demonstrate honest disagreement without hatred or disdain is worth a lot. It's how Congress should act, but seems not to today. It's how commenters on blogs should act, but too often don't.
Mr. Dionne–
Your 1970's dissertation excerpt is excellent. I, for one, cannot help but remember my younger self because of it.
I witnessed the original Watt's riots and I remember the fear that permeated the white community. We lived near Watts and I could see the towering billows of smoke from burning buildings from our house. Blacks made public threats that they were going to cross the main avenue and invade white areas. Clearly there was going to be blood and I was not much more than a child and terrified. People sat on their front porches, including at least 25% Hispanic ethnicity, armed and ready to defend their homes from the coming black invasion. Notably there were NO blacks living in our neighborhood. The Governor of California was slow to mobilized the national guard and we knew we were left to defend ourselves. The police and fire departments were overwhelmed. Our city police guarded our city border but it was a very thin line. Black snipers would shoot at policemen and also at firemen trying to put out fires and save black lives in Watts. The black citizenry in Watts had little or no protection during the riots.
Ironically the Watts black rioters succeeded in nothing but burning down their own town, terrorizing, robbing, and, killing their own people. After the riots were put down, it became clear to us that the overwhelming majority of black people in Watts had nothing to do with the riots. They were themselves victims of it. Terrorized, they had desperately wanted order to return to Watts.
Black people did all the losing during the Watts riots, white people lost practically nothing, except that in the aftermath, non-blacks in our community lost a big chunk of fear, (and thus racism), of blacks because of a sympathy and new respect for black people that peacefully, if frightfully, endured the onslaught of their own extremists.
There was much more happening, but I suppose as days and weeks passed, as we sorted out in our minds what had happened in general, these where “teaching moments” for us all back then.