On July 16, 2009, news broke that prominent black Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested for disorderly conduct at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The Gates image above was plastered everywhere in the media and stoked the ever-simmering fire of racial tension. To some, the picture shows preferential treatment; at least his handcuffed hands were not behind him as we are accustomed to seeing. Many blacks when they see an image of a black man in handcuffs draw a direct connection to the one below it of Kunta Kinte (from the dramatically movie about slavery in America, Roots).
It is this painful memory that is projected onto the Gates image that fuels the cry for justice. Many in our society insists that this incident is racially motivated and is an example of racial profiling by the Cambridge police department. Racial profiling occurs when race and ethnicity is used to predict whether a person is likely to commit a crime or an illegal act. The image of a black man in handcuffs is all too familiar and suggests again to some that a famous scholar is not immune to racial prejudice even in a post black president society.
Professor Gates alleges that on July 16th he returned home from a trip to China to find his front door jammed, but was able to open the back door to his home. Once inside, he attempted to dislodge the front door. Eventually, both he and his driver were able to open the jammed door. He was in the home for several minutes after his driver left when Sgt. James Crowley appeared on his step and asks him to come outside. According to his lawyer, he told the officer he lived in the house and showed him his identification card. The officer then followed him into his home and said he had received a report of a break in. Gates grew frustrated at the continued questioning and suspicion, ask for the officer’s name, and badge number. The officer called for backup and moments later arrested him. The Cambridge police held Professor Gates in jail for four hours then released him only after he posted a $40 bond.
Not surprisingly, the police officer’s incident report chronicles a somewhat different account on 12:44pm on July 16th. It reports an arrest of disorderly conduct with the following excerpt from the narration, “after being observed exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior, in a public place directed at a uniform officer who was present investigating a report of a crime in progress”. The report alleges that Gates became out of control and yelled at the police officer. Gates, it further alleges called the officer a racist on three separate occasions in the encounter. At one point, the officer reports that Gates said, “Ya I’ll speak to your mama outside”. A second officer, Figueroa in a supplemental to the original police report suspiciously dated July 20th (four days later) indicated that Professor Gates screamed to gathering on lookers, “THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO BLACK MEN IN AMERICA”!
Professor Gates is the Director of Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African Research. Time Magazine declared Professor Gates, in 1997 one of the 25 most influential people in the United States.
S. Allen Counter, a Harvard neuroscience professor and friend of Gates said two Harvard police officers stopped him in 2004 after they mistook him for a robbery suspect as he crossed Harvard Yard. Many blacks perceive the police as an occupying force that lords over inner city communities carting off young men to jail for the slightest infractions while in the suburbs where they live; young white perpetrators mostly receive counseling and insignificant punishment. They argue that black men are undervalued and marginalized by Police departments. A February 28th, 2008, New York Times article by Adam Liptak also reports that one in a hundred American adults are behind bars (1.6 Million). For African Americans adults, the figure is one in fifteen and even more startling are the numbers for African American men between the age of 20 and 34, where one in nine are in prison. It cost an average of $23,876 dollars to imprison someone in 2005, the most recent year for which data were available. There are more black men in jail than in college. Interactions with the police leave records of criminal convictions that are an economic kiss of death for young black men. This kiss ultimately feeds the negative downward spiral of their communities. Black men share their encounters with each other like boys scouts tell stories over a campfire and; you will be hard pressed to find one black man in America today who does not have a police story to tell. As recent as May 2009, a white New York City police officer mistook a black colleague, shot, and killed him. From an historical perspective, there are also those who still harbor negative feelings against the police for attacking civil right protestors and reinforcing the institution of racial divide only two generations ago. To down play the mistrust between the black community and the police is simply intellectually dishonest.
Ryan S. King, a policy analyst at the Sentencing Project, a think tank that researches incarcerations rates points to a broader issue of racial disparities in the nation’s justice system. "If you look at every stage of the criminal justice system from initial police contact all the way through sentencing and incarceration, you see that African Americans are disproportionately impacted by each stage," King said”. This perhaps explains why black men in particular are so fearful and angry in encounters with the police. There is clearly something here, as many states have enacted laws against this abuse of power and instituted civilian review boards to combat the problem.
President Obama on the day of the incident, when asked to comment on the issue involving his friend said that the “police acted stupidly”. He has since back tracked from these comments and has worked hard to douse the tension. He later spoke to Crowley and said to him that he did not mean to malign the Police Department. The President instincts to react were right but his words were not. He has since called the incident a teachable moment, arranged a meeting of the two principals at the White house (the Beer Summit) to talk. This event was nothing more than a photo opportunity that allowed the president to exit stage right from this political hot button issue and refocus attention on the raging health care debate. He is telling the American people indirectly this not the politically correct time for a national discourse on race. At least, one in which he leads.
The Cambridge police also reacted quickly to the media firestorm and put forth their version of the truth. Fellow officers both black and white rallied behind their colleague. They were quick to point to the police officer’s exemplary record and state that he is a long-standing racial sensitivity instructor. Within days, the Middlesex County district attorney’s office dropped the charges and the city of Cambridge apologized calling the incident "regrettable and unfortunate".
Did the media and others rushed to judgment? Was the police officer just doing his job? The police have very dangerous jobs, procedures and protocols to follow. Their mission is to serve and protect the public. Others supporting the officer’s perspective believe there should be a degree of respect and understanding given to the police in the performance of their duties. They claim there is nothing racial here. It is a fact that African American populated inner city communities have a disproportionately higher crime rate. Crowley supporters say some will always yell racism every time a white police officer arrests a black man. On the same day of the dust up with professor Gates, a young black man shot five police officers in Jersey City, New Jersey and one officer has since succumbed to his wounds.
Did both professionals and good men have a momentary lapse in judgment caused by bruised egos? Even presidents have major lapses in judgment. Does this make the officer a racist or perhaps a victim of his own thought process? Scholar David Bohm in “On Dialogue” says, “thought is not individual and originates in culture”, thought and perhaps Crowley’s action is a response from memory. Thought Bohm declares is imparted from parents, friends, family, school, books, the media etc. A black man who commits a crime is six times as likely to be on the news than his white counterpart. A woman is likely to clutch her purse tighter when she sees a black man approaching. Incidents like these will continually flare up as long as thought is drawn from the same infected pool.
For those wanting to deconstruct the incident even further in the quest for truth invariably will look at this as another Rashomon because the 911 caller’s version does not reconcile with officer Crowley‘s report. Why did Crowley lie in his report? The 911 caller is Lucia Whallen. She is a 40-year-old Hispanic looking woman of Portuguese decent that works in the neighborhood. The Cambridge police released the 911 call to the public. It does not mention that the men were black. In the call, Whallen suggests that it was possible that the men lived at the home and noted seeing suitcases on the porch not two black men wearing backpacks written in the police report. The image from this statement in the police report gives the mental visual of two young black burglars busting into a suburban home. The attorney for Whallen insists that her client did not have a conversation with Officer Crowley at the scene. Her client vehemently refutes the accusation that she is a racial profiler as the attacks from internet bloggers and others intensify.
There is a third point of view here; police wield too much power in our society. The way this particular police report reads suggests that one can be arrested simply for annoying a police officer. Bill Maher a comedian who supports this viewpoint quipped in a recent CNN interview that Gates arrest was for “not kissing the behind of the police officer” and nothing more.
We live in a disconnected culturally blind society. If the 911 caller recognized her neighbor, the incident would not have happened. Could the outcome be different if the officer recognized this prominent black scholar and treated him less suspiciously? Alternatively, if Professor Gates were white, or even if the races of the men were reversed. If the Professor acted less of a grumpy old man and more respectfully, I am sure we would have been spared the scars from the flare-up. What threat could a 150 pound, yelling 5 feet 7 inches, 58 eight-year-old man with a cane in his own home pose to society and a team of gun tooting police officers? Who did the arrest served? Twenty years after Spike Lee’s movie on race relations, Do The Right Thing; in it, a young black man was strangled to death by a police officer. It is also now over a decade after the O.J. Simpson verdict and the racial undertones is still a factor in our society. Our natural reflex is to draw the race card first or cower away from an honest national dialogue on this divisive issue.
Perhaps, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was right in February when he called the American people "essentially a nation of cowards" in failing to openly discuss the issue of race. On a local level more community policing and sensitivity training is needed. The two men have said in press conferences that they will continue to talk, but to me, it is very unfortunate that we lost the opportunity to make this a real teachable moment because both men refuse to apologize to each other for a simple misunderstanding.
Recent Comments