:: Shekhar Bhatia

Dateline USA

By Shekhar Bhatia

Aug 17 : This happened in New York last fortnight. My wife was walking down a street looking at the shop windows and was about to bump head-on into a tall, young black American coming from the opposite direction. The man saw the startled look on her face and, with the spontaneous informality that is quintessential New York, said, "Don’t be scared, lady. I’m black, like the President". He didn’t pause, or look back. Just walked off with a spring in his step.

I liked it. I thought it was a casual remark by someone with a sense of humour. Back in Cambridge, Massachusetts, some American friends, however, had a different take: they said it reflected the current mood of optimism among African-Americans who feel empowered with a black President in the White House. There is also a lot more public discussion on the prejudice against people of colour.

A case in point is the recent story of the arrest of a senior African-American Harvard professor that was headline news on American channels for nearly two long weeks and literally buried the Michael Jackson death story. The incident happened in Cambridge, a city adjacent to Boston. Professor Gates, a respected scholar, was struggling to open the lock on the door of his house when a paranoid neighbour, suspecting a stranger of breaking in, phoned the police.

The professor was arrested by a police officer who happened to be white, handcuffed, and kept in a lock-up for a few hours, spurring an angry political debate about police brutality and race relations. Now, Mr Gates is not just a Harvard don but also a friend of US President Barack Obama who, in a knee-jerk reaction, said the police had "acted stupidly". His choice of words sparked off further controversy.

So the President invited the professor and the police officer for a beer to the White House, setting off an intense debate over the issue of racial profiling. "What I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact", he said.

Racial profiling is defined as using a person’s race, colour, ethnicity or national origin to determine whether he or she is likely to indulge in criminal activity. It is said to be targeted at African-Americans, Asians, Latinos, south Asians and Arabs, and, is known to be rampant throughout the US.

Critics say the beer summit was just a photo op, Mr Obama’s attempt to make up for his comment. There were instant jokes about it. My favourite is "The audacity of hops", a take on Mr Obama’s biography.

The professor’s daughter wrote in the news website, the Daily Beast: "Discrimination is the single greatest wound in American history and could never be solved over a beer. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. There are more black men in prison than in college and literally thousands of black men are arrested across this country each day".

Maybe the summit was pure PR, or clever damage control. Still, coming from India, I find it remarkable that a head of state should first intervene in a local dispute (indeed, with deeper implications), and then take this extraordinary step to calm tempers. In a debate that was taking an ugly racist turn, he tried to find middle ground. Though not in as many words, he admitted that his choice of words was inappropriate. Some say that was the end of the controversy; I think it was a clever way of setting up the agenda for future debate, of encouraging a deeper dialogue on racial prejudice.

What’s also interesting is to see that a country that has struggled to give equal rights to all its citizens still has the conscience to question its own attitudes. In India, where people continue to be discriminated against on the basis of colour, caste, religion and ethnicity, we accept prejudice as part of life. We are also hypocritical in our attitudes. We talk about political correctness but laugh at racist jokes.

Some more news from Cambridge: In a first of its kind, Harvard, the world’s richest university, has licensed its name for a men’s fashion line called the Harvard Yard. The look will be 1960s — seersucker shorts and regimental stripes. The high-end clothes, to be made by a New York-based group, will not come cheap; the pricing, it seems, will be in line with the university’s expensive education: trousers at $195 and shirts for $160.

Harvard’s endowment is down 30 per cent from $37 billion last year, and the joke here is that the university is desperate to make up for some of the losses. It has not disclosed how much money it will make from the deal.

An American friend who recently went on a Mediterranean cruise narrated the following.

Halfway through the cruise that had only Americans on board the captain of the luxury liner met the passengers and asked them if they were comfortable and having a good time.

One passenger complained that the microwave in his cabin didn’t seem to work. The captain looked surprised. "But there are no microwaves in any of the cabins", he said.

Passenger: "There is one in my closet with buttons on the door and every time I put something in it to warm, shut the door and press the buttons, nothing happens".

Just in case you haven’t got it, he thought the mini-vault in the closet was a microwave.

There were more questions. Allow me to narrate just one:

"Does the crew sleep on the ship at night?"

No, I am not kiddin, as they say in America.

Shekhar Bhatia can be contacted at shekhar.bhatia@gmail.com