A Nigger with a PhD

Malcolm X’s words speak from the grave when he asked an audience about 40 years ago, “What does the white man call a black man with a PhD? A nigger with a PhD.” This is quite true with the recent arrest of Harvard Scholar and African-American historian, Henry Louis Gates Jr., who was thought to have been breaking into his Cambridge, Mass. house by local police enforcement.

Gates was not arrested for breaking and entering, but was detained with the charge of disorderly conduct for allegedly shouting at an officer and following him outside with more verbal complaints after he had to prove that he was indeed the resident of the house he was entering. Can you believe it, the man who was hooting and hollering about the amount of white blood he had in his family was seen as a negaro?!

Fresh from a trip in China where he was taping a PBS documentary, Gates had every right to be furious. As he and his driver (a black man as well) pushed his jammed front door, automatically, his activities pegged him as a suspect before a homeowner.

A man, who has dedicated his whole life to reconnecting the forgotten members of African tribes to their roots and complex lineages, is now as criminalized as every other black man in the United States, including Barack Obama.

There is an ugliness about black brotherhood in America. It is an insidious open secret that every black man knows and understands. He is the face of the criminal, before anything else, and especially before being seen as a symbol of humanity.

In every black man’s life, he has engaged in a conversation about how someone he knew was harassed by the police, or he himself was the subject of harassment. It is an embarrassing and dehumanizing fact that black men attempt to soothe each other in the throes of explaining a commonsense survival experience that no other man in America can ever understand.

This incident incites a question I have been asking since Obama’s election, and since the official announcement of a depression. Why are racial incidents increasing in the era of post-race?

Gates’ arrest is the epitome of an American society that is created on a false consciousness called “Whiteness,” an idea that being white and the belief system of a certain white person is not just superior, but the only accepted standard. In this ideology of “Whiteness” it is manifested by everyone. What I mean by that is, "Whiteness" cannot be maintained by just white folk, but is a social construction that people of color help perpetuate, and sometimes perpetuate it the best. It is the idea that a machine can keep going as long as you replace the parts that know how to keep it running, regardless of what brand or factory they were manufactured. If they fit and can do the job then the machine continues to run.

In the case of the Harvard scholar, the fact that Gates was a suspect before a resident is part of a slave code that evolved into a black code, which then transformed into Jim Crow, and is now a foundation of institutional racism, or “Whiteness”. This new code is part of an old consciousness that Black Bucks are dangerous and not to be trusted, even with a goddamn degree and all.