Acting White: The Invisible Hand Of Race

It dawns on me that while there is plenty of overlap in viewpoints of the treatment of blacks and whites in our society, there is also a very predictable, nearly invisible hand, guiding respective views of situations like that of Professor Gates and Officer Crowley. It is this invisible hand that directs blacks to see gross unfairness, while whites see the opposite misbehavior. So what is going on here?

What blacks seem to feel is that Gates’ color dictated Crowley’s approach, while whites feel that Gates’ behavior was the driving factor. The Gates, or black perspective, is rooted in assigning the non-randomness of Crowley’s approach, accompanied by arbitrary action, the arrest. Crowley, alternatively, uses Gates’ obstructionist behavior as precipitating evidence of the his justified and objective response. They both are right and wrong at the same time. Crowley is not as colorblind as he believes, and Gates discounts how his own behavior might incite the officer into a more aggressive posture, regardless of ethnicity.

In general, whites feel they too get mistreated everyday by authorities, so they ask ‘why should Gates get special treatment just because he’s black or a big shot?’. On the other hand, blacks, (me included) know that blacks are, at times, singled out unfairly, and are thus denied the rightful opportunity to move about as freely as whites. So how will blacks and whites ever reconcile on their respective plights with authority? Should we all go to a giant beer-bust on the Mall? Perhaps, but maybe not.

More practically, whites might consider how they would feel if police were, for illustrative purposes, more wary of over-weight, or red-haired whites, compared to brown/black-haired, or lean-body mass whites. Knowing that police are more suspicious of you for sub-attributes like weight or hair-color is akin to how blacks feel about being singled out for their ethnicity. Following on, blacks might consider the posture they would normally assume if being detained by a same-ethnicity officer, compared to the posture that they assume with a non-black officer, 'just doing his job'. What response would the professor expect if Crowley had been black?

When we deny others their sensitivities, agreed with or not, we draw a battle line in the sand. Crowley ignored how Gates, the black man, or the professor, might perceive his tone and demeanor, even after identification. Gates, for his part, ignored how Crowley would perceive his verbal rejection of authority, in a bona fide police action. So while it is clear that both men exhibited healthy egos, what they both might work on, as could all of America, is empathy – the propellant of understanding.

James C. Collier

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