Gates on Lincoln

I caught Henry Louis Gates on C-Span last weekend, hyping his new book, Lincoln on Slavery and Race (link), and focusing, inter alia on the topic of according blacks the right to vote. Gates was obviously pleased that Lincoln (as Gates reads the record) came around the issue in the end (at least for those who had fought for the Union in the war and those of “exceptional intelligence”). But Gates is obviously a little squirmy that Lincoln seemed to reach his final position so slowly and haltingly.

I don't want to quarrel with his sense of disappointment, but it might be fun to consider: forget about race. What about the question whether we should extend the vote to people generally, including women, those without property, the great mass of (e.g.,) illiterate urban immigrants? As Answers.com recounts:

From the early national years to the Civil War, states were free to deny the right to vote with regard to a wide range of conditions, including gender, religion, race and ethnicity, citizenship, residency, tax status, wealth, literacy, mental competence, criminal conviction, and military service.

The idea of "unversal suffrage" (to put the point differently) was an idea that wasn't near to being born yet in Lincoln's time. To restrict the suffrage of blacks could easily be understood as no more than a subset of a general case.

Today we tend to look back with condescension on the idea of limiting suffrage, and with good reason: Jim Crow southerners long used phony suffrage restriction as a device to keep blacks (as one might say) in their place. And just about everybody recognizes today that a general prohibition on the the suffrage of women, was pretty much of a damn fool idea by any measure.

But the idea of some sort of restriction on suffrage--bona fide, straight-up literacy or basic citizenship tests, for example--are not in principle a bad idea. I'm not proposing that we roll back universal suffrage--the costs would clearly outweigh the benefits, and anyway, the lumpen stay away from the polls in great enough numbers substantially to mitigate the evil. I'm just sayin' a rational case could be made, consistent with an expansive view of human dignity. Were I Professor Gates' friend, I would urge him not to worry about Lincoln on suffrage: here at least, we don't need to see Lincoln's concerns as race-based at all.

Afterthought: Sounds like a good book in any event, worth looking forward to. And indeed, I'd like to more about Gates' work on black American racial ancestry, which sounds like a fascinating project in itself.

Two Footnotes on Gates

I must say I am impressed at how much of a hold the Gates case seems to have taken on the public imagination--not just Fox News, nor the extremes of the blogosphere, but here it is the lede story in my paper New York Times--second lede in the Wall Street Journal (i.e., Saturday morning). I can hardly expect to kick the can very far downfield, but I do think it my obligation to cry out against what might be the dumbest public policy suggestion since somebody told Thomas Jefferson he ought to try an embargo on European trade:

[S]houldn't we at least entertain the possibility that Gates, at some point in the transaction, decided that baiting Crowley into arresting him would constitute a "teachable moment" about police misconduct toward black people? If he decided that getting himself arrested, under circumstances where the arrest couldn't stand up and would make the police look bad, might protect some younger and less well-connected black man from false charges of disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and assault and battery on a police officer, that wouldn't have been a silly calculation to make.

Source: link, but to save him unnecessary embarrassment, I will not repeat his name of the author of this idiocy here. Anyway, I trust it is apparent to all reflective readers that this is the kind of logic that could only sound plausible in a first-tier faculty common room. "Teachable moment," you say? "Police misconduct?" Baby, we've teachable-momented ourselves into a point where the wingnuts think they turn it into a resolution of censure against the President. "False charge of disorderly conduct," you say? Actually, I agree with you on that one--or want to agree with you:mouthing off to a cop is not (or should not be) an offense. But my intuition is that somewhere between 30 and 70 percent of the electorate think Gates damn well got what was coming to it--and if it really wasn't disorderly conduct before, maybe the natural consequence is that we will redefine "disorderly conduct so that it will be next time. And what is this about "resisting arrest, and assault and battery?" So far as I can see, the best thing the coppers have going for them here is that they did not overcharge--they took the cheapest item from the hors d'oeuvres side of the menu and left the raw meat quivering on the platter. One more "teachable moment" like this and some looney will start shouting that we should send 'em all back to Africa.*

The whole scenario sounds like nothing so much as Inspector Clouseau. But wait; here is Inspector Clouseau, offering up a piece of advice which, by comparison with the item above, comes across as positively statesmanlike:

If you’re afraid of the Police, or feel some urge to call them dirty names, drive someplace with lots of people (with camera phones) before you pull over. The Police are well aware of the consequences of beating on you in public while being recorded.

Now that, my friends, could be a teachable moment.
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*Disclaimer: rhetorical overkill. The staff and management here at Underbelly central does not endorse the idea just suggested; it thinks the idea just suggested would be more or less as dumb as the idea suggested earlier in the column. The whole point is that once you paddle into the maelstrom of stupidity, it is only a matter of time before all good sense gurgles hideously down the drain.

How Not to Run a Police Department

I wouldn't think for a moment of passing judgment on the propriety of the Cambridge police arresting a prominent professor of African-American history for breaking into his own home (roll that sentence off the tongue a few times). But I will offer what I take to be a an instructive anecdote.

Here at Palookaville U, we enjoy the presence and services of one of world's foremost authorities on the butterfly. He's a treasure and a lovely guy to boot. But he looks like a street person--scraggly beard, ducktaped Levis (okay, I made up the ducktape, but you get the idea). In short, he looks like a hobo. And being a butterfly expert he spends a lot of his time hanging out under bridges.

My wise friend Ignoto says: it is the job of a Palookaville cop to know the difference between Dr. Butterfly and a hobo. Even though it is not obvious, it his job.

Jump cut to Cambridge. Let's stipulate from the outset that when a cop sees two guys with backpacks trying to force the front door, it is not unreasonable to inquire. Let's stipulate that if this had been a real burglar and the cop had given him a bye, why then he would have been in trouble for that, too. I would also like to believe (though I am sure this is more contentious) that it is not actionable to address a cop as "Yo' Mama."

But n0ne of this is the point. The point is that if you are a cop, you do not want things like this to happen, period. You don't want to get into a mess where your story is going world wide in every major news outlet. You want things to be orderly, peaceful, and, most of all, quiet. Move along, folks, nothin' to see here.

As a minimum, I would think this means knowing something about your neighborhood. The story says that the professor lived "a few blocks from Harvard Square." My guess is that this is a fairly upscale neighborhood, full of high-prestige famous-all-over-town celebrities with (I suspect) a vast sense of entitlement (not, we are not talkin' race here; we're talkin' Harvard professor). A good cop is going to know who is who, or, more precisely, who expects to be recognized, and who will ring the phone off the wall in the chief's office in the morning if he is not. A good cop at work in his own neighborhood knows the difference between a Harvard professor and a housebreaker.

And again quite aside from the narrow rightness of the matter--I'll bet that's what his shift commander was telling him after it all blew up last night.

Aferthought: One more anecdote which probably doesn't prove anything. I used to have a '65 Mustang --crappy car, dumb mistake. But one night, I left work at the University to make the 90-mile (sic) drive home. I quickly determined that was way too foggy to drive; I turned around with the purpose of dumping my car in a campus parking lot, and then walking over to a motel. I saw the blue light behind me.

I got out of the car and walked back to the cruiser. "I don't know what you stopped me for," I said, "but I probably did it..." and then told him what I just told you now.

The cop was black, a compact little man with sergeant's stripes. Once he saw I was an old white guy, he lost all interest in me. "Okay, professor, have a nice night..."

Review the bidding: an old Mustang creeping around campus at eight miles an hour in the dark. Not a bad call, was it?

Update: Hoo boy, that didn't take long.