Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
July 23, 2009
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Maybe I’m imposing the “current events” angle on this too much, but I began comparing the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. with Ma’s near-arrest by the Chicago police officer in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Here’s an excerpt from the play. Ma is being cited for assaulting a taxi driver:
MA RAINEY: Tell the men who he’s messing with!
POLICEMAN: Do you know this lady?
MA RAINEY: Just tell the man who I am! That’s all you gotta do.
POLICEMAN: Lady, will you let me talk, huh?
MA RAINEY: Tell the man who I am!
IRVIN: Wait a minute… wait a minute! Let me handle it. Ma, will you let me handle it?
MA RAINEY: Tell him who he’s messing with!
IRVIN: Okay! Okay! Give me a chance! Officer, this is one of our recording artists… Ma Rainey.
MA RAINEY: Madame Rainey! Get it straight! Madame Rainey! Talking about taking me to jail!
The “real” Ma Rainey was arrested several times herself, once for practicing illicit sexual relations with other women in a Chicago hotel room (she was bailed out by Bessie Smith, according to the story). In this fictional incident, she’s pretty clearly being profiled herself, in a time before that word really even existed. What made me think of Gates is the simple fact that they are both celebrities in their own right, and how being a celebrity or being well-off is—to a point—no protection from being singled out by law enforcement. The latest development of the story is that President Obama has now remarked upon it in a national press conference and condemned it, calling the police officer in question “stupid.” The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates has an interesting take on Obama’s perspective:
I was not so much surprised by Obama’s answer, as I was by his thinly-veiled anger. Anger may not be the right word, perhaps “perturbed.” After thinking about, I should not have been. Obama’s been pissed off before in public interactions.
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.
Coates doesn’t fault Obama for his privileged position, but I think he questions why this issue could only come to such prominence when it happened to a famous Harvard professor. In Wilson’s play, Ma Rainey is not of the upper middle-class, and despite her celebrity, she’s no celebrity to most white people in the 1920’s. Even if she thinks she deserves better treatment, I don’t think that, realistically, she expects that the cop is going to give it to her because of who she is. I suspect that she fights back only because she knows that Irvin and Sturdyvant, her white producers, can back her up (and ultimately, it’s Irvin’s bribe to the cop that gets her off the hook). Furthermore, Irvin and Sturdyvant protect Ma only insofar as it’s a means to continue making money off of her. Ma understands that she’s only temporarily renting fair treatment from the powerful.
I don’t want to diminish Professor Gates’s treatment, which was unfair and humiliating. However, that incident was followed by an outcry in the national media, an apology by the president of Harvard, and then a condemnation by the President of the United States. That kind of validation is hard to come by for most black Americans who find themselves the victims of racial profiling, especially when the discrimination is more subtle and hard to prove and isn’t followed by a front page New York Times story on their behalf. I think Obama said all the right things in his press conference answer by drawing out the necessary lessons of the incident, particularly in calling the history of law enforcement’s racial profiling a “fact” and pointing out “how race remains a factor in this society.” As a white man of fairly affluent upbringing, it’s easy for me to perceive sometimes that race isn’t a factor anymore, and maybe it takes the arrest of a university professor, a case literally close to home, to remind me otherwise.
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