re: #264 Gus 802

On the topic of Skip Gates and racism. Cobb from Cobb Blog has an interesting take on this called “Six Pounds of Racism.”

[Video]

If you watch it through he ends on an unexpected note.

I watched the whole video. I don’t know anything about Cobb or his blog, but I found that to be a rambling, poorly organized, inarticulate, unconvincing video that mostly seemed to take a similar view of the Gates affair to that expressed by Colin Powell. The argument is basically this: yes, of course, absolutely without question Sergeant Crowley was a racist who treated Gates in a racist manner. But it was racism of an only moderate degree, and there are some times when you just need to let racism roll off your back and not make a big deal of it. Cobb took a slightly stronger stand than Powell, further arguing that if police officers are to be held to a standard in which absolutely zero racism is tolerable, then they simply won’t be able to do their jobs.

I still do not agree with either Powell or Cobb. I will not accept that any time any police officer responds to a report of a possible crime in progress and asks a black man to show ID, that the police officer is necessarily committing a racist act. I just won’t accept that.