The arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and how this should be contextualized and understood has--rightfully--created a media storm around the world. The event has become bigger than the event itself in that it brings to the forefront some important--and for many painfully uncomfortable--issues about the centrality of race and racism in American society. Primarily, it calls into question that the United States--or any other liberal society like Canada, the UK, or Australia for that matter--is post-racial, a claim that contends race no longer has significant systemic or individualized effects.
Thus, what has been interesting to see is how those commentators who have been willing to concede that race still matters have attempted to pathologize racism as endogenous to society while narrowing its points of origin to individuals as opposed to broader social dynamics. These kinds of orthodox understandings of racism have been cogently critiqued by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva who argues that their effect--in sum--is to limit the understanding of what makes up racism to overt and conscious behaviors while dismissing its scope by presenting racism as a marginal hold-over from a less enlightened past. This depoliticizes racism by constructing the problem as merely an abnormal social manifestation enabled by a few bad apples. For example, this would be the typical kind of reading given to the disturbing image above.
Such an understanding then makes possible two highly problematic outcomes. The first is that we end up overlooking what Stuart Hall has called 'inferential racism', that is, representations in fact or fiction of race--or relating to race--that we take as natural yet which have 'racist premises and propositions inscribed in them as a set of unquestioned assumptions' (Hall 2002, 91).
The second, as Bonilla-Silva illustrates, is that race and racism are seen as things that reside outside of proper contemporary social structures rather than being both an element central to them and a product of their dynamics. In other words, the spectre of racism is not so much abnormal as it is endemic.
What this points to is that if we are going to come to grips with what happened to Professor Gates--or other stories like his that have not received this level of recognition--the intrinsic role of inferential racism within existing social dynamics needs to be addressed head on.
What made the arrest of Professor Gates in his own house possible wasn't simply a bad cop or even a 'racist' police department. It was a complex constellation of elements including more general practices of social differentiation and policing that have racial representations inscribed into them. These would include things such as predispositions about what a burgler looks like in that neighbourhood, knowledge of the geographic separation and segregation within that policing precinct, and underlying notions of the probable description of a 'real' resident at that address. Notice these are also entangled within understandings of class and gender.
Therefore, as painful as it may be to admit it, despite the best of intentions by many there is still a lot of work to be done in the United States and other societies to transform those unconscious attitudes, formal representations, and social structures that make the contemporary practices of racism possible. Pardoxically, as Slavoj Zizek has noted, it is the obscene exclusionary gestures of racism that necessarily supplement other values like democracy, dignity, and human rights that are said to be the defining features of contemporary liberal societies.
A note about 'Cairo 1970', the photo above from K e v i n with credit for the image to Peter:
'I met a guy named Peter at a conference in Chicago. He told me he and
his friends used to come to Cairo, Illinois on weekends because whites
wouldn't shoot at blacks if white college students were in town...'
