By now, we all know which facts are beyond dispute: Harvard professor/celebrity Henry Louis Gates came home to Cambridge from a trip, found his front door jammed, and enlisted his driver in forcing it open. Someone observing the scene called police and reported it as a break-in. Police officers arrived, questioned Gates, and eventually learned that he did indeed live at the house.
We don't know who said what wrong thing first, or how the incident escalated, but Gates was not pleased with some part of the encounter, and asked the investigating officer for his name and badge number. The officer exited Gates' home through the front door, Gates followed him, and was arrested on his front porch for disorderly conduct. The charges were quickly dropped.
Gates has discussed the incident as if it is an example of how black men in America are treated by police. He's right about part of the equation. If you're an average guy in an encounter with a police officer, his badge gives him license to hold all negative attitudes -- yours and his -- against you. Unless and until all the traditional negative attitudes have disappeared from black-white encounters, a black man running into a white cop is likely to end up on the receiving end of a few more negatives than his white neighbor crossing the path of that same cop. Gates, like Leroy Average Brother, has reason to think that his close encounter with police went sour more quickly than it would have if he looked different.
Gates probably knows that there are Harvard professor/celebrities who would have been treated like the big shot pillars of the community they consider themselves to be. "Very sorry sir, nothing personal. All we knew was that we got a phone tip that two men were breaking in the front door. We're glad it turned out to be a false alarm, and we want you to know we're here for you in case the call is real next time. Are you all set with getting that door fixed?"
It's also probable that what Gates got instead was tone and body language that said something more like, "Who the hell are you to be questioning me? You're lucky I didn't dent your skull for taking too long to show me some ID." It's a very rare black man vs. police encounter where both behave as if law enforcement is the side that has to be careful and accommodating. Almost every black man in America knows that he doesn't have status that trumps a police officer's feeling that he is freer to vent on you than your neighbor.
Galling as that fact may be, though, it's still worth Gates' time to recognize that while he may have been lined up for disrespect for the same reason as Mr. Average Brother, that dis took far less severe form than Leroy would have expected. Insert Leroy into the scene -- upscale neighborhood, report of a burglary, front door forced open, Leroy Average Brother found inside -- our boy Leroy is lucky to avoid becoming the latest Amadou Diallo. If Leroy happens to go unshot, he'd know to cut his losses at the scene, hold his temper and tongue, and express any irritation about the incident to someone other than the offending officer. And if Leroy couldn't help venting his frustration, even if only by running off at the mouth, he'd likely have some cuts, bruises and lumps to show for it, along with some extra charges like resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer. Gates told officers that he was uncomfortable with his arms cuffed behind his back and the arresting officers loosed his wrists and recuffed them in front of him. Think they would have done the same for Leroy?
If the reaction to Gates' trauma is something less than boiling outrage even from the Leroys of America, it's probably not because they think race is no factor in police treatment of black men. It's more likely that folks are feeling the disconnect between Gates' treatment and his reaction.
If Gates had received the Leroy treatment, had lumps on his head, broken bones and swollen eyes, there'd be a wave of anger as a result. Millions would be upset at the demonstration that the wrong appearance makes you unsafe from the police in your own home. Getting denied the upper-crust treatment you think you've earned doesn't quite have the same widespread resonance. This is not nearly Rodney King; it's a bit more like Oprah being turned away from the Hermes shop in Paris.
The most obvious solution when you're denied the BMOC/HNIC treatment: make the mope recognize that he should have known who he was messing with. Make some phone calls. Pull some strings. Get the guy transferred to a hellhole. Or fired. Behind the scenes, leaving no fingerprints. Let him and his former coworkers suspect that the day his life started to spiral downhill was the day he got on your bad side.
Gates will serve his image well if he can get satisfaction for his personal insult in that kind of private way. He'll make better use of his public platform by focusing attention on how Leroy gets treated.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Michael Jackson
Broad poetic license is granted for the purpose of praising the dearly departed in the course of a eulogy.
So when Magic Johnson told the world that watching Michael Jackson made him a better point guard, heads were cocked and eyebrows were raised not because the words were out of character for the moment.
It was because they were unnecessary. Magic didn't need to exaggerate to give Michael Jackson the praise he deserved. Later speakers, like Berry Gordy, groped for the correct note. But when Gordy found it, he and everybody else heard that it rang true, and the bell has been sounding ever since.
Michael Jackson was the greatest entertainer ever.
"Greatest" does not necessarily mean "most talented." Jackson didn't compose as much or as well as Stevie Wonder or Smokey Robinson. He didn't have the vocal chops of Luther Vandross or the instrumental virtuosity of Prince. He didn't stamp a single sonic style for all time the way James Brown did. Sammy Davis was Jackson's peer in singing and dancing, plus he had enough extra skill in acting, comedy and impressions to win an overall talent decathlon.
But greatness is measured by more than the height of a performer's peak. Roger Maris hit 61 home runs in a single season and Hank Aaron's one-year best was only 47, but nobody would dare to suggest that Maris was a better home run hitter. Greatness is a measure of the sum total of your flight path: how high, how far, and for how long. Add up those columns, and Jackson can't be matched.
How high did MJ fly? His His Motown career with his brothers began with four straight singles that went to number one on Billboard's U.S. pop charts. He went even higher as a solo artist: five straight multiplatinum albums, one of which, as everyone knows, is the top-selling album of all time. 12 number one singles, and 13 more that were in the top ten.
The distance of the Jackson flight pattern was unprecedented, and it's not likely to be duplicated. Jackson came along when the development of technology enabled facts, sounds, images, and people to move around the globe with an ease unknown to prior generations. Cultural fads that took months to cross oceans during Sinatra's peak years and weeks at the start of Beatlemania happened in a matter of days when Thriller was released. And the whole world saw the premiere of Black Or White at about the same time.
Jackson's career was perfectly timed to take advantage of shifting trends in another way: during his prime, more of the world than ever before began to use the new ease of travel and transport to import American culture. The fraying of the Soviet Bloc and the end of the Cold War opened up new markets for Coca-Cola and McDonald's, but they also meant that Beat It and Bad were not seen as evil capitalist symbols the way Blue Suede Shoes and Hound Dog would have been. The result: Michael Jackson played to sellout crowds in football-sized stadiums not just in New York, London, Tokyo and Paris, but also in Moscow, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest and Warsaw. Add those cities to Jackson concert stops that would have been too much trouble to reach in 1955 or 1965, like Tunis and Tel Aviv, Mumbai and Manila, Bangkok and Buenos Aires, plus Cape Town, Santiago, Mexico City and Sao Paolo, and you've got a star whose reach could not have been imagined in the world that existed at the start of his career.
The increasing ease of information transfer helped make Jackson a star whose like had not been seen, and it's also likely to keep him from being eclipsed. The world had opened up just enough for everybody to be a recipient of the same information in the 80s and 90s, but it hadn't quite reached its current point -- where everybody can generate and disseminate their own information. Today's audience is more fragmented and has more producers creating content for every identifiable niche. Which makes it much more difficult to reach the kind of cross-section of viewers and listeners to make a Thriller-sized blockbuster possible. In 2009, a would-be Michael Jackson might spring his own version of the moonwalk at a broadcast like Motown 25, but fewer homes will have three generations of viewers sitting around the same TV to see it. Grown men will be watching ESPN, little kids will have Disney on their own sets, plenty of women will be watching Lifetime, and the core music-consuming audience of teens and twentysomethings will spend less time being awestruck than their 80s counterparts and more time trying to create knockoffs, spoofs, and superior moves to upload to YouTube. With so many more distractions in today's media world, it'll be hard for anybody to grab as much attention as MJ did at his best.
The duration of Jackson's stardom will be just as tough to match. I Want You Back, the Jackson 5's first Motown hit and a Billboard #1 single, was released in 1969. You Rock My World, Michael's last single to reach the top ten on the Billboard pop charts in the U.S., was released in 2001. That 32-year span, remarkable when considered in isolation, is even more majestic when viewed in comparison to the longevity of other music icons. In 1995, 32 years from the Beatles' first appearance in the Billboard U.S. top ten, Paul McCartney was ten years past his most recent top ten single. In 1987, 32 years after Elvis Presley's first charting single, he was 15 years past his last top ten single and ten years gone from the face of the earth. Jackson's stardom was steady during that long span. Either as a solo artist or in combination with his brothers or others, he had at least one top ten single in 13 of the 20 years from 1970 to 1989, and six more in the 1990s.
Jackson's longevity is the obvious explanation for the outpouring of emotion triggered by his passing. We've known Michael Jackson for 40 years. For the first twenty years, we'd seen nothing more sinister than a sad dissatisfaction with his appearance and a harmlessly weird reluctance to grow up. By the time things began to look worse, we'd known and liked him for so long that some of us refused to believe he'd done anything wrong, others wished he hadn't, and plenty more preferred to avert our eyes and thoughts. Until the end, we'd hoped against hope that he could find the uncompromised happiness that filled so much of his music. His death makes it clear that there will be no such finding for him in this life, and that's a sad fact to have to digest.
So when Magic Johnson told the world that watching Michael Jackson made him a better point guard, heads were cocked and eyebrows were raised not because the words were out of character for the moment.
It was because they were unnecessary. Magic didn't need to exaggerate to give Michael Jackson the praise he deserved. Later speakers, like Berry Gordy, groped for the correct note. But when Gordy found it, he and everybody else heard that it rang true, and the bell has been sounding ever since.
Michael Jackson was the greatest entertainer ever.
"Greatest" does not necessarily mean "most talented." Jackson didn't compose as much or as well as Stevie Wonder or Smokey Robinson. He didn't have the vocal chops of Luther Vandross or the instrumental virtuosity of Prince. He didn't stamp a single sonic style for all time the way James Brown did. Sammy Davis was Jackson's peer in singing and dancing, plus he had enough extra skill in acting, comedy and impressions to win an overall talent decathlon.
But greatness is measured by more than the height of a performer's peak. Roger Maris hit 61 home runs in a single season and Hank Aaron's one-year best was only 47, but nobody would dare to suggest that Maris was a better home run hitter. Greatness is a measure of the sum total of your flight path: how high, how far, and for how long. Add up those columns, and Jackson can't be matched.
How high did MJ fly? His His Motown career with his brothers began with four straight singles that went to number one on Billboard's U.S. pop charts. He went even higher as a solo artist: five straight multiplatinum albums, one of which, as everyone knows, is the top-selling album of all time. 12 number one singles, and 13 more that were in the top ten.
The distance of the Jackson flight pattern was unprecedented, and it's not likely to be duplicated. Jackson came along when the development of technology enabled facts, sounds, images, and people to move around the globe with an ease unknown to prior generations. Cultural fads that took months to cross oceans during Sinatra's peak years and weeks at the start of Beatlemania happened in a matter of days when Thriller was released. And the whole world saw the premiere of Black Or White at about the same time.
Jackson's career was perfectly timed to take advantage of shifting trends in another way: during his prime, more of the world than ever before began to use the new ease of travel and transport to import American culture. The fraying of the Soviet Bloc and the end of the Cold War opened up new markets for Coca-Cola and McDonald's, but they also meant that Beat It and Bad were not seen as evil capitalist symbols the way Blue Suede Shoes and Hound Dog would have been. The result: Michael Jackson played to sellout crowds in football-sized stadiums not just in New York, London, Tokyo and Paris, but also in Moscow, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest and Warsaw. Add those cities to Jackson concert stops that would have been too much trouble to reach in 1955 or 1965, like Tunis and Tel Aviv, Mumbai and Manila, Bangkok and Buenos Aires, plus Cape Town, Santiago, Mexico City and Sao Paolo, and you've got a star whose reach could not have been imagined in the world that existed at the start of his career.
The increasing ease of information transfer helped make Jackson a star whose like had not been seen, and it's also likely to keep him from being eclipsed. The world had opened up just enough for everybody to be a recipient of the same information in the 80s and 90s, but it hadn't quite reached its current point -- where everybody can generate and disseminate their own information. Today's audience is more fragmented and has more producers creating content for every identifiable niche. Which makes it much more difficult to reach the kind of cross-section of viewers and listeners to make a Thriller-sized blockbuster possible. In 2009, a would-be Michael Jackson might spring his own version of the moonwalk at a broadcast like Motown 25, but fewer homes will have three generations of viewers sitting around the same TV to see it. Grown men will be watching ESPN, little kids will have Disney on their own sets, plenty of women will be watching Lifetime, and the core music-consuming audience of teens and twentysomethings will spend less time being awestruck than their 80s counterparts and more time trying to create knockoffs, spoofs, and superior moves to upload to YouTube. With so many more distractions in today's media world, it'll be hard for anybody to grab as much attention as MJ did at his best.
The duration of Jackson's stardom will be just as tough to match. I Want You Back, the Jackson 5's first Motown hit and a Billboard #1 single, was released in 1969. You Rock My World, Michael's last single to reach the top ten on the Billboard pop charts in the U.S., was released in 2001. That 32-year span, remarkable when considered in isolation, is even more majestic when viewed in comparison to the longevity of other music icons. In 1995, 32 years from the Beatles' first appearance in the Billboard U.S. top ten, Paul McCartney was ten years past his most recent top ten single. In 1987, 32 years after Elvis Presley's first charting single, he was 15 years past his last top ten single and ten years gone from the face of the earth. Jackson's stardom was steady during that long span. Either as a solo artist or in combination with his brothers or others, he had at least one top ten single in 13 of the 20 years from 1970 to 1989, and six more in the 1990s.
Jackson's longevity is the obvious explanation for the outpouring of emotion triggered by his passing. We've known Michael Jackson for 40 years. For the first twenty years, we'd seen nothing more sinister than a sad dissatisfaction with his appearance and a harmlessly weird reluctance to grow up. By the time things began to look worse, we'd known and liked him for so long that some of us refused to believe he'd done anything wrong, others wished he hadn't, and plenty more preferred to avert our eyes and thoughts. Until the end, we'd hoped against hope that he could find the uncompromised happiness that filled so much of his music. His death makes it clear that there will be no such finding for him in this life, and that's a sad fact to have to digest.
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