Gates on the Front Porch of American Race Conflict

The spectacle of Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates, shouting while handcuffed on his front porch, was so painful that it took even Barack Obama out of his carefully scripted, impeccably controlled game plan. It was so painful that even Obama, the most skilled politician of our time, made comments that he would have known, if he were thinking more rationally, would obliterate everything he said previously in his press conference about health care reform, seemingly his most urgent political goal of the year.

Still we return to that image of Gates, shouting perhaps for his cane, which hadn't been given to him at that point, dressed like he'd just gone on a pseudo-preppie shopping spree at the Harvard Coop, in the grip of one white officer, being browbeaten by another, while a third, African-American officer stands guard in the foreground. We can forgive Obama if instead of saying the police acted "stupidly," he should have said, "I don't know all the details, but if you see a photo of a 58-year-old man in handcuffs calling out for his cane on his own porch, and all he did was get cranky from a serious case of jet lag after flying all the way from China, you gotta think that something's wrong with this picture."

But the only apparent effect of this spectacle in our media is a resumption of a static "race debate" where two sides argue in an ahistorical vacuum, devoid of context, facts, and analysis. There has been little debate about the apparent contradictions in comments made about the incident by Gates and his arresting officer, James Crowley.

This is what Gates said, according to a NY Times article:

After getting in and calling Harvard’s maintenance department to come fix the door, Professor Gates said, he saw Sergeant Crowley on his porch. The sergeant was disrespectful from the beginning, the professor said, asking him to step outside without explanation and demanding identification while refusing to provide his own.

This is what Crowley said:

“He was arrested after following me outside the house,” Sergeant Crowley said on the radio, “continuing the tirade even after being warned multiple times — probably a few more times than the average person would have gotten. He was cautioned in the house, ‘Calm down, lower your voice.’ ” He added, “The professor at any point in time could have resolved the issue by quieting down and/or by going back in the house.”

The Cambridge police report reads that Gates was arrested for "exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior in a public place" (emphasis mine). If it's true, that as the report reads, Gates said "ya, I'll speak with your mama outside," the professor seemed not to want to come outside. Yet Crowley insists that Gates could have defused the situation by 'going back in the house.'" It's hard to believe that Crowley wasn't aware of the fact that by stepping outside Gates would leave himself more vulnerable to arrest than by simply continuing his rant inside the house.

Finally, how about some context for the actions of Harvard Magazine fundraiser Lucia Whalen, Gates's next-door neighbor, who called the police to report suspicious activity at his home. It's sad enough that she didn't even recognize him. But perhaps her Homeland Security Threat Level was Elevated because of a recent incident on the Harvard campus that seems to have been quickly forgotten. On May 18, a Harvard student named Justin Copney was charged with murdering someone who was apparently selling him marijuana in a Harvard Yard dorm. As a result of that incident, 21-year-old Brooklyn native Chanequa Campbell, who was friends with Copney's girlfriend, and who has not been charged in connection with the murder, was expelled from her on-campus residence and not allowed to attend her own graduation.

Campbell told the Boston Globe that week that she was being singled out because was "black and poor and from New York." While it has been rumored that Campbell has associations with drugs, there is no doubt that there are many undergraduates at Harvard of various class and race background for which this is true, and they are not being denied attendance at their own graduation. If anything, the Campbell case helped to cast a light on other incidents on the Harvard campus, such as a 2007 campaign called "I Am Harvard," organized by black students in response to racial profiling, that I'm sure both Skip Gates, Lucia Whalen, and his arresting officer were well aware of. (And I'm not even mentioning Cornell West's testy falling out with Larry "Women Are Scientifically Not as Smart as Men" Summers, former Harvard president and currently helping to "fix" the economy for Obama.)

All of this is to say that we are far from living in a post-racial America. It's much closer to the truth that we're only just beginning to deal with the issue.