The arrest of Harvard professor “Skip” Gates was probably justified

Professor Henry Louis Gates, one of the most distinguished scholars in America, was arrested last Thursday after he was spotted trying to break into his own home, which is located near Harvard University. Yes, like a dummy, he locked himself out.

After reading about his arrest, I immediately thought about the imperious manner in which celebrities often throw their fame at public officials to get their way. And even though I find this tact unseemly, I think this was an occasion when Gates might have been well-served to play this celebrity card on the officers who arrived on this understandably suspicious scene.

For example, he might have responded as follows:

No cause for alarm officers, this is my home.

And if that did not diffuse the situation, Gates would have been forgiven for then exclaiming, indignantly:

Don’t you know who I am?!!!  My name is Henry Louis Gates, Jr., but my friends, like President Barack Obama and Oprah, just call me Skip.  I am the director of Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. May I reach slowly into my pocket to show you my ID?

(FYI: Gates was the host of “African American Lives,” a PBS show that featured black celebrities, including Oprah, tracing their African roots. And he was named by TIME magazine as one of the 25 most influential people in America.)

With that, I have to think that even if these cops were Bull-Connor racists hell-bent on executing their unspoken mandate to racially profile blacks, such a response would have compelled them to defer to Gates, and this situation would have ended cordially.

To be fair, Gates insists that he did exactly as I suggest, but that the police continued interrogating him even after he showed them his license and Harvard ID.

But the officers claim that he refused to respond to their order to identify himself. In fact, they report that he became belligerent, calling them racists and exhibiting a “loud and tumultuous behavior” while saying, repeatedly:

This is what happens to black men in America…  You don’t know who you’re messing with.

The officers insist that Gates resisted all of their efforts to calm him down.  Moreover, his version of events fails to take into account the obvious fact that these Cambridge officers would have been loath to invite this public scrutiny; which they must have known was bound to follow the arrest of any Harvard faculty – not to mention the arrest of a black one screaming accusations of racism.

This makes it reasonable to infer that they had probable (and just) cause to arrest him. And, if Gates responded as they claim, then he deserved to be arrested – no matter how reasonable his suspicion that he was being racially profiled. As things turned out, he was charged with disorderly conduct, released within hours on his own recognizance and is scheduled to be arraigned on August 26.

Not surprisingly, racial empathy has moved many of his black colleagues at Harvard to come to his defense – with Law Professor Charles Ogletree, who is almost as famous as Gates, now acting as his lawyer.

We do not believe that this arrest would have happened if professor Gates was white. It really has been very unsettling for African-Americans throughout Harvard and throughout Cambridge that this happened.

(Professor Allen Counter, who has taught neuroscience at Harvard for 25 years)

Fair enough.  But I am not without some racial empathy of my own, having had similar run-ins with the police in Arlington, Virginia over the past 15 years.  Therefore, given that I always managed to reason with the good ole boys who “racially profiled” me, I find it incomprehensible that Gates was unable to do the same in this situation.

More to the point, even Professor Counter claims to have been racially profiled by the Cambridge police a few years ago. Unfortunately, the instructive irony seemed lost on him when, in defending Gates, Counter revealed that he too managed to avoid arrest … even without being able to produce a personal ID.

Frankly, it would be one thing if Gates were claiming police brutality, and that this is what triggered his belligerent behavior.  But claiming that his behavior was justified because he felt he was being racially profiled only perpetuates the stereotype of black American men as emotionally immature and prone to violence.

Far more than “unsettling”, it’s a damn shame that this happened.

NOTE: Black Americans invariably assert that those of us from the Caribbean cannot possibly relate to the psychosis of black victimology that racism has wrought, which causes them to go gangsta sometimes when they’re confronted by the police.   But this only reflects their ignorance of our own civil rights struggles and amounts to nothing more than intra-racial stereotyping….

UPDATE

Local DA drops charge

Today at 11:56 AM:  As I indicated above, the police were clearly loath to arrest Gates.  Therefore, it came as no surprise that the local District Attorney was even more loath to prosecute him – given that his trial would have been far more about racism in America than about Gates’ alleged disorderly conduct.

Accordingly, for law-enforcement authorities, dropping the charge is a regrettable but sensible thing to do.  For black men in America, however, even though good for Gates, it sets a dangerous precedent: as any ordinary black man in Cambridge, Massachusetts who tries to emulate him by bad mouthing the police will undoubtedly find out.