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The Gates Case
Jul. 22nd, 2009 04:24 pmHenry Louis Gates is now the second most famous man with that name in America. And, I suspect that's just the way he wanted it.
Gates said, "It never would have happened - imagine a white professor, a distinguished white professor at Harvard, walking around with a cane, going into his own house, being harassed or stopped by the police. It would never happen."
When I read that quote, I knew I had to weigh in, even though it's a pain to type on this handheld.
For a Yale-educated Harvard professor, Gates seems glaringly unaware of certain realities that are totally separate from any questions of race.
First of all, not a word is being said about the fact that the police responded to a potential burglary, and were thus there to protect his property. The neighbor who called for assistance could not have been expected to know who was forcing their way into the dwelling, and was in fact putting his or her butt on the line instead of saying, "Hey, not my problem."
Second, when police respond to any situation, they have no idea what to expect. Bernie Madoff is educated, powerful and white, yet his honus now rots in jail for being a cataclysmic jerk; I don't have enough fingers and toes to count how many well-dressed white folk have gone postal on the police.
Third, Gates forgot or never learned Chris Rock's first rule of how to avoid getting your ass kicked by the police: "Shut the hqiz up." White, black, puce or écru, if you're being interviewed by the police, for Mogg's sake, stay polite. If you've got a legitimate complaint about how you were treated, take it to the national stage later if you really want to, and you stand a much better chance of coming off conqueror.
Every moment is a choice, and every choice has prices and benefits. If you ask me, Gates chose ... poorly. There would have been much better ways of getting the very valid issue of racial profiling into the national consciousness ... the way he opted for, be it premeditated or a simple case of ivory-toweritis, made him look more like an immature whiner than the brilliant man that he is.
We live in perilous times. The police we hire to guard us walk a fine line between protecting us and protecting their own safety. But ever since I was a small child, it's been axiomatic that bringing attitude to a confrontation with the law is always going to make things worse instead of better. Gates would have done well, for himself and his causes, to remember that.
Gates said, "It never would have happened - imagine a white professor, a distinguished white professor at Harvard, walking around with a cane, going into his own house, being harassed or stopped by the police. It would never happen."
When I read that quote, I knew I had to weigh in, even though it's a pain to type on this handheld.
For a Yale-educated Harvard professor, Gates seems glaringly unaware of certain realities that are totally separate from any questions of race.
First of all, not a word is being said about the fact that the police responded to a potential burglary, and were thus there to protect his property. The neighbor who called for assistance could not have been expected to know who was forcing their way into the dwelling, and was in fact putting his or her butt on the line instead of saying, "Hey, not my problem."
Second, when police respond to any situation, they have no idea what to expect. Bernie Madoff is educated, powerful and white, yet his honus now rots in jail for being a cataclysmic jerk; I don't have enough fingers and toes to count how many well-dressed white folk have gone postal on the police.
Third, Gates forgot or never learned Chris Rock's first rule of how to avoid getting your ass kicked by the police: "Shut the hqiz up." White, black, puce or écru, if you're being interviewed by the police, for Mogg's sake, stay polite. If you've got a legitimate complaint about how you were treated, take it to the national stage later if you really want to, and you stand a much better chance of coming off conqueror.
Every moment is a choice, and every choice has prices and benefits. If you ask me, Gates chose ... poorly. There would have been much better ways of getting the very valid issue of racial profiling into the national consciousness ... the way he opted for, be it premeditated or a simple case of ivory-toweritis, made him look more like an immature whiner than the brilliant man that he is.
We live in perilous times. The police we hire to guard us walk a fine line between protecting us and protecting their own safety. But ever since I was a small child, it's been axiomatic that bringing attitude to a confrontation with the law is always going to make things worse instead of better. Gates would have done well, for himself and his causes, to remember that.
