Pass the Beer, Mr. President! (Part 1)

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

A lot of thoughts run through my mind as I watched the key players in the July 16, 2009 Cambridge, Mass., domestic arrest of the renowned Harvard University professor that was widely beamed around the globe sip at generous mugs of beer with their hosts at the White House, namely, the President of the United States and his vice on television. What was quite obvious was the fact that Sgt. James Crowley, the arresting officer, was not very keen about the entire affair, the logical remedial afterthought in the unfortunate wake of Mr. Barack Hussein Obama having emotively gushed that the actions of the Cambridge police involved in the domestic arrest of Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., had acted “stupidly.”

Naturally, the head of the Cambridge police officers’ union felt the utmost urge to riposte, being that the president’s rather visceral and keen reaction to the reported actions of the arresting officers not only prejudicially and flagrantly impugned the professionalism of the Cambridge police, as a whole, but even more grievously called their rational faculties, or common sense, into question.

Consequently, some critics are of the opinion that if, indeed, the July 30, 2009 so-called Beer Summit at the White House had any “teachable moment,” or edifying message, vis-à-vis the epic and seemingly intractable question of race relations in the United States, that “teachable moment,” indubitably, was one that was primarily tailored for the especial benefit of President Obama.

But that his mordant indictment of the Cambridge police was pronounced with his full knowledge of the fact that the most significant details of the incident had, as yet, not been pieced together is all the more lamentable. The Beer Summit, therefore, must have given the president the necessary opportunity to prove himself as an even-handed statesman who unreservedly represented the several and joint – or collective – interests of Americans at large.

On a fundamentally moral level, Mr. Obama appears to have achieved precisely what the “summit” aimed for; and obliquely, former President William Jefferson Blye Clinton had quite an admirable lot to do with the latter. And it is inescapably the fact that during the latter part of his administration, President Clinton had instituted a blue-ribbon dialogical panel on race, fittingly headed by the recently deceased Duke University distinguished professor emeritus Dr. John Hope Franklin. Believe it or not, centralizing the discourse on race had a remarkable lot to do with the hitherto unprecedented readiness of mainstream – or white – America to according Mr. Obama the rare pioneer’s privilege of the presidency.

Indeed, it was for the preceding reason that the president’s rather ill-advised decision to preface/prefix his “stupid” remark with his supposedly abiding and fast friendship with the renowned Harvard African-American Studies professor came off to many Americans, irrespective of racial classification or ethnicity, as nothing short of the patently unfortunate.

Needless to say, on the question of race and ethnicity, Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is quite an erratically curious character. And it is for this reason why his allegedly stentorian protestation to the arresting Cambridge police officers of his “Blackness” being the overriding source of official obloquy or proscription verges on the outright risible. Risible because throughout the 1980s and the early 1990s, when he was far and away the most prominent African-American intellectual on Black literary and cultural discourse, Prof. Gates vehemently and sneeringly rejected any attempt to situate him among the ranks of the “Afrocentric” wing of the American academy.

His repeated assertion, which had partial validity, that many a leading member of the Afrocentric school was a racial “Essentialist,” endeared Prof. Gates to the liberal wing of the mainstream American academy. Needless to say, no intellectual of any remarkable heft needed convincing about the fact that for the still young and fledgling discipline of African-American Studies (or Black Studies) to be accorded the respectability of a traditional academic discipline, the latter needed to transcend the petty squabbling regarding who best qualified to teach African-American Studies, a black or white person, rather than soundly predicating such purely academic question on scholarship and professional preparation. This is in no way to suggest that little worthwhile scholarship carried among the ranks of even the most “essentialistcally radical” Afrocentric intellectuals. And here, the sterling example of Maulana Ron Karenga, of the University of California system should suffice.

By 1992, however, while he taught at Duke University, Prof. Gates would abruptly change tune by insisting that, indeed, he was and had always, in fact, been a bona fide Afrocentric scholar but quickly add in almost exactly the following words, “My brand of ‘Afrocentrism’ must be distinguished from that of ‘those boys’” by which, of course, Prof. Gates cavalierly meant such remarkable scholars as Prof. Karenga, founder of the widely celebrated African-American festival of “Kwanzaa,” and Temple University’s Prof. Molefi Kete Asante. Indeed, Prof. Gates would also go to the cavalier extent of viciously maligning Kwanzaa as a completely alien African culture that had no place, whatsoever, in either Black America or the greater America polity. In an article published in Newsweek, which was simultaneously and obliquely riposted by Prof. Molefi Kete Asante, for instance, Prof. Gates sneered that “One celebrates Kwanzaa in Lagos, Nigeria, and not Los Angeles, California.”

In other words, the renowned Prof. Gates who would now have the world, at large, envisage him as the epitome of African-American cultural achievement and development, has spent a remarkable part of his adult life, scholarship and public pronouncements systematically undermining Black-America’s cultural development. At best, he may be aptly described as a suave and prolific careerist.

It is also worth highlighting former President Clinton’s policy initiative on the imperative need for a well-articulated and perennial dialogue on race relations in America. For in the final analysis, while America has been globally recognized as a bi-racial polity for most of its history, its indisputably cosmopolitan and recently acquired multiracial identity, at least in legal and public consciousness, necessitates that such dialogue become expansive and inclusive.

In sum, President Obama needs to go far beyond the purely symbolic and personal level of a “Beer Summit” in order to effectively account for the indubitably complex and seemingly intractable problem of race. Still, what Mr. Obama’s “stupid” comment eloquently elucidates, is the grim fact that even the President of the United States is as vulnerably susceptible to unguardedly venting his spleen against any perceived incidence of racial profiling as the least recognizable and/or influential citizen among us.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is a Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI), a pro-democracy think-tank, and author of 20 books, including “The New Scapegoats: Colored-on-Black Racism” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com. ###