First, we have an African-American president. This means that at least on some rather broad level, we as a nation have almost completely, if not completely overcome race as a national issue. That doesn’t mean that many, many people in this country are still racist, but that will never change. There’s a difference between eliminating the social acceptability of racism and eliminating racism itself. The former might be possible; the latter will never happen.

It’s also my understanding that it’s not just white cops who have a predilection for confronting blacks on the streets disproportionately to whites. Even black cops can do it. I think that while many acts of cop racism are the result of individual and group racism, the broader issue of legal injustice has more to do with class than race. There just happens to still exist a strong coincidence between race and class, but in my opinion the cause-and-effect relationship between the two is dimishing. I think the key factor to success in our present society, apart from inheritance, is one’s willingness and ability to be or appear to be of the dominant European culture and class. Many blacks, Gates included, have found a very comfortable home there, individual racist cops notwithstanding.

But, second, my biggest beef is with Gates himself. Here’s a recent quote from him about the incident—from an appearance on CNN, if I’m not mistaken:

“What it made me realize was how vulnerable all black men are, how vulnerable all people of color are, and all poor people, to capricious forces like a rogue policeman, and this man clearly was a rogue policeman.”

Just where has Gates been? I’ve never been hassled by a rogue policeman, and even I know this goes on, and I’ve known it for a very, very long time. He actually admitted publicly that he was ignorant of the plight of “all poor people.” I think the real cause of Gates’ outrage has to do with the fact that he’s a wealthy and famous Harvard professor being hassled by a cop, not so much that he’s a black man being hassled by a cop, as I think “Phantom Negro” puts it well here:

Skip Gates, please sit down
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/07/24/gates/

Racism has usually been used as a distraction from the real issue of class in our society, despite the fact that racism itself has produced a tragic and viscious record of harm of its own. Even the black president that we just elected is continuing the class warfare on Americans started by his white predecessors. The more things change, the more they stay the same.