Gates’ arrest shows we have a long way to go

By GEORGE E. CURRY

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested two weeks ago after mistakenly being suspected of breaking into his own home in Cambridge, Mass. A spirited public debate — with one side fearing that police were engaged in racial profiling and the other side maintaining that police were acting properly after receiving a call reporting suspicious activity at the home of the noted historian — demonstrates that even with a black man sitting in the White House, we’re a long way from a post-racial society.

According to police, an officer drove to the stately house near Harvard Square after receiving a call from a white woman about a possible break-in. Gates told friends that after returning from China, he found his front door jammed. He said he then went to the back door, unlocked it, turned off the alarm, entered the house, and tried to open the front door from the inside. When that failed, he went back outside and with the help of his driver pushed in the front door. By the time Cambridge police Sgt. James Crowley arrived, Gates was inside his house. Gates and Crowley agree that the officer asked Gates to step outside and he refused.

What happened next is dis-puted.

Charles J. Ogletree, a Harvard law professor serving as Gates’ attorney, said Gates showed the officer his Massachusetts driver’s license and his Harvard identification card but Crowley did not appear to believe that Gates lived in the house. At that point, Gates asked for the officer’s name and badge number, according to his attorney.

Racism?

The policeman’s version is that after informing Gates that he was investigating a possible break-in, Gates replied: “Why, because I’m a black man in America?” He said the professor accused him of racism.

“While I was led to believe that Gates was lawfully in the residence, I was quite surprised and confused with the behavior he exhibited toward me,” the sergeant wrote in his report. He said Gates followed him outside and yelled at him. The officer said he warned Gates “that he was becoming disorderly” and when Gates persisted, he was handcuffed and arrested.

Gates was held at police headquarters for four hours and released after posting $40 bail. Charges against him were dropped.

In a telephone interview with the Boston Globe on Tuesday from his second home in Martha’s Vineyard, Gates denied ever yelling at the officer or calling him a racist.

“The police report is full of this man’s broad imagination,” said Gates, whom Time magazine named one of the most influential Americans in 1997. “I said, ‘Are you not giving me your name and badge number because I’m a black man in America?’ ... He treated my request with scorn.”

Gates, whose wife is white, said: “I don’t walk around calling white people racist.”

Less than 12 hours after the first story appeared in the Globe, more than 1,800 comments had been posted to the newspaper’s Web site. Among them:

Ari: “In other words the police didn’t believe he lived there, Gates asks for their badge numbers and they in turn charge him with an offense. ... Welcome to our world, white America.”

Johnpaul: “Here we go. Let’s blow this out of all proportion. Let’s not wait until we hear the full story. ... Bring on the Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton circus.”

Dave C: “Enough of throwing down the race card. ... We have a black president now, so that tired old ship has sailed.”

Veeve: “The election of Obama didn’t end racism and only someone with deep racial bias would proclaim as much. You know full well that if the guy was white and lived in Dedham or Wellesley, the cops would have moved along once identification had been established.”

Gates wrote about how differently whites and blacks are perceived. In his book “Colored People: A Memoir,” he wrote: “When I walk into a room, people still see my blackness, more than my Gates-ness, or my literary-ness.”

He and others say that is particularly true when it comes to law enforcement officers.

In 2004, two Harvard police officers mistook S. Allen Counter, a black professor at the Harvard Medical School, for a robbery suspect as he crossed Harvard Yard.

When Cornel West, another prominent black intellectual, was teaching at Harvard, he too was stopped by local police. When West told a policeman that he was a professor at Harvard, the officer replied: “Yes, I am the Tooth Fairy.”

Sting of racism

Even at elite universities, there is no escaping the sting of racism.

Gates told the Globe: “I’m outraged. I shouldn’t have been treated this way, but it makes me so keenly aware of how many people every day experience abuses in the criminal justice system.”

X George E. Curry is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.