When the Henry Louis Gates Jr. story first broke, I was interested.
Here is a man who is a highly respected and lettered professor at Harvard University. He was returning from a trip in the afternoon, the door on his house was stuck, he broke in and was subsequently arrested by the Cambridge police even after showing his drivers license and Harvard employee card.
Then, it turns out that he was inside when the cops showed up; the cops were leaving the house and he followed them outside haranguing them until, finally, one of them placed Dr. Gates under arrest and took him down to the pokey to cool off for a couple hours.
Now, Dr. Gates' feathers are ruffled, his panties are in a bunch and he is Outraged I tell you, OUTRAGED. After all, as he was quoted (repeatedly): "This is what happens to black men in America."
The story at the Washington Post:
Gates Says He Is Outraged by Arrest at Cambridge Home
Prominent Black Professor Says He Will Use Experience to Further Academic Work
Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. cast his recent arrest in his home in Cambridge, Mass., as part of a "racial narrative" playing out in a biased criminal justice system. The professor who has spent much of his life studying race in America said he has come to feel like a case study.
"There are one million black men in jail in this country and last Thursday I was one of them," he said in an exclusive interview with The Washington Post Tuesday morning. "This is outrageous and that this is how poor black men across the country are treated everyday in the criminal justice system. It's one thing to write about it, but altogether another to experience it."
He was still outraged but he said he has had time to take a step back and will now apply the scholarship that has been his life's work to the issue of race in the criminal justice system.
These is no law that says one must unduely respect a cop. And we should be protected from the police. THey think they can say anything bully anyone without recourse. This man was in his own house the cops should have apologized and left and kept walking away even if the man gates was pissed off and screaming at them - the cop was in the wrong if you ask me.
It would be a very scary feeling to have cops trying to interfere with you in your own house. I think the fact that he was black was more an issue in his own mind carried over from ages ago...could have happened to anyone. Maybe the neighbor who called the cops saw a black man breaking and and jumped to conclusions...not unlikely. But they might have called on anyone. Didnt' the neighbors know who lives there?
I still think it was a totally stupid thing for the cop to do and cops often do stupid things and use their power to get back at people for not giving them unwarrented "respect". Geese your a cop if you can't figure that someone is gonna freak out sometimes...he didn't threaten him or anything.