Afew days before the election, I accompanied a friend to the dentist’s office. It was one of those situations in which appearance takes over more complex realities of who we are. I was a middle-aged black woman assisting an elderly white man. That he’s a wild old radical who browbeats the mad law professor in me with Russian ideologues and German philosophers probably wasn’t what most people saw as we toddled down the street arm in arm on cane. In the vast warren of the medical center, we become even more invisible in a waiting room filled with physically fragile patients, many of whom had been brought there by female caretakers of color.
Perhaps because of some such condescension, we became privy to a loud conversation floating out the not-quite-closed door of the office next to which we were sitting. One of the doctors was chatting with a patient, expressing his general pique at the world in familiar, often contradictory clichés. He was upset at the loss of standards in schools. He pitted merit against equality and paired merit with white, Jewish and Asian students. He insisted that “we are not all equal” and concluded that affirmative action was inherently immoral. A few minutes later he blamed white liberals for abandoning standards and praised as standard-bearers those blacks who support vouchers. “The problem is” minorities who teach their children to hate white people. He said that “blacks are out of control” and that black leaders “are not taking responsibility.” He cited Al Sharpton, Marion Barry and Louis Farrakhan as typical black leaders, and he rattled on against substance abuse in the inner cities and guns in the hands of young blacks who will never make it into the middle class, because they don’t study and don’t have good table manners.
“Bite down,” he said as he finished with a paean of support for “zero tolerance” policies, standardized testing and George W. Bush.
George W. Bush! I shook my head wonderingly. If only he were black. It’s one of those things we black people think about a lot: If only this or that one were black. Can you imagine, we tell each other.
Just think where a black man who spent more than half his adult life as a substance abuser would be–a black man who had a conviction for drunk driving and a notoriously bad attitude. Is it too obvious to point out that George Bush and Dick Cheney–who has two convictions for drunk driving–share a certain equality of status with Marion Barry?
Just think where a sneering black frat brother who committed gross grammatical butcheries and called Greeks Grecians would be. What fun Abigail Thernstrom could have questioning why unqualified upper-class whiners like that should be admitted to “first tier” universities like Yale and Harvard. (I guess we’re supposed to feel better that Cheney flunked out of Yale on his own merits.)
Just think of where a black businessman with a “winning” personality but a losing financial record would be when he showed up to buy that team franchise. Assuming he could get a job way down in the corporate food chain, you can bet they wouldn’t let him anywhere near the cash register.
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Imagine a black politician who was so loudmouthed that his own family called him “bombastic,” who proffered opinions about nations whose names he hadn’t bothered to learn or badly mispronounced and who created an international incident by falsely accusing the Russian Prime Minister of stealing from the IMF. If you’re thinking Al Sharpton, think again.
Imagine a black leader who began his campaign for office at a university that historically advocated racial separatism as God’s law and that published materials describing Judaism as heretical and Catholicism as a “cult.” I do wonder how it is that George W. can wander through so much of Louis Farrakhan’s metaphysical territory and still come out looking like someone whose morals so many Americans say they can look up to.
I do not draw such analogies simply to relativize. The more important point, I think, is one related to what I sometimes call innocence profiling. If George W. Bush were black, he would be a classic suspect profile. If he were Driving While Black, there are people who would have forgiven police if they had decided to shoot at his drunkenly weaving car on that dark Maine highway (as New Jersey troopers shot at that van full of perfectly sober, cooperative college students). If he had been black, we might have heard Mayor Rudolph Giuliani describing him as “no altar boy” (as he described Patrick Dorismond, a security guard “accidentally” shot and killed by the NYPD).
But of course, George W. Bush is not black, and thus it is, perhaps, that the New York Times instead ran an article describing him as having tamed his “inner scamp” and entered “midlife redemption”–even as the article goes on to describe the supposedly redeemed man-who-would-be-Commander-in-Chief as having behaved so insultingly and inappropriately toward Queen Elizabeth at a state dinner in 1991–five years after he says he gave up alcohol–that a horrified Barbara Bush promised the Queen to seat him far away from Her Majesty, “for fear of him saying something.”
The lesson of equality is, at its heart, related to the question of double standards: There are still too many examples in American society of the degree to which we have zero tolerance for disreputable black behavior and seemingly unlimited indulgence when whites behave the very same way.
Anyway, back at the medical center, the dentist’s door flew open. “Next!” called out the doctor.
“Now set the teeth…,” growled my dear old friend and lefty warrior as he marched into the office to face needles, drills…and more. “It won’t be so bad,” smiled the dentist unsuspectingly.
But my friend had been quoting Shakespeare’s Henry V. “Teach them how to war…” he went on and winked at me. The door shut softly behind them.
