It's Henry Gates who plays race card
by Michael Graham
DNN Staff - EXCLUSIVE!
Monday, Jul. 27, 2009
‘I said, are you doing this because I’m a black man in America? Are you doing this because you’re a white police officer and I am a black man?” - Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. recounting a conversation with his arresting officer in Cambridge.
So what if the cop had been black?
What if Sgt. James Crowley happened to be one of Cambridge’s 41 black police officers rather than bearing as he does the affliction of whiteness? If a black police sergeant responded to the call of a possible breaking and entering, and asked Gates for some form of identification, what would have happened then?
Gates would have been just as tired after his trip to China - an excuse his defenders use to explain his arrogance and rudeness.
And if having a cop show up at your door and ask about your identity is, as Gates claims, intrusive or insulting, it would have been just as intrusive from a black cop as a white one.The context would have been identical as well: Nine daytime, front-door break-ins reported in the neighborhood in the first quarter of 2009; Gates’ own door damaged by a previous, possible break-in attempt, according to the police report.cw0
Imagine all the facts and all the circumstances identical, but a black police officer instead of a white one. What would have been different?
Everything.
The tired professor would have found the strength to hand over his ID without significant objection. The officer would have gone on his way. No angry shouts, no (alleged) “yo mama” comments, no screams so loud they attracted the neighbors, or embarrassing photos of a raging Skip Gates on the front of the Herald.
All changed, not because of a different cop, but a different Professor Gates.
The Gates who greeted Crowley was a racist. And I know, because the professor said so himself.
By his own admission, Gates didn’t just blame the incident on the fact that he is “a black man.” He also added the accusatory question, “Are you doing this because you’re a white police officer?”
Review every account of the Gates arrest, including Gates’ self-serving interviews, and it’s hard to find an action of Crowley’s that can be characterized as inherently racist.
Yes, it’s possible that the arrest itself was a racist act. But it’s also possible that it wasn’t. It may have been a righteous arrest, or the action of an annoyed, flustered cop. Or Crowley may be a power-mad jerk with a badge. All possibilities.
But the only motive for Gates’ behavior, by his own admission, is the cop’s skin color and Gates’ race-based assumptions about him.
Once again, the “white cop” charge comes from Gates’ own words, not the police report. And not just white cops, but white witnesses, too.
According to an eyewitness quoted in the Herald yesterday, when police asked him for ID, Gates started yelling, “I’m a Harvard professor . . . You believe white women over black men.”
Not that Gates is without compassion. “Crowley should beg my forgiveness,” he told one reporter.
“If I decided he was sincere,” Gates assured us, “I would forgive him.”
Don’t you just love a rich guy who summers on the Vineyard asking a working-class cop to “beg”? How perfectly Cambridge.
Gates’ race-obsessed heart may not be in the right place, but his house certainly is.
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