In July of 2009, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested for disorderly conduct by a white police officer who was responding to a call of a break-in at Gates’s home. Returning from a trip, Gates found his front door jammed. With the assistance of his driver, he was able to force it open. Meanwhile, a neighbor called 911 and reported Gates’s actions as a break-in.
Although he showed the responding officer his drivers’ license and his Harvard ID, the white officer arrested him for disorderly conduct after Gates followed the officer out his front door. (An arrest that President Obama legitimately called “stupid.”)
Since the 2016 election, we have seen a marked increase of these incidents where white people have called the police because they object to some ordinary activities that were being conducted by people of color. I’m not sure whether the actual number has increased due to the racist in the White House, or to the ease of recording and then posting on social media that has drawn our attention to the unreasonable fear that white people seem to have of little girls selling bottles of water, if those little girls happen to be black.
White people have called the police because black people have dared to use community swimming pools with their socks on, because they barbecue in public, or mow lawns, or because they unlock their own car doors. And while it is easy for white progressives to smugly condemn these other white people for their racist actions, perhaps we should be doing a little character searching of our own, to see just how much racism we are carrying around and how much more we are supporting.