August 2009

In our polarized fascination with Sgt. Crowley and Professor Gates, there's been a lot of talk about teachable moments, but little effort to understand how two decent guys doing their jobs and living their lives could have such different perceptions of their encounter.

The central problem is how we think about race or, really, about racism.

The idea that racism is wrong is very new in our culture, history, and law. Before World War II, racial stereotypes were common in everyday life. Racial epithets, slurs, jokes, and put-downs were uneventful ingredients of discussion across ethnic, religious, and class lines. The Supreme Court embraced segregation and slavery, and it approved of the imprisonment of all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast during World War II.

The change in our values reached its peak when legally sanctioned segregation was ended in the 1960s. The immorality and evil of racism became so accepted that even factions of the Ku Klux Klan declared themselves non-racists who just happened to "like white people." In mainstream culture, racism grew to be so socially forbidden that it was just about the worst thing one could be accused of. Labeling a white person racist was to put him or her in the company of lynching, church-bombing, slaveholding monsters. It became common for some to deny that they even notice race.

This has made it very difficult to talk about the obvious reality that when we encounter each other - on the street, in the workplace, or in our homes - we do notice race, and it has meaning for us. This is not wrong or a personal failing, and we won't be able to understand or do anything about race issues if we insist that racism is restricted to villains.

Few individuals are familiar with the story of the U.S. and U.K. expulsion of the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands: "between 1968 and 1973, in a plot carefully hidden from the world, the United States and Great Britain exiled all 1,500-2,000 islanders to create a major U.S. military base on the Chagossians' island Diego Garcia." In Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia, David Vine provides historical insight into collusive U.S. and U.K. actions to establish the Diego Garcia military base, details the devastating consequences for the Chagossians that resulted from their removal, and pleads urgently for the Chagossians' right to return.

Island of Shame reveals U.S. motivations to establish a military base on Diego Garcia. Vine notes that "by the late 1950s ... the power of the United States had diminished relative to that of its Cold War opponents." It is within this Cold War context that Stuart Barber, a civilian naval planner, devised the Strategic Island Concept. "The premise of the plan was [Barber's] recognition that in the age of decolonization, local peoples and the governments of newly independent nations were increasingly endangering the viability of many of the Navy's overseas bases." Establishing military bases on minimally populated and isolated islands was the heart of Barber's Strategic Island Concept.