Prometheus 6

Rage of the Thinking Class
by Mark Anthony Neal

But the attention that the case has attracted raises more troubling issues about which black bodies really matter. Few blacks—and fellow black scholars for that matter—are fortunate to have Charles Ogletree on their speed dial; or edit an on-line magazine in collaboration with The Washington Post and Newsweek Magazine. Indeed Antwi Akom, a professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at San Francisco State University didn’t have such a profile when he was arrested in front of his campus office in October of 2005 while retrieving books.

Without asking for or allowing Professor Akom to produce his campus ID, the officer arrested him while his children sat in his car. Professor Akom was formally charged with resisting arrest. Campus administration remained silent about the case, though the charges were eventually dropped months later. Professor Akom’s case didn’t generate the kind of attention that the Gates case has, but Professor Akom benefitted from a network of scholars and activists who spoke out about a clear case of racial profiling and Professor Akom’s unimpeachable reputation. What’s to be said though, for those folk for which such experiences range from a regular nuisance to real incidences of terror and death, far too frequent to even document?

What do you call a Black Man with a PhD? pt. 2
July 23, 2009 By: The Good Doctor

The class dynamics here are particularly stark. Gates is a Harvard Professor, his lawyer (Charles Ogletree) is not only also Harvard Law Professor, but is his friend. As soon as he’s arrested he is able to get his personal secretary to make a call to one of the best civil rights lawyers on the planet. Because he is who he is, he gets instant national (international?) press coverage. And even though he felt he was stuck in a narrative he couldn’t get out of, because of his stature he was able to quickly establish an effective counter-narrative! Check out the introduction of the statement issued by Prof. Ogletree (his lawyer).

How do the sentences establishing his full title, and his whereabouts before the incident work here? For me they work to establish that Gates wasn’t your “regular negro.” (Even though he arguably acted like one–the original police report has been scraped from the web but I believe it, rather than Gates’ statement.) Whereas then-candidate Barack Obama was hesitant to make any type of definitive statement about the Jena 6, last night during his press conference he was quick to label the Cambridge police officer’s action “stupid”.

Now here’s the stark reality.

Working class and poor black men are treated like this every single minute of every single day. But our–and here I mean not just whites but blacks–response is usually muted at best. Because the entire concept of racial profiling is based on class–on the idea that black middle and upper class men are treated as if they are POOR and black. If Gates wasn’t Gates but John John, we either never hear about it in the media, or (if we live in a black neighborhood) we drive by it without even thinking twice. We routinely withhold care–a political resource–from poor and working class blacks, so we give less than a damn when they get jacked. (This is why Obama’s Father’s Day rhetoric plays so well in black communities.)

A Good Victim Helps the Cause

This nation has often needed good victims to gird our moral resolve. I am reminded particularly of Rosa Parks, who was not the NAACP’s first choice for the Montgomery bus boycott. That honor belonged to Claudette Colvin, a 15 year-old NAACP volunteer. Ms. Colvin was chosen in part because of her age and seeming innocence. However, shortly after she was arrested for refusing to move to the back of a bus, she became pregnant by an older, married man.

Despite being victimized by an unjust law and abused and humiliated by police officers, Ms. Colvin’s case ended quietly. Rosa Parks became an icon while Ms. Colvin, whose pregnancy meant she was no longer a good victim, was largely forgotten.

The young black and Latino men and women who routinely face the kind of treatment Professor Gates endured are largely not good victims. They are young and poor, like Claudette Colvin, and are often involved in crime. When these people are targeted for humiliating and unfair treatment, it is difficult for some of us to muster much outrage — even if the outcome is that 1 in 9 black males between the ages of 20 and 34 are incarcerated. That apathy should be our shame and not theirs.

A comment at American Leftist

the Lacewell post caught my attention, because it indirectly touches upon a subject that has been periodically discussed amongst progressives and leftists over the years, the extent to which progressive and left intellectuals were effectively fenced away from the larger public by incorporating them into academia

Lacewell seems to be implicitly saying, even if she is not aware of it, that the intellectual and cultural project implemented by Gates over the years at Harvard is one that is disconnected from the day to day concerns of African Americans and proponents of civil rights more generally

I can't say whether that is true or not, although it would seem that there is an unavoidable class bias associated with it, meanwhile, on the left, particularly amongst anarchists, there has been a tendency to see such an endeavor as one that involves an inescapable cooption, and, and, as you might guess, you don't find many anarchists in academia, at least as faculty