Commentary: Obama, race and my arrest

• Story Highlights
• Jeffrey Wright: President Obama catches flak for remarks on professor's arrest
  
• Wright applauds Obama for having courage to speak his mind
  
• Actor says he too was victim of arrest in which race played a part
  
• He says political leaders need to address race and policing
  

By Jeffrey Wright
Special to CNN

Editor's note: Jeffrey Wright is a stage and screen actor who has won a Tony, Emmy and Golden Globe. Wright has appeared in "Angels in America," "Basquiat," "The Manchurian Candidate," "Syriana," "W." and "Casino Royale."

NEW YORK (CNN) -- President Obama expressed what many Americans feel regarding the recent arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates -- that the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police responded "stupidly."

Obama is catching some flak for that, but I applaud him for having had the courage to speak his heart and mind.

I wonder if the president himself has ever experienced the blunt end of racial profiling, or if he personally knows of anyone other than Professor Gates who has. Among African-American males in this country, the small minority is those who have not or do not.

Did some prior experience or knowledge inform his response about the Gates incident? I have no facts to back this up, but, to me, it seemed personal. If it was, I understand.

I was arrested last July in Shreveport, Louisiana, outside a bar where dozens of members of the cast and crew of the movie "W." and I had gathered to celebrate the end of filming. There was no bar brawl as widely reported -- nor even a pre-election political argument.

Nine police cars and a fire engine responded; seven people were arrested. Two of the seven suffered minor head wounds at the hands of the Shreveport police. Josh Brolin and I were pepper sprayed by cops, and while face down in the street, I was made to feel the business end of a Taser.

The truth of what led to the whole morass has never been accurately reported. I was asked to leave the bar by a white female bartender who took exception to a comment I made.

As with Professor Gates, the police in my case backed unquestioningly the suspicion of a white woman that the black man she accused must be guilty of something. Once that die of accusation was cast, a ghost of racial bias, misperception, and the potential abuse of police authority was set free to make mischief.

The bar was one of two places in downtown Shreveport that serves food after 10 p.m. A few nights before my arrest, I had gone there very late after work to grab a bite to eat. It was before closing, and there were a few customers and employees inside, but the door was locked. I knocked and asked, over the music streaming from inside, if I might buy a small pizza. The bartender insisted that they were closed.

"Whatever," I said with a shrug of resignation and walked back to my hotel room.

Four nights later and in a festive mood, we gathered at this same establishment. Upon seeing the bartender who had a few nights before told me that the place was closed, I asked her for a drink, which she poured. I quipped, "Ah you're going to serve me tonight!"

At that, she pulled the drink away and told me that I had to leave. I asked if she was kidding. She went on to say that if I didn't leave, she would call the police. As I stepped away to tell friends what had happened, a call was made to Shreveport police.

Two cops, the first of many, arrived in minutes, and I was physically escorted outside although neither of them had the curiosity to ask what had transpired before they arrived. A mess ensued.

To their credit, Josh and the others arrested followed me outside with a few others from our group. The cops physically released me and were seeming to be ready to let me go altogether when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw another member of the film crew driven headlong into the sidewalk by two newly arrived cops.

Josh verbally objected to their actions, at which point a cop said to him, "You too!" I moved Josh away from the fray and held him. We were then pepper sprayed to separate us, after which Josh knelt in submission and was handcuffed.

Disoriented and blinded by the pepper spray, I remained standing until I was kicked in the knee and forced to the ground. I did not completely relax one of my arms as it was twisted behind me, so I was tasered in the back of my ribs repeatedly, eventually handcuffed, left to lie in the street for several minutes, then arrested and hauled off to jail, and charged with impeding police. The six others were similarly charged -- and it all began with a joke.

Nearly six months later, after a good-size storm kicked up in Shreveport over the incident, prosecutors agreed to drop the charges against all of us arrested that night.

New Year's Day 2009 and the same week in which charges were dropped against us, in Oakland, California, Oscar Grant, a young father, was killed in a BART station, surrounded by cops and in the same position as I found myself down in Shreveport. It seems the BART cop may have pulled the trigger of his firearm thinking that it was his Taser.

Shreveport Mayor Cedric Glover is known as a law-and-order mayor. The day after the encounter, in the presence of his police chief, Glover apologized to me and privately acknowledged that while most Shreveport's cops were good, there were some "devils" among them.

In public meetings regarding the "W." incident, however, he held fast that the responding officers acted appropriately. Either Glover's public statement was dead wrong, or the joke was on us.

Of course, public officials, particularly at the local level, are loathe to criticize law enforcement officers. On a certain level, it's understandable. Cops answer a noble and difficult calling. The pressure must be relentless, and I imagine a cop is largely underappreciated by most except those with whom he or she serves.

A political pat on the back from the executive in charge must be a comforting thing in controversial times, and politicians prefer to duck behind the political safety of the blue wall of silence than upset the men and women who, like our nation's troops, are charged with placing themselves every day in harm's way to keep us safe.

When he was mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani encamped himself behind that blue wall. After Amadou Diallo, living out the All-American, hard-working immigrant story, was brutally shot down on the steps of his Bronx apartment building, Giuliani refused to question the actions of the cops who fired 41 bullets in killing the unarmed young man.

Is a politician's unwavering fidelity to law enforcement officers the best approach, or does it promote a police culture of impunity and retard progress on law enforcement issues?

What if after the Diallo tragedy, political leadership in New York inspired the passage of serious legislation to keep in check the presumption of criminality that cops so often direct toward young men of color. What if that had led to similar acts nationwide around these issues?

Gates might not be headline news today; Grant might not have died; and New York police Officer Omar Edwards, an African-American undercover officer shot down two months ago by a white fellow officer while chasing a suspect through a Harlem street, might be alive today to toss a football again with his son. iReport.com: "Shame" on Gates

I'm not presuming to blame Giuliani alone for what has become a systemic problem in our country -- that would be absurd, these issues predate him -- but when political leaders in this country express compassion only for those for whom they perceive it to be politically expedient or fail to challenge law enforcement and incarceration issues that cut to the core of the history and culture of race in America, they fail us all. They exemplify what U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder meant when he spoke of the cowardice with which we as a society approach race dialogue in this country.

These are messy, even bloody issues, but the cost of not addressing them is too draining of our societal health. Among other things it fosters a society in which too many young Americans internalize the aura of criminality that's projected onto them and handcuff themselves to self-imposed limitations that stifle us all.

Going to prison rather than to college becomes a rite of passage. They wear their pants below their behinds in solidarity with their friends, brothers, uncles or fathers who aren't allowed belts while incarcerated, though perhaps the low-hanging pants are a defiant gesture to society at large for continually presuming them to be miscreant.

This past week the Apollo 11 crew was at the White House welcomed by the president of a new generation of dreamers. Our great nation put a man on the moon, but it can't train its cops to distinguish between an ordinary brown-skinned brother and a criminal. At its least injurious, as with Gates and myself, this leads to bruised pride and reputation; at its worst, Grant or Edwards gets killed.

President Kennedy famously said, "We choose to go the moon ... and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard." Maybe properly educating, screening and training our nation's police is one of "the other things." My son is 7 years old. May our generation have accomplished this other thing before he's a young man, and before we've sent a man to Mars.

The challenge is one that many Americans are willing to accept -- one, that for the sake of our children, all Americans should be unwilling to postpone.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Jeffrey Wright.

Wikio

Commentary: Good schools aren't only for rich kids

• Story Highlights
• Steve Perry: A parent asked why only rich kids get good schools
• He says question started process of building a quality school
• Perry says his team fought bureaucracy, union to try something new
• He says his school is highly rated and sends all graduates to college

By Steve Perry
Special to CNN

Editor's note: Steve Perry is the founder and principal of the Capital Preparatory Magnet School in Hartford, Connecticut, and author of "Man Up!: Nobody is Coming to Save Us," which offers solutions to problems in the black community.

HARTFORD, Connecticut (CNN) -- "Why do only rich kids get good schools?"

I was the founder and director of a part-time out-of-school college preparatory program.

The questioner was a parent; herself a victim of a dulled urban education. The statement was more of an indictment than question, and I had no answer. "Well, why can't this program be a school," she offered.

The program sent 100 percent of our graduates to college. We served poor students who were the first generation in their families to attend college. We provided college preparation through a six-week summer program, after-school tutoring and in-school academic advising.

That single mother's question came at the end of the summer program. This was always a tough time. As the kids said goodbye to their friends and the program's high expectations, we all looked at the school year with great trepidation.

We knew that the students were returning to failed schools with very low expectations -- and results to match. Like that mom, I too wondered why wealth and whiteness are too often linked to quality education. Her question connected to a discussion that I'd been having with some colleagues during the summer program.

All of the teachers in that program worked in failed urban schools. Many had tried to reform traditional urban schools. They'd started formal and informal programs, identified groups of kids and connected to parents. Each had had some success with some kids, but the conditions that led to the need to do something went unchanged.

The question was raised at the end of our 2002 summer program. My first instinct was to begin down the path of opening an all-male minority charter school. In Connecticut, charter schools are publicly funded and privately run, with no teachers' unions, no school board influence and no centralized curriculum. These were the pluses. There was only one minus: There was no money. The charter idea was dead as soon as it began.

I assembled an all -black team. My plan was to put black educators together, and we would show 'em. Brothers and sisters were gonna open a successful charter school. Black educators serving black kids. This was my first major mistake.

Talent and commitment have no color. Kids don't care what color their teachers are, and I shouldn't have either. After almost a year of stops and starts with a team that was not effectively assembled, I realized that I failed in my judgment because I did not keep my eye on the goal, which was to build a school that sent kids to college regardless of their hue or economic status. I have never made that mistake again.

I doubled back and went into the schools and found the teachers who stayed the latest and arrived the earliest. I looked for the most ambitious teachers who had a reputation of being the most talented, and we started a second team.

I am a social worker. I knew that I could run an organization, but wasn't sure about developing curriculum. When I created Team 2, my first pick was the best teacher I could find. Rich Beganski is the perfect complement, or opposite, of who I am. He's meticulous and lives and breathes curriculum. He is an operations genius. He was a longtime assistant coach who never wanted to be coach. I've never been an assistant and don't want to be one.

Our team was composed of a white guy, a Latina, a black woman and a black man bound by a single commitment: to send kids to college.

In 2003-04, Connecticut was settling a desegregation case. A component of the agreement was to open eight magnet schools in Hartford in two years. Magnet schools are publicly funded and publicly run theme-based schools, complete with unions and subordinate to the local school board.

The part-time college preparatory program was hosted in a community college. The college's president was an impulsive visionary. On a Friday afternoon elevator ride from the 10th to the seventh floor, he said, "Steve, we're gonna start a high school, you should run it." I told him I would and got off on the seventh floor. First thing that following Monday, I was in his office with the dead charter school application.

Over the next few months, we tweaked it until it became a magnet application. With the help of some of the program's parents, we submitted it to Hartford's mayor, superintendent, and then the board. The process was anything but smooth. The district could not conceptualize what Capital Prep would become.

A year-round college-preparatory uniform school for grades six to 12 was the absolute antithesis of the district's offerings. Hartford was either the worst or second-worst school system in Connecticut, with a high dropout rate and three failed traditional high schools. At first, Capital Prep was a poorly received idea. It became real, in large part, because of the state's settlement and our team's determination to answer the question.

After receiving school board and state approval in December 2004, we were expected to open for August 2005. The problem was that while we had a "team," Capital Prep didn't have a single employee. Since we were becoming Hartford Board of Education employees, we all had to apply for our jobs. My hire was relatively painless.

Beganski, the team's operations genius, was turned away as an "internal" candidate. After two years of working 30 hours a week to turn an idea into a reality, he became our first central office/union casualty. I promised to resign if he wasn't hired. Finally, the district relented and gave him the job that he had designed. This was to become an ongoing theme in the school's first few years: ridiculous actions focused on maintaining the failed status quo.

We worked through the summer with the rest of the team. The district stumbled and stalled until, with less than two weeks before our first day of school, Capital Prep only had two staff members: Beganski and me. We were not allowed to hire a single teacher.

Even though we had had a team that had worked for years researching and designing the school for no money, we were told that none of them could be hired because union rules dictated who and when we could hire. This meant that our last employee for year one was hired 14 hours before the first day of school.

In the years that have followed, the struggles with the union and central office's narrow, regressive policies have tested our commitment to answer that mother's simple question. The complexity of the answer is rooted in Capital Prep's relationship to the failed policies of the once highly centralized district and educators' union.

In recent years, a new superintendent has come on board -- the third in our first three years. His approach has been absolutely aligned with what we need to exist. He leaves us alone as long as we get results. He can't shield us from the unions, but he has supported our creativity and commitment to our kids. He lets me run the school, and our teachers teach what works. That's all we've ever sought.

Answering the question of "why only the rich kids get good schools" has set our team on an odyssey. Seven years later, we have an answer that we are proud of. Rich kids are not the only kids who have good schools, because Capital Prep's 80 percent black/Latino, 60 percent poor students attend one of America's top high schools, according to US News & World Report.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Steve Perry.

Wikio

Commentary: Professor arrested for 'housing while black'

• Story Highlights
• Michael Eric Dyson: Gates is an eminent intellectual and Harvard professor
• He says Gates' arrest in Cambridge shows that U.S. still grapples with racism
• He says police are particularly sensitive to questioning from people of color
• Dyson: Obama must renew his pledge to eliminate racial profiling

By Michael Eric Dyson
Special to CNN

Editor's note: Michael Eric Dyson is a professor of sociology at Georgetown University and the author of 16 books, including the New York Times bestseller, "April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Death and How it Changed America".

(CNN) -- Last Thursday, President Obama, in his fiery speech before the NAACP Convention, admitted that "an African-American child is roughly five times as likely as a white child to see the inside of a prison."

But he surely couldn't have imagined that only a couple of hours before his oration, one of America's most prominent scholars -- and a distinguished professor at Obama's alma mater, Harvard University -- would breathe cruel and ironic life into that sad statistic.

Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. is simply the most powerful and influential black scholar in our nation's history.

He received a doctorate at Cambridge University long before the culture wars became au courant; he was among the first group of figures to receive a MacArthur "Genius Award" Fellowship; he wrote the finest work of literary criticism in a generation with "Signifying Monkey"; he was named by Time magazine as one of the "25 Most Influential Americans"; he has a boatload of honorary degrees; and he has been a ubiquitous media presence and thoughtful interpreter of race and culture for a quarter-century.

But none of that made a bit of difference when Gates returned from a research trip to China to find the front door to his Harvard-owned house jammed and enlisted the assistance of his driver to muscle the door loose. By the time Gates was on the phone with his leasing company, a white policeman had arrived, summoned by a neighbor who spotted two black men looking as if they were unlawfully breaking into the house.

Their stories diverge from here; the policeman says he asked Gates to step outside, Gates refused, the officer entered the home and requested Gates' ID, which he didn't initially produce, and finally had Gates arrested when he followed the officer outside, as Gates was "exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior."

Gates allegedly shouted, "Is this how you treat a black man in America?" and "You don't know who you're messing with." Gates says he showed the officer his ID, demanded that the officer identify himself, which he didn't, and then the professor followed the officer outside to get the policeman's name and badge number when he was arrested by the gaggle of police who had gathered.

Several features of the story scream the presence of lingering bias and racism. A black man in a tony neighborhood simply seems out of place, even to his neighbors.

Had Gates been a white professor trying to get inside his home, and called on his driver to help him jar his door open, he probably wouldn't have as readily aroused the suspicion of neighbors. And when police arrived to check out the premises, they probably wouldn't have been nearly as ready to believe the worst about the occupant of a home who clearly wasn't engaged in a criminal act.

Whatever one believes about what happened, Gates clearly wasn't the beneficiary of the benefit of the doubt, a reasonable expectation since he posed no visible threat.

It is also striking that Gates seems to be the victim of a police mentality that chafes at a challenge of its implicit authority. While that may be true for folk of all races, it seems especially galling to cops to be questioned by a person of color.

How dare black folk believe that, regardless of their station or privilege, they have permission to speak back -- or speak black -- to state-enforced authority, one that, not a decade ago, routinely ravaged black communities in blatant displays of wanton aggression.

It is for good reason that police brutality is a constant concern for black folk; the stakes are often high and harmful. The link between black vulnerability and racial profiling -- of setting in one's collective imagination an image of black men as bad people who are liable to commit mayhem at any moment, and who must therefore always be suspected of wrong and subject to arbitrary forms of control and surveillance -- is evident in the pileup of black bodies, from Amadou Diallo to Sean Bell, that testify to the force of police to impose lethal limits on black survival. Gates rubbed up against the unspoken code that enforces black silence and often violently compels black compliance.

In the end, Gates' unjust treatment speaks volumes about the cynical assertion that we now live in a post-racial paradise.

Gates' crime appears to be a new one in the litany of crimes that black folk commit by virtue of their very existence -- in this case, HWB, or housing while black. If a famous and affluent black man in his own home can be accosted, arrested and humiliated, then all black folk can reasonably expect the same treatment.

To Gates' credit, he realizes that racial profiling happens regularly to poor black folk, and he has pledged to do something about it. But another famous black figure associated with Harvard must renew his pledge to get rid of racial profiling and spare the nation the illusion that his success represents a post-racial America. While it's not likely he'll be unjustly arrested in his House, he's got to make sure that the same privilege extends to millions of other black folk who don't live on Pennsylvania Avenue.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Michael Eric Dyson.

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