Barack Obama and the Racial Trap

Obama’s opponents assert that the president, born in Hawaii, doesn’t have a good and legal birth certificate and thus cannot be president of the United States.

Over ten days ago, in front of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which fights for civil rights for minorities in America, Barack Obama called on the black community to overcome its fears in order to get out of the social ghetto where it has locked itself.

It was a speech that wouldn’t have been denied by his Republican opponents. “Your destiny is in your hands, no excuses,” he said, continuing the philosophy developed in Ghana to call on Africans to not drape themselves with the weight of colonial heritage in order to evade their responsibilities. Shouldn’t the presence of a mixed-race person in the White House demonstrate that America lives in a world that is no longer determined by skin color?

Judging that discrimination “still exists,” but that “it is more tied to structural inequalities than to racial prejudices,” Barack Obama wanted to state, albeit a little hastily, his conviction in the ascension of the “postracial” era, of which he is a symbol.

But the Gates-Crowley affair exploded at the same time, unleashing a media storm that transformed itself into a rough collective psychoanalysis.

Henry Louis Gates, an eminent professor at Harvard University, black and an expert on African-American history, returned from a trip to China and found himself locked out on the front step of his beautiful house in Cambridge because the key jammed in the lock. He decided to break the door in with the help of his taxi driver, but an old woman asked a neighbor to call the police, fearing a break-in.

Collision of Races or Collision of Egos?

Arriving on the scene, police officer James Crowley asked the professor to identify himself, arousing his anger. Gates complied, but not without accusing the interviewer of suspecting him because he was a “black man in America.”

“Do you know who I am?” he spat out. Did the police officer – who had by that time arrested and taken the professor away for “disorderly conduct” – act this way because Gates was black, as Gates said when he accused the officer of “racial discrimination”? Did the condescending tone of his interlocutor infuriate him enough to provoke his excessive zeal? Are we facing a collision of races or of egos? Or possibly both?

The answer, far from being clear, creates a fierce debate in America in the media and on blogs. Ad nauseam. As if nothing else existed on the media’s radar screens.

The hasty and undoubtedly damning word from Barack Obama, who called the police officer’s reaction “stupid,” straightened out nothing. Obama has usually been known for his tact in sensitive racial affairs. In the Republican camp, the president’s opponents stood as one to denounce his party as supposedly anti-white and anti-law and order.

A Good and Legal Birth?

“He’s a racist who sees himself as fixing social wrongs,” intellectual Glenn Beck raged Tuesday morning on Fox News. Former FBI officer Steven Rogers added that Barack Obama should stick to a stereotypical view of the police. In the waiting conservative camp, suspicions rang out. It’s elsewhere in this same defensive white ideological reservoir where recently the idea has flourished that Barack Obama, born in Hawaii, doesn’t have a legal birth certificate and thus cannot be president of the United States.

In supporting Gates, whom he knows well, Barack Obama touched on this “powerful intersection of class and race,” which transformed Sarah Palin into a cult figure from the white working class, exasperated by the politically correct elitism of the east and west coasts, warned columnist Edward Luce in the Financial Times.

A Glass of Reconciliation

Sensing danger while he tried to concentrate his efforts on the major issue of reforming health care, Barack Obama decided to bring Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley together at the White House for a round of beer to drown the past.

The new inhabitant of the White House is well suited to the racial reality and how it is perceived as continuing to deeply divide American society, representing a potential political trap. According to a poll from the Rasmussen Institute, three out of four black voters think that the police treat blacks unjustly. Only one out of four whites agree. “We have made a big effort to improve the attempts of police regarding minorities,” Los Angeles Police Chief Wilson Bratton confided in USA Today. “But you don’t need to pick at a scab for a long time to open the wound.”