In graduate school, turning brown on my wall was a double spread IBM newspaper ad of Henry Louis Gates sitting in his office at Harvard, typing away--or at least pretending to--on his IBM thinkpad. Cheesy and high school, perhaps, but then dreams need a file of affirming images, and among contemporary images out there epitomizing the idea of the prolific black scholar and intellectual, few, in my opinion, rivaled the quintessence of that IBM ad.
Once you have images like that you can't help having a narrative: a logical, cohesive, and stable connection between ideas, which in the case of this aging poster is a narrative equating the idea of working your butt off to the idea of the American dream; the idea of self improvement to the idea that you can forge your own destiny; class ascension to education; and the achievement of a certain level of success to the idea that it guarantees you and your family a privileged bubble that renders you less vulnerable to the vicissitudes of a random world.
What if something happens to threaten that narrative on which your entire worldview and subjectivity (sense of self) is anchored?
Though the president waded into a local issue and due to the vast weight of his office succeeded in doing what some would have thought impossible: turn the cops into Davids and Gates into Goliath, and has had to "apologize" for doing so, there is still no doubt that he was miffed by all this. As Ta-Nehisi
notes on his blog a few days ago:
Moreover, for black people, this is the kind of issue that tends to cut across lines of class and politics. I would say that this is the sort of thing that angers upper middle-class black people even more than it angers anyone else, because they tend to be individuals who, by society's lights, are very accomplished. They deeply resent being lumped in with the mass. And more than anyone they resent the whole "when you're black, you talk to the police like this" routine. Obama has lived as a member of that class for a large portion of his adult life, or he's had some concentrated exposure to it--the black strivers roll deep on the South Side. It's not shocking that he was pissed.
The racial debate and fallout from all this doesn't interest me much. Rather, what I find compelling is the role narrative (as in a much more cohesive state of objects and relations) plays here as a form of knowledge, and especially in relation to what I consider the vast implications arising from that often dismissed co-dependency between knowledge and power.
Before POTUS waded in, Gates, in 2 online interviews, used the term narrative perceptively. In the
Daily Beast interview with his daughter, he said:
I was cast by him in a narrative and he didn’t know how to get out of it, and then when I demanded—which I did—his name and badge number, I think he just got really angry. And he knew that he had to give me that, and his police report lies and says he gave it to me. If he had done that I would have simply taken it down and wrote a report! I was definitely going to file a report, now—just not as big as the one I’m about to file!
And he repeated it to Dayo Olapade in the
Root interview when he goes, "Now it’s clear that he had a narrative in his head: A black man was inside someone’s house, probably a white person’s house, and this black man had broken and entered, and this black man was me."
Human beings grow to possess subjectivity--a sense of self and place separate from others and the world around them--but they are not born with it. Subjectivity is built; it is a construct pieced together from the pre-determining world of narratives surrounding us and out of which everyone strives, within the parameters of plot and possibility narratives impose on us, to build and maintain their own subjectivity as a cohesive state of being.
"The positions of the subject," Michel Foucault would say, "are defined by the situation that is possible for him (or her) to occupy in relation to the various domains or groups of objects." (1972, 53-4). That relation between a group of objects that positions the subject is what I want perceived here as a narrative, or as that property that sets a narrative apart from general knowledge -- cohesiveness. For I would argue that what we all strive for is more cohesion, not less; for our own subjective well being we seek out better and firmer connections between the ideas, facts, fictions, or personal experiences that lets us see ourselves in the terms of a more cohesive narrative; any threat to that cohesion is therefore a threat to the stability of what anchors our subjectivities to a certain social location or to a location we aspire to. In turn, we seek higher degrees of cohesion to guarantee us stabler subject locations and vice versa.
Okay, that takes care of the knowledge side but how then does power come into all of this?
What comes into play when we exert ourselves--get more education, get a makeover, get married, lose weight, etc--in an effort to maintain cohesion or attain a higher degree of it--i.e. the stability of one's subject location-- can be called power. In
Prison Talk, Foucault tries to clarify why he finds it necessary to combine knowledge and power when he says:
I think there is of power on knowledge and of knowledge of power. We should not be content to say that power has a need for such-and-such a discovery, such-and-such a form of knowledge, but we should add that the exercise of power itself creates and causes to emerge new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information. One can understand nothing about economic science if one does not know how power and economic power are exercised in everyday life. The exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces power. [. ..] Modern humanism is therefore mistaken in drawing this line between knowledge and power. (pp. 53-4)
Back to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, one can argue, using Gates logic, that both Crowley, the cop, and Gates were both locked in their narratives by the need to validate an anticipated cohesion of cues, assumptions and facts, and both men, in pursuing his own line towards a certain kind of cohesion that is in no doubt integral to his own subject location, exerted power in doing so.
Gates felt insulted by the suspicion cast on him--and rightfully so--and insisted on framing the episode in racial terms, grasping for an affirming--affirming in the context of his own life's work I mean-- cohesion of the cues, assumptions, facts and preconceived ideas that would have validated his worldview as well as the narrative underlying his own subjectivity and social location. Gates insistence on framing the episode in racial terms came from a need to cohere knowledge not just any way but in a particular way; in a way that was advantageous to him, and he exerted power in doing so. Perhaps, even stupidly.
Sgt. Crowley, in arresting Gates, was also locked in a narrative and was carried to an absurd extreme by the need to maintain that narrative's cohesion of facts and anticipations. Okay, i'm going to get off the academic highway here for a bit. For Sgt. Crowley, I think his was the case of an admirable cop, who taught classes in racial profiling, but was now stung by the shameful epiphany that he, the expert, in response to a call about 2 black men with backpacks muscling in a door and in fear for his own life, had stepped unto Dr. Gates lawn with the wrong narrative and had sought to maintain the wrong cohesion of facts and cues. To maintain this cohesion, even after it was proven wrong, required him to exert power stupidly and to an absurd extreme.
I agree with Harold Ford on only that point. Once Sgt. Crowley found out he was wrong or that there was a hole in his theory, he should have calmed it down, and whether he succeeded in doing so or not, he should have stepped the f*%k off. A cop can't just arrest an innocent man in his own house for being an asshole, especially after you, the cop, gave the innocent man good reason to be an asshole towards you. Like with teachers when it comes to dealing with unruly kids, I do sympathize with the cop and I'm sorry his job has a huge suck factor, but suck it up he must and swallow hard he has to in order to stay professional and deal. A cop's power to arrest carries too much symbolic weight and ramifications to be used flippantly, emotionally or even in accordance to a strict interpretation of the letter of the law in such a way that closes the door to discernment and good judgment. Burglary and calling a cop a racist are two different things. One warrants an arrest, and even though the other might stick in your craw like a bitch slap, it doesn't warrant Sgt. Crowley's own exertion of power, and the same can be said for Gates.
Finally, there is no doubt the president was pissed. In trying to maintain the cohesion of the narrative integral to his own subjective location which also happens to be the collective location of an African American upper class privilege for which the name, image, work and voice of Henry Louis Gates serves not only as a metaphor but as a metonymic cue, POTUS also exerted power, which I'm sure he thought would be seen and measured by everyone watching and listening as his own personal take on the situation. However, when you are the president of the United States you no longer have the option of exerting your personality and its limited influence; everything you do or say carries the full weight of the White House.
