A collection of opinions from around the web on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates.
Ta-Nahesi Coates sees both class and race at play:
…for black people, this is the kind of issue that tends to cut across lines of class and politics. I would say that this is the sort of thing that angers upper middle-class black people even more than it angers anyone else, because they tend to be individuals who, by society’s lights, are very accomplished. They deeply resent being lumped in with the mass. And more than anyone they resent the whole “when you’re black, you talk to the police like this” routine.
Over at The American Prospect, Adam Serwer says racist is a better label for the neighbor than the cop:
What really disturbs me though, is the fact that Gates’ own neighbor didn’t recognize him. Regardless of who is ultimately at fault in the encounter between Gates and Sgt. Crowley, the most frightening thing is that a Harvard professor could be mistaken for a burglar by his own neighbor. I’m not ascribing malice here — it’s the nature of race that people react to it without forethought — but the idea that a black man can be mistaken for a criminal trying to enter his own house in his own neighborhood should remind us all that we’re hardly living in a post-racial paradise. I find it highly unlikely that this incident would have occurred at all had Gates been white, and I can imagine the entire situation degenerating into something horribly tragic had Gates not been middle aged, had he not been a college professor, and had this not occurred a nice neighborhood in Cambridge.
Conor Friedersdorf, guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan, suggests there are times cops should be given the benefit of a doubt given the difficulty of their jobs. But is this one of them?
…why should police officers require the benefit of the doubt when they are confronted with a lone guy — old, nonthreatening in appearance, apparently well-dressed — who is pushing on the front door of a house in a nice neighborhood? Does that sound like a particularly dangerous situation?
At Beliefnet, Erin Manning thinks the larger question is one of police power, not race:
So, is the Gates case a clear example of racism on the part of police, or is it an unfortunate example of the power police officers have to make us identify ourselves to them even if we are only behaving “suspiciously,” and haven’t committed or been involved in any criminal activity–which, while deplorable, isn’t really the fault of individual police officers?
A reader of Bruce Maiman’s blog at the Examiner suggests this is a good wake-up call for blacks like Gates who achieved “the so called american dream”:
in a way iam glad this happend to mr gates because blacks like him who acheive the so called american dream seem to think that their acomplishments insulates them from what the brothas and the sistas at ground zero go through everyday. blacks folks like him don’t want to put in jepardy what they have gained so they turn a slight blind eye to what they see going on with black folks at ground zero it’s only when they suffer from an altercation with white folks involving race that they refer to themselves as being black and suffering an injustice because of skin color. it’s our own fault
John McWhorter, normally the last guy to cry racism, calls b.s. on the notion of a post-racial society:
…the idea that he should have exhibited “deference to the police” ignores the totemic status that black men’s encounters with the police have in the way countless people process being black and what it means. There’s a reason Gates told the Washington Post Tuesday that what happened to him was part of a“racial narrative,” and that awareness surely informed his angry conduct.
The relationship between black men and police forces is, in fact, the main thing keeping America from becoming “post-racial” in any sense.
Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a colleague of Gates’ at Harvard, disagreed what she saw as his naive commitment to the ”post-racial project.” Now she sees his arrest as the final nail in that project’s coffin:
Gates seems genuinely surprised and deeply hurt. His sense of violation and humiliation evokes great empathy, but also some incredulity about his astonishment with racial bias in the criminal justice system.
I like and respect Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Although we have had intellectual and political disagreements he has always welcomed dissent and encouraged individuality. Our personal connection is not why I was so devastated to see his mug shot or images of him handcuffed on his front porch. I was not even distressed because of class implications that reasoned, “If this can happen to a Harvard professor then no one is safe.”
My distress is squarely rooted in feeling that I watched the police handcuff American possibility.
