Quote:
Originally Posted by peter12
That NYT article posted awhile back really says it all for me... an academic elitist, in the truest sense possible, gets slightly harassed by a multi-ethnic team of police officers outside of his upper-class home in Cambridge and all of a sudden becomes Al Sharpton's new banner. Meanwhile, the ghettos are still festering with hate, drugs and poverty.
Something inside of me thinks that Gates should shove it, get back to teaching upper-class Americans about their ancestors' sins, and let the rest of America get back to living their real lives.
Identity politics is a cancer and people like Gates, and even Obama in this circumstance, are more responsible than they would like to think for the continuing self-victimizing that has come to characterize the political community of American blacks.
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I think it's definitely true that if Gates weren't "famous," we wouldn't be talking about this at all. But really, doesn't that just point more starkly to the social problems that we should be addressing? I can see your point, but I don't think anyone is advocating attention to HL Gates at the expense of attention to the poverty and misery among poor blacks in America. However, you are right in the sense that it seems like our attention can only be fixed on one thing at a time, and bigger events seem to kind of suck the oxygen out of the room a little bit.
The same could be said about our attention to Michael Jackson's death at the expense of attention to the Iranian elections--or looking farther back, our attention to the genocide in Bosnia while a much larger-scale genocide went on practically unnoticed in Rwanda. That's not to say that we shouldn't have been in Bosnia--but the West's total inaction in Rwanda ought to be (in my view) a stain on our conscience that will last a long time. And it can be partly explained by the fact that the attention of the media (and the Clinton administration) was on Bosnia.
As for calling him an ivory-tower elitist... well, he pretty much is one, by definition. He
has a driver, for pete's sake. OTOH, I wouldn't call being arrested without proper cause "lightly harassed"--that's pretty much the highest extent to which you can be harassed by police, short of tasers in the bum.