Americans are hardly perfect in our adherence to the principles on which the nation was founded. We were, after all, discourteous and ungrateful rebels at the very creation, willing to shed our blood and the blood of our former British BFFs, in idealistic pursuit of principles never before set out so unreservedly as the only true basis of political organization. All men are created equal, Jefferson said. And, all are endowed by their creator (not the king or the lord) with certain unalienable rights. That these rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And, that it is to secure these rights that governments are formed by the people who consent to be governed with these principles in mind.
It became a nation based upon an idea, a few ideas really. It has not become a United Nations, whose organizing principle is superficially embraced by all but severally disregarded by many; not a European Union, whose organization is motivated by economics and the need to offset the power and authority of the United States, nothing more; not a China or a Saudi Arabia or an Iran, organized around whatever oppressive principles the powerful few enshrine.
The organizing principles of the United States spring from whatever a human being is. The rights inhere with the first drawn breath, perhaps sooner in the view of some, and it is true of humans wherever they are born, although most of our global neighbors do not and will not experience life as free as we know it. Native-born citizens, naturalized citizens, immigrants, refugees, all races, creeds, and ethnic groups, one hopes, shed their tribalism and territorialism upon arrival and, coming ultimately to understand and believe the ideas embodied in the Declaration of Independence, they accept that each human one of them belongs individually to the idea that is the United States.
It is sadly true that, as a young nation, writing the Constitution by which we would require government to restrain itself, we immediately compromised and abused the principles under which we had gathered. For the purpose of this essay, I mean the Constitution's veiled protections for slavery, which survived until the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment settled the matter for good and for all.
But, a phrase in the preamble to the Constitution reminds us that the Founders, politicians all, harbored few illusions. They understood that the new nation was not perfect and might never be, but with luck, freedom, and the inherent goodness of mankind, it might in time improve. Thus, the phrase "in order to form a more perfect union." That is after all what we are Americans are constantly about. Thus too, the Thirteenth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, the Fifteenth Amendment, the Nineteenth Amendment, and the Civil Rights Act. We're doing better, or at least we want to do better, all the time.
That's why most learned observers agree that Americans of all races get along so much better now than their ancestors did 150 years ago, or even 50. That's why Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department teaches a course to police recruits of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, who need to learn how to do their jobs in circumstances, very common these days, in which they come in contact with persons of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. Americans, including police, have learned to do better, and we pass the learning on.
Certainly, it's not perfect, or perfectly uniform. It doesn't mean there isn't distrust and discomfort between and among different types of Americans. Most Americans, after all, despite their education, upbringing, and acceptance of other Americans, will nevertheless grow up to live and work among folks who look and act as they do. Class, economic, intellectual, educational, and other distinctions remain, as the Founders knew they must. And, some of the more benighted among us haven't learned the lessons that the nation has learned in its long effort to perfect itself. Some never will. Even so, institutional and de facto discrimination, in both public and private settings, has been enormously ameliorated, and its survival as an impediment to the advancement of one race or ethnic group or another has been mortally compromised.
Nevertheless, a challenge to the utter elimination of the distrust and hostility that has often been a hallmark of race relations in our short history suggests itself in the reactions of Professor Gates and President Obama to the professor's confrontation with Sergeant Crowley. Whatever may have been the attitudes baked in the sergeant's nature, all the evidence suggests he set out to do his job as he was trained to do it and as he trains others to do theirs. The rule is, treat everyone the same, don't predetermine the capacity for misbehavior on the part of a black or Latino, or anyone for that matter, merely because of his or her race.
Perhaps the meeting between the sergeant and the professor fell to pieces, because the professor's behavior and language were the dark blossom of long-held resentments at the historic and even contemporary treatment of members of his race by police officers, though perhaps not this one. I suspect also that the president's observation that the Cambridge police "acted stupidly" was a flower of the same bush. Sadly, it is a plant nurtured by some of the exploitative figures in the black and white communities, persons who earn their livings and inflate themselves by inspiring their adherents - and astonishingly some of them, many of them, call themselves preachers - to feed on and nourish their resentments.
You will have learned, in the multitude of news reports, columns, blogs, and cable news forums - along with the claptrap about this being the occasion for a national conversation about racial profiling - that "many seasoned observers" were surprised by what the professor and the president said. The professor is esteemed, learned, and mild, the president smart, disciplined, and beyond all a symbol of American life post-racial hatred.
I guess that the president was irritated at his Wednesday press conference by all the hurdles gathering in the way of his health care reform effort. I suppose too that his friendship with the professor kindled him. And I am sure that horrifying racist behavior, experienced by him before he became president and by others he knew and loved, stoked the flames behind his words, as it must have done for professor Gates. What is so lamentable about the afternoon of the policeman and the professor is that the dark past reclaimed the two men. It became a revival - racial profiling redux, but absent the racial profiling - with the same old cast, and no new lines written.
Too bad, because we and our leaders ought to be about what America is about, namely perfecting itself, or at least doing better. To form that more perfect union, it seems to me, the Sergeant Crowleys of the world need to go on learning and training. And the professor and the president need to lead the way out of the past and away from its durably bitter resentments, because for all three, and for the rest of us, it's what we do next that counts.
