by Ishmael Reed
Why the Media and its “General Public” Bought Sgt. Crowley’s Lie
Let’s All Have a Beer13
I
t’s not surprising that some whites, who monopolize the means of expression both electronically and in print, mainstream and progressive, would automatically take Sgt. James M. Crowley’s word against Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s even though Crowley’s account of the Gates arrest has been disputed by both Gates and Lucia Whalen, the woman who called 911.
They also disapprove of President Obama calling the action “stupid.” According to a CNN poll, fifty-nine percent of blacks believe that Officer Crowley acted stupidly; twenty-nine percent of whites.
Whalen said nothing about “two black men with back packs,” during her 911 call as noted by The New York Times, the day after two of its reporters embraced Crowley’s version of the incident. She never used the word black. Crowley’s invisible “two black men with back packs” came from the same part of the American imagination as Susan Smith’s black man wearing a knitted cap, Bonnie Smith’s invisible car-jacking black men and Charles Stuart’s invisible black-male murderers. The same place as Barack Obama’s invisible Kenyan birth certificate, a hoax accepted by the Gothic South where the uniform of its homegrown terrorist movement is that of Casper the Friendly Ghost.
Even twelve-year-old Christopher Pittman got into the act. After blowing his grandparents to Kingdom Come with a shotgun, young Pittman blamed the murders on an invisible over-six-feet-tall black man.
Now that there are fears of black and brown uprisings, fears stoked by Rupert Murdoch and CNN’s Jonathan Klein, for ratings, the country is revisiting Cotton Mather, the real founding father, who wrote a book about his personal hallucinations called The Wonders of the Invisible World Being an Account of the Trials of Several Witches Lately Executed in New England. His Salem Woods were full of invisible black men. He was one of those nuts who sparked the witch hysteria, which has become the Obama hysteria, inflamed by Klein and Murdoch who go after eyeballs like vampires go after an exposed neck.
Birthers, the creator of Obama as the Joker, tea baggers and assorted anti-Obama nuts are always welcomed at birther-loving CNN, MSNBC and Fox. I don’t know what all of this is leading up to, but I hope that members of President Obama’s Secret Service detail have been rigorously screened. Abraham Bolden, author of The Echo from Dealey Plaza, writes about the racist attitudes of the men who “guarded” JFK. One of them said that he’d never take a bullet for a “nigger lover.”
One of those who is under the post-race spell is Stuart Taylor, senior columnist for National Journal. Appearing on the August 3 edition of the Washington Journal, Taylor said that the Gates arrest had nothing to do with race. When a black caller from Michigan accused Crowley of lying, Taylor said that “there was no proof of a significant misstate- ment” by Officer Crowley. He argued that we’ve entered a post-race period because of Obama’s election and that “there was not a single example of discrimination against Obama in his entire life,” even though Obama says that he experienced racial profiling while serving in the Illinois Legislature. Taylor also denied the existence of racial profiling saying that “a lot of white people get treated worse by the police” than blacks.
Taylor also said that whites don’t do crack, when studies I’ve read indicate that whites consume most of the crack; they just don’t get sentenced for its possession and sale. “Crack penalties appear to hit minorities harder,” was the headline of a Los Angeles Times story published in May 1995.
Despite evidence that large numbers of whites use and sell crack cocaine, federal law enforcement in Southern California has waged its war against crack almost exclusively in minority neighborhoods, exposing black and Latino offenders to the toughest drug penalties in the nation.
Not a single white, records show, has been convicted of a crack cocaine offense in federal courts serving Los Angeles and six Southern California counties since Congress enacted stiff mandatory sentences for crack dealers in 1986.
Yet Taylor attributed the obstacles facing black Americans to their personal behavior, which has been Skip Gates’ line up to now. Like “poor work habits,” which makes you wonder how over eighty percent of blacks manage to hold down jobs; given Stuart’s error-filled interview, who is he to complain about poor work habits?
Taylor’s main point was that “racial preferences pervade American society” when a number of studies, including one from the Department of Labor, describe affirmative action as benefiting white women the most. Taylor was interviewed by a white woman, Libby Casey, who neglected to point this out.
He said that a disproportionate number of blacks are incarcerated because they commit most of the crimes, another lie. They just get arrested more often. Seventy-five percent of blacks and Hispanics wouldn’t be in jail if they were white, and lies coming from Taylor and his colleague at the National Journal, Ron Brownstein, contribute to the climate that sends them there. Brownstein and Taylor make a living by ratcheting up white resentment against blacks, a job so easy that you can do it from the beach. All that is required is a laptop.
Bill Cosby is providing these opportunists with ammunition through his poor command of the facts. I love the guy, and will never forget the time when he flew me up to Harrah’s and provided me with accommodations that included a chef, and introduced me to Ray Charles, but his tough-love lectures are shaky.
Instead of lecturing “thirty-five-year-old grandmothers living in the projects,” wealthy black Americans like Bill Cosby and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who view the “underclass” from first class seats, should establish a black version of the Anti-Defamation League that would challenge the 24/7 false reporting about minorities, who don’t have the media power to fight back.
I’d make a contribution and I know a number of people who’d do the same. For its part, the Anti-Defamation League exposes anti- Semites who are racists as well, some of them armed with deadly weapons.
Letters to the editor, like the one that NAACP president Julian Bond wrote to The New York Times, reminding them that affirmative action is preferential toward white women, don’t seem to have an impact. Bond disputed the paper’s recent right-wing hire, Op-Ed writer Ross Douthat, who, like a reporter for the Times, believes that affirmative action is primarily “race conscious.”
Stuart Taylor’s responses lacked the facts, yet he warned Gates that “he should be careful about what he says.”
The fact that men of Taylor’s background and prejudices dominate the discussion of race in the United States is just another bill that blacks have to pay, and you’d think that the media—both mainstream and progressive—would host white writers who weren’t so much in denial about race. Writers like Leo Litwack, David Zirin, James Lowen, Russell Banks, Tim Wise and Dalton Conley, and Jack Foley, an Irish American who is not trying to impress WASPs by playing Handel on the harpsichord.
With his lies, Sgt. Crowley not only made fools of Stuart Taylor, Huffington Post commentators Robin Wells and Frank Serpico, who accepted his false report, but most depressing, Greg Palast, a leader in the fight against the caging of voters. Moreover, Crowley, who, after the beer summit, seemed grateful that things didn’t have to get “physical” with Gates, a fifty-eight-year-old man who walks with a cane.
The American media have sided with the police most of the time, even when the police led the invasions of black neighborhoods where the inhabitants were massacred, or when they simply stood by and watched—something that the Cambridge and Boston police didn’t learn in school, nor did the whites, the media’s “general public,” who, when polled, took Crowley’s word over Gates’. The Newseum in Washington, DC should have a hall of shame, which would display the headlines of newspapers whose inflammatory reporting led to race riots: Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1921; New Orleans, 1900; etc.
Showman Lou Dobbs praised Sgt. Leon Lashley, the black policeman who backed Crowley as some kind of martyr to political correctness, without mentioning that the officer s
aid that he would have handled the situation differently. Can you blame the guy? He has to work with people like Justin Barrett, the Boston cop who called Gates “a banana eating jungle bunny” and threatened that if Gates had given him some “belligerent non-compliance” he would have “sprayed him in the face with OC [pepper spray].” Officer Barrett is suing the city of Boston because in the view of him and his lawyer, he was fired, unjustly, by Boston’s mayor. His suit lists the damage that the mayor has caused him “…Pain and suffering; mental anguish; emotional distress; post-traumatic stress; sleeplessness; indignities and embarrassment; degradation; injury to reputation; and restriction on his personal freedom.”
His lawyer Peter Marano said that Barrett didn’t mean to characterize Gates as a “banana eating jungle monkey,” but only meant to characterize Gates’ behavior.
Appearing on the Larry King Show, however, Barrett said that he didn’t know what made him say that, a statement which just about pleads for a new branch of psychiatry, or at least of an exorcism. His pathetic attempt at wit is the kind of thing that black policemen have had to deal with for decades: racist graffiti posted on bulletin boards, on emails, overheard on police radios, pasted on their lockers.
Lou Dobbs wasn’t the only commentator cherry-picking the information from the Gates-Crowley encounter. Ed Schultz, a progressive, didn’t even mention Ms. Whalen’s disputing of Officer Crowley’s report. He supported the media line that both Gates and Crowley overreacted, with Gates doing the most overreacting.
The typical response by the talking heads—even the token progressives—took Sgt. Crowley’s word over that of a black professor and a white woman. In a show of ethnic solidarity with Crowley, the Morning Joe show’s Mike Barnicle said that the next time Gates needed a policeman, he should call the Harvard lounge, a remark that drew round-the-clock thigh slapping and yuks from his colleagues. In other words, blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans should accept any action from the police even when it violates their rights, because they, the taxpayers who pay their salaries, might need them in the future.
Chris Matthews, another member of MSNBC’s Irish-American mafia, nominated Crowley for governor of Massachusetts after Crowley’s arrogant and unremarkable press conference. (If a poll were conducted in Ireland, Gates’ version of events would probably prevail over Crowley’s.)
An on-camera left-wing Irish American is as rare as a left-wing African American or Hispanic. Salon’s Joan Walsh won’t do. She agreed with the Albany jury that acquitted the police who murdered Amadou Diallo, who didn’t have a PhD. Like Maureen Dowd, Joan Walsh has cops in her family. If CNN and MSNBC were interested in recruiting some left-wing Irish commentators they might contact the newspaper Irish Echo, which they ought to read. Of course if Celtic-African-American President Obama showed signs of solidarity with the brothers and sisters, like that shown toward Crowley by Scarborough, Matthews, Barnicle and Joe Queenan, appearing on the Bill Mahar Show, he’d be dismissed as an angry black chauvinist. Black and brown cable faces are also drawn from the political right. The lone progressive CNN Hispanic contributor is often outnumbered three to one. The leader of CNN’s Hispanic right is Cuban American Rick Sanchez, who ran down a homeless man named Jeffrey Smuzinick after imbibing “a few cocktails” at a Dolphins game. One of the few Hispanic syndicated columnists is Ruben Navarrete, Jr. whose assignment, like the three at CNN, is to take it to the brothers and sisters from time to time. (Leslie Sanchez, a Republican spokesperson, appears on both MSNBC and CNN.) For example, Navarrete, accepting Crowley’s account, blamed the whole incident on Gates’ not being deferential to the cop. Maybe Gates should have said something like “Bossman police, Iz sorry for bein’ in my own house,” followed by an offer to shine his shoes. I reminded Navarrete that Crowley lied. He answered with a sarcastic note. Navarrete is the writer who said that he was okay with The New York Post cartoon in which President Obama was depicted as a dead chimp slain by the police. Even Rupert Murdoch, the closest media owner we’re likely to get to Goebbels, apologized for that one. The black face at Time is Ramesh Ponnuru, perhaps a reward for his taking the flak at The National Review when Asian-American groups protested a cartoon, which they found offensive. Ramesh Ponnuru defended the cartoon. One of the editors at the time told the protestors that he would not “kowtow” to their demands.
Gates might have raised his voice, he might have yelled, but there was no evidence that he was “belligerent,” in the words of blogger and yoga instructor Robin Wells or “cantankerous,” the word used by sportscaster Stephen A. Smith, who also blamed the incident on Gates. Why would Ms. Wells take the word of Officer Crowley over that of her colleague in the sisterhood, Lucia Whalen? Does Arianna Huffington agree with Ms. Wells?
The fact that black commentators also accepted the officer’s testimony shows the compromises that some blacks have to make in order to keep their jobs in an industry owned by the white right. Oh, sure, the reporters might be liberal, but they don’t run Clear Channel, Fox, CNN, MSNBC and McClatchy.
Before integration, black newspapers were so powerful and independent that J. Edgar Hoover wanted to charge them with sedition according to A Question of Sedition by Patrick Washburn. He was overruled by Franklin Roosevelt’s Attorney General Francis Biddle. Black journalism was weakened when some of the more talented journalists got jobs with mainstream newspapers where they have no power. While Pat Buchanan and Joe Scarborough can go apoplectic any time they feel like it, the few blacks on camera have to keep their cool so as not to appear angry.
Even so, Eugene Washington, who speaks in almost a whisper, just about called Crowley a liar when he said that he didn’t believe that Gates made a slur about the officer’s mother.
Knowing Gates, I don’t either, but then Washington caught himself by adding that he doesn’t know whether a white Harvard professor would have received the same treatment. He called that hypothetical. Hypothetical? Like the theory of gravity? Even tough-lover Bob Herbert, who, like some other token black writers, got angry over the way Gates was treated (Herbert had received a Talented Tenth award from Gates). Herbert blames society’s failings on rap music and says awful things about Michael Jackson, whose contributions to charities were in the millions, but his opinion isn’t shared by the Times’ sales department, which devotes whole sections to Jackson and the rappers in an effort to woo younger readers. He should go to the Times’ advertising department and threaten to quit if they don’t cut it out.
MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart, a real mousey fellow, said that Gates had grown up in a Jim Crow era and that accounted for his losing his cool, again swallowing Crowley’s account of the encounter. Capehart said that he’s never had an unpleasant experience with the police. He said that Gates’ response was generational, a rumor started by a white New York Times Magazine writer who wrote about a divide between Jesse Jackson’s and Barack Obama’s generation on racial issues, even though Obama has been a victim of racial profiling. The writer knows as much about black history and culture as one of the scrub jays in my backyard. Well, a lot of people from Capehart’s generation have had ugly encounters with the police, some of them lethal.
On the phone the other day, Toni Morrison’s son, Harold, a Princeton architect, who was responding to my CounterPunch piece, told me about his encounter. The police, in the front yard of his home, beat up Adam Kennedy, son of the great playwright, Adrienne Kennedy. His mother and he wrote a play about the beating called Sleep Deprivation Chamber.
I was struck by a cop and called a nigger—in the presence of black cops—after he overheard me telling a friend that he was taking a bribe. He charged me with disorderly conduct and came to my cell that night at the Tombs. Unlike the maniac I’d encountered earlier that day he said in a very calm voice that if I pled guilty, I’d only have to spend the weekend at Rikers Island, a New York prison. I told him no deal, and got a lawyer and wondered how poor and Hispanic and black men without resources respond to such great bargains. The judge dismissed
the charges.
Like Sgt. Crowley, the officer lied on his police report and most black men would agree with journalist Jack White that the police lie all the time.
There is no evidence that Gates “over-reacted” in the words of President Obama, and Colin Powell, a man who was part of an administration guilty of perhaps one of the most colossal over-reactions in history. To his credit, Tim Wise, author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, was one of the first commentators to comment on the discrepancies in Crowley’s report.
The dynamic young black intellectual, Joseph Anderson, actually looked up the criteria for disorderly conduct under Massachusetts law. He wrote to me:
… merely verbally disputing, protesting, even being rude to and/or yelling at a cop is NOT “Disorderly Conduct,” and that’s specifically why those charges were later dropped (not merely because of bad PR by the Cambridge Police Department). I’m no supporter of Gates (he used to deny that racial profiling or targeting happened to other blacks), but once Gates provided information (his Harvard ID and his driver’s license) that he indeed lived at that address, the cop should have left!
Moreover, there is no ranting or raving by Gates on the police tape. Not only did Crowley lie, but he flouted the law; yet the majority of whites who were polled, support Crowley over Gates and Obama.
In 1792, Captain Kimber of the slave ship Recovery was charged with murdering two African women after subjecting them to horrendous torture and sexual humiliation. The judge’s charge to the jury led to his acquittal. The account appears in Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route by Saidiya Hartman.