Opera Singers, Subway Revelers, and Cops

Happy new year all my loves. I can't quite believe it's 2010. I remember being a little girl and calculating how old I would be in the year 2000. It seemed like such science fiction then, so far in the future. And now we are a decade past that. It's going to take me a minute to get my arms around that.

New Year's eve was mixed for our family. My husband and I had a lovely time with friends, who were hosting some of the performers from the Concert for Peace held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. There was a rather famous and personally captivating opera singer, her friend the press agent, a sitar and dirigidoo player and her partner who directs a dance troupe, a film producer and her partner who works on women's issues in India, a photographer, another woman who was friendly and lovely, but whose details I don't know, our hosts and us. What a delightful gathering it was! At midnight we hugged and danced and twirled and blew our noisemakers and set off mini firecrackers and wore silly hats and 2010 glasses with little rolling lights, and the opera singer imitated various choreographers' styles to hysterically funny effect, and the dancer twirled scarves and paper streamers and the rest of us clapped and kicked our feet up (literally) and one of the men filmed the proceedings and we drank good champagne and rang in the new year in boisterous style.

Our 16-year-old daughter, meanwhile, was out in the city with four girlfriends. They gathered at one house, then decamped to a second and finally a third. Three parties. We let her do it, praying for an incident-free evening for her, knowing that there were aspects of it that were not within our control. We let her know that we were trusting her to call us if anything gnarly was going down. She stayed in phone contact with us all night, texting us at every move, and she seemed her cheerful, unintoxicated self when we picked her up from her friend's house in a cab at almost 2 a.m. She described how there were two drunk German girls on a subway ride they took earlier in the night. The girls were yelling "Wake up, New York!" and they led a round of happy birthday singing to one of my daughter's friends, with the whole train car joining in. As my daughter tells it, the night was just rambling fun, at least for her and her little group of innocents.

For our son and one of his friends, the night wasn't quite as sanguine as for my daughter and us. They were going to a party in Brooklyn. They came up out of the train station, looked around and found themselves in an unfamiliar and not great neighborhood. Heads down against the light hail, they walked towards the street where the party was being held. On the way, a police car pulled up next to them. The cop inside, a White guy, rolled down the window and said to the two Black boys on the sidewalk, "Where the fuck do you boys think you're going? Do you know where the fuck you are?"

At first, they thought he was being hostile and gave subversively sarcastic answers, but as the cop continued to question them, it began to dawn on both my son and his friend that he might actually be looking out for them. "You two college boys are going to get yourselves shot and killed out here tonight," he told them. "I'd advise you to get to your party and lock the door or turn around and go home." The boys went ahead to the party, noting that the cop car didn't move from the block till they were inside. At the party, they looked around, decided "the party was whack anyway," and headed back out into the night, to the subway station, where they took the train back to the city. They decided to get off in Times Square and watch the ball drop with the rest of the hordes, then they got something to eat and came back to our home. We walked in to our apartment shortly after 2 a.m. to see them sitting there, watching The Matrix.

"You're home early," my husband said, surprised.

"Oh, we have stories," my son's friend said. He nudged our son with an elbow. "Tell them."

My son started recounting what happened, sanitizing the cop's language. "No," his friend said, "Give the tone of voice, use the actual words he used. Tell them the real story." So my son did, with his friend adding details.

"How did that make you feel?" I asked the boys when they were done.

My son shrugged. "Like that cop knew something and didn't want to have to clean our dead bodies off the street," he said.

Considering it now, I choose to think that cop might have been a guardian angel in profane disguise protecting our boys on New Years eve night. We'll never know for sure. For which I am eternally grateful.

The Tape of the World

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” —W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

"I do not know a single Black man in this country, from any walk of life, who does not think that the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates in his home by a White police officer was not about race." —Eugene Robinson, Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist for The Washington Post

------------

Two weeks ago Black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested in his home by White police officer Jim Crowley (the irony of that name is almost too much to contemplate). The professor was arrested after showing identification proving that he was indeed in his own home and was not a burgler. Gates had returned from a trip to find his front door jammed. He asked his cab driver to help him force it open. A woman passing by called the cops to say, she wasn't sure, but there might be a burglary in progress. The woman never mentioned race.

Officer Crowley showed up to find Professor Gates already in his home. He asked for identification, which the professor produced, proving he was indeed the occupant of that house. Crowley then proceeded to treat Gates as a suspect: Hand on holster, he asked the professor to step outside. Gates, a veteran like the rest of us of too many tales of Black men wrongly shot by cops, refused. Some reports say the professor grew irate, but in fact, the tape of the incident released by police reveals no such thing. He merely protested being accosted and bossed in his own home. But at that moment, despite all his accomplishments, he became just an uppity Negro who offended a White cop by not showing proper deference. Out came the handcuffs.

If you are Black in America, you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Gates's arrest was about nothing more than affronted racial egos. On both sides.

The charges were ultimately dropped, and the Cambridge police apologized to the professor, evidence of their assessment that Gates was wrongly detained. Then President Obama, in a rare instance of less-than-careful (albeit truthful) speech, called the arrest "stupid." And the media frenzy began. On Fox News, Glen Beck declared that the President was racist. On MSNBC, Joe Scarborough reflected that what happened to Gates would never have happened to a White professor proven to be in his own home. Cops in Cambridge groused that the President was hostile to law enforcement. And on and on.

Today the President, the professor and the police officer will sit down for beers in the White House garden to try to work out a peace. I have no doubt they will achieve some sort of resolution, that they will each leave there with a better understanding of how this happened, and of one another. As for the rest of America, I'm not so sure.

The whole unfortunate saga brings three things to mind for me.

1) When my son was younger, I taught him that if he ever got lost, he should not seek out a male cop. Instead, he should find an older woman who seemed like a sympathetic aunt or grandmother and ask for her help. My reasoning was an older woman would be more likely to stay with him until he was well and truly safe. A male cop, on the other hand, was a crapshoot. He might be a good sort, or he might be subject to conscious or unconscious stereotypes and see nothing in my son but a present or future criminal.

2) My son runs track. He is a hurdler and a 200-meter and 400-meter sprinter. I have always encouraged him to train on the fields at his school rather than in the public park near us, because I secretly worry that when cops see any Black male running, all they see is a suspect.

3) Many people asked Michelle Obama in the weeks leading up to her husband's declaring himself a candidate for president, whether she wasn't terrified that he would be shot. Indeed, the night Obama won the Iowa Caucus, my own mother was anything but happy. "They're going to shoot him," she said worriedly. "I don't want him to run. I don't want him to win." "Mom, that's just fear talking," I told her. "We can't sit still and let our fears run rampant. We'll never take a step forward." (Bold words coming from noisy-brained me!) Michelle Obama apparently agreed. Her answer to those unsettling questions? "As a Black man, Barack could be shot just going to the store," she said. "So no, we don't give in to those fears."

Post-racial America? Not yet.