It's racism, only less overt

By David Kairys

In our polarized fascination with Sgt. Crowley and Professor Gates, there's been a lot of talk about teachable moments, but little effort to understand how two decent guys doing their jobs and living their lives could have such different perceptions of their encounter.

The central problem is how we think about race or, really, about racism.

The idea that racism is wrong is very new in our culture, history, and law. Before World War II, racial stereotypes were common in everyday life. Racial epithets, slurs, jokes, and put-downs were uneventful ingredients of discussion across ethnic, religious, and class lines. The Supreme Court embraced segregation and slavery, and it approved of the imprisonment of all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast during World War II.

The change in our values reached its peak when legally sanctioned segregation was ended in the 1960s. The immorality and evil of racism became so accepted that even factions of the Ku Klux Klan declared themselves non-racists who just happened to "like white people." In mainstream culture, racism grew to be so socially forbidden that it was just about the worst thing one could be accused of. Labeling a white person racist was to put him or her in the company of lynching, church-bombing, slaveholding monsters. It became common for some to deny that they even notice race.

This has made it very difficult to talk about the obvious reality that when we encounter each other - on the street, in the workplace, or in our homes - we do notice race, and it has meaning for us. This is not wrong or a personal failing, and we won't be able to understand or do anything about race issues if we insist that racism is restricted to villains.

I learned this many years ago, when I was a rookie public defender in Philadelphia, as I've written in a memoir. Over the span of a few days, I saw a city judge set bail for two defendants accused of drunken driving. Both were employed, middle-class guys with previous drunken-driving charges and no other record. The judge set a low bail for one of them, a white car salesman, saying something about his needing to sleep it off. For the other, a black insurance agent, the judge set a higher bail that would keep him in jail for at least a night.

I asked the judge in private to explain his thinking, without mentioning race or suggesting something was wrong. He saw the white man as a decent, harmless guy who "had a few too many but wouldn't hurt anybody." He identified with him as he would with a relative or friend who had made a mistake.

But the black man evoked the dangers of drunken driving in the judge's mind: People get hurt by people who drink and drive. (Of course, it would hurt just as much to get run over by the white guy.)

The judge's inconsistency had nothing to do with monstrous, ideological racism. It was a matter of perception and empathy, in which race is a common though not always welcome ingredient. That doesn't mean we should excuse or ignore his different treatment of the two men. It was a form of racism that is less extreme and virulent than explicit racial hatred, but no less real or important.

If we think of James Crowley or his behavior in an either-or framework - as either perniciously racist or completely free of prejudice - we miss what really happened and what can be done about it.

Perception, experience, and empathy played an important role for both Crowley and Henry Louis Gates, and one hopes each now understands the other better. But one of them was wielding government authority, including the power to enter the other's home, take him away in handcuffs, and make him face criminal charges. And abuse of that power has an undeniable racial history.

We can understand that Crowley has a difficult, dangerous job and is not an overt racist, while acknowledging that race probably played an inappropriate role in his arrest of Gates.

As important - though unfortunately lost in the racial debate - no one should be arrested inside or outside his home for questioning or criticizing a police officer. The police should have left once they knew Gates was the homeowner and not an intruder. As we are seeing in daily news reports of mass arrests in Iran, protection against unjustified arrest is an important part of what it means to be free.

Progress on racial issues requires that we pay attention to the reality and consequences of racial perceptions, experiences, and empathies - and not excuse or ignore discriminatory conduct just because it's not accompanied by epithets.