WCSU in the Age of Reason

On my son’s first day of work as a waiter, he got a lesson in racial politics. The restaurant was in a section of Washington, D.C., where most of the patrons happened to be African American and Latino. When he presented one customer her bill she protested and said he had told her that Corona beer was part of the happy hour and she was being charged too much. My son said no, he had not said that and he called over the manager to deal with it. Soon the owner of the restaurant was involved. He was black and the customer was Latina. They argued until the owner pointed to my son and said: “He may be white, but he’s not stupid!”

That owner was perceptive, not only about my son but about the way we must think of ourselves and race.

The results are usually not so clear when an incident that involves race plays out on the national stage.

Dr. George Coleman, deputy commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Education and a WCSU adjunct professor, chaired a panel discussion on the Henry Louis Gates incident at Western Connecticut State University this week. Gates is the black Harvard professor who was arrested in his house after an altercation with a white police officer.

Coleman pointed out that when famous people speak insensitively about race the collective community calls for a national dialogue, “as if race is an overlooked aspect of the national curriculum and the faux pas is the result of the chapter being skipped over or the violator not being in school that day.”

Coleman asked why we still need such a dialogue (we’ve been talking about race for 300 years, after all) and what should we be talking about?

Alice Hyman, a community activist and member of the panel, said the answer to why the Gates arrest caused a national furor and what we should be discussing is simple.

“The problem is color,” Hyman said. “A police officer saw a black man. It was easy to determine that he lived there and that he was not a threat. That makes me say ‘What is up with this?’

“Even today with an African American president there is always that bit of racism – and racism is a very hard word – that still exists in our society. We still have a segment of our society that does do not want to understand that people are different. We don’t have to love everybody, we have to understand them. We have to be more tolerant of color and differences.”

The best part of this discussion was that black folks and white folks talked to each other about race in America. It just doesn’t happen that often. The panel’s general consensus was that for race to be less of an issue, we have to spend more time getting to know each other and understanding the different perspectives that each race has about freedom in America.

“We have different perspectives,” said WCSU Professor of Economics Dr. Oluwole Owoye. “African Americans have a different take when they are accosted by police officers. Police should respect and accept African American perspectives. When you have people of different views discussing the issues, you have compromise. Then you can begin to understand each other. Our culture has become a culture of confrontation. We need to be accepting of each other, be tolerant of each other.”

Kerri Forrest, a senior producer based in Washington, D.C., for “The Early Show” on CBS, said that what most people want is respect.

“We have worked so hard to be part of the whole and when someone challenges that, it hurts,” Forrest said. “We need to consider what it’s like to be a black man arrested in his own home. We need to consider what it’s like to be a white police officer who is doing his job and called a racist. A lot of discussion is needed in our own community. There’s a lot of hurt passed on from generation to generation.”

Danbury Police Chief Al Baker took a lot of the heat from fellow panelists and from members of the audience as he was asked to explain the actions of officers not under his command, including Sgt. James Crowley, who arrested Gates. Baker refused to second-guess Crowley’s decision-making but he did point out that the district attorney decided not to prosecute Gates, an admission by the state that the arrest would not hold up in court.

Dr. Harold Schramm, professor emeritus of Justice and Law Administration at WCSU, took the grumpy view.

“We’ll all feel wonderful when we leave here, but if we don’t have action, this will be for naught,” Schramm said. “I’d like to find a way to move from talk to action.”

There is reason for hope. The restaurant owner down in D.C., for instance, threw out the customer who tried to cheat on her bill and told my son to get back to work. It was a perfect post-racial ending.

(See photos of the event by WCSU Photographer Peggy Stewart at http://www.wcsu.edu/newsevents/westconnection-flickr.asp?setID=72157622543949348)

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