The Absurdity Of Racial Discourse In America: Stupid Is As Stupid Does

JAMES CROWLEY

A reason -- although not the biggest reason -- that a racial gulf persists in the U.S. is the defensiveness of whites like Police Sergeant James Crowley, who is now on the record as saying that he is not a racist. (The biggest reason is that some whites are racists. As are some people of color.)

Crowley, of course, infamously let an unpleasant situation escalate into a bad one when when he confronted Harvard prof Henry Louis Gates in the act of breaking into his Cambridge home, Gates got crosswise instead of submissive and Crowley arrested him on a disorderly conduct charge that was dropped thisfast when word of the absurdity of the collar got out.

President Obama's characterization of the affair as "stupid" summed things up nicely, while Crowley's defense that he's not a racist because he once tried to save a black man's life is . . . well, beyond stupid when you consider what the consequences might have been had he let the man die.

As it turns out, that man was Reggie Lewis, and not even the administration of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation could restart the Boston Celtics superstar's heart.

I'm inclined to give Crowley some slack because police work is dangerous. He may well not be a racist, merely a hot-headed cop, and many of us would grab onto something from their past like he did to prove that we believe that we're all brothers and sisters on the surface of the planet earth. But the fact of the matter is that by many white folks' lights, one positive gesture to a black person over a lifetime is enough to qualify as not being a racist.

I once pulled my car over on the narrow shoulder of a busy Philadelphia expressway after I spotted an African American woman and her three young children, one of them holding a black Raggedy Ann doll, standing in harm's way next to their broken-down minivan. I got them into my car and drove off the expressway to the nearest police station where a white desk sergeant let the mother use a phone to call for help. The littlest of the three children was sitting in my lap, still clutching her doll, by the time help arrived

You see, this makes both the desk sergeant and I not racists, because he could have refused the mother a phone call or taken offense at the little girl climbing into a white man's lap. And I could have left the mother and her brood on the highway where they might have been filleted by an eighteen-wheeler, a not infrequent occurrence on the mean highways of Philadelphia.

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It gets absurd pretty quickly, doesn't it? Yes it does, but that's nuttin' compared to the wails of outrage from white conservatives over Gatesgate.

While Obama has been unafraid to confront the broader issue of race in America, you would have thought that he'd bent Kay Bailey Hutchinson over his Oval Office desk and not merely called the Cambridge incident for what it was. (And the president's wee walkback yesterday after he telephoned Crowley was unnecessary. The clarification, not the call.)

While none of these conservatives can be considered racists themselves (cough, cough), it is ironic -- no, make that bitterly ironic -- that they have no time to address let alone deal with racial discrimination as it applies to non-whites, including a criminal-justice system that routinely convicts innocent African Americans, but flip out when the president defends one who happens to be especially eminent unless you're one of those conservatives, in which case Gates is an elitist who played the race card.

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The spitstorm over Gates took me back to hands down the best speech Obama has ever given. That would be his address in Philadelphia last year in the heat of the presidential primary in which he refused to shrink from his relationship with his throwback pastor and elaborated with candor, forcefulness and eloquence about why the black church has been so important to him while stressing that it was time for America to stop licking its racial wounds:

"I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community," Obama said of Jeremiah Wright. "I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother -- a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in the world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

Now let's deal with health-care reform, okay?

Top photo by Christopher Evans/Boston Globe