News Flash for Professor Gates: Life Is Hard for All of Us

A couple of white cops in Cambridge, Massachusetts, pound on the door of a residence in an upscale section of town. A black man answers. They immediately assume that his skin is the wrong color to belong in this setting, and they demand to see identification. Having been satisfied on this point, they nevertheless insist that the poor man step outside—and once they have induced him to forsake the relative safety behind his threshold, they cuff him for disorderly conduct and haul him down to the station.

This is approximately the sequence of events which the President of the United States and his media minions project of the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., last week. The images are incredibly naïve. Consider some of the facts either scarcely mentioned or wholly ignored by the media menagerie (including FOX’s grandstanding “moderate”, Shepherd Smith)—facts, I stress, available to any adult possessed of common sense and requiring no access to police records.

a) A neighbor reported a stranger breaking into and entering Gates’s house: the two cops had to assume that the person they encountered inside might well be there illegally, since he had not been recognized by someone who lived next-door. At this point, any qualified and sane officer would adopt a “ready for anything” posture: no one disputes that the house had been entered forcibly.
b) Gates produced two forms of identification—but billfold debris is dubious proof that someone OWNS A HOUSE. A forged address could have been transposed upon an otherwise valid i.d. rather easily, the i.d.’s carrier may have reported his address falsely when registering, the carrier may have been a former resident now denied access by the owner, etc. How frequent are such cases? I don’t know—and neither do you, and neither does President Obama. (But I DO know that they are more frequent in university towns, having lived in many myself.) Police protocol, I would hope, requires that a suspect step outside under such conditions. If he were allowed to remain in the house while the contention that he was said house’s owner was further verified by computer, and if he were in fact a criminal, he might turn and flee, summon an accomplice for help, secure a hidden weapon for deadly use, etc., etc.
c) Gates appears to have barked to the officers almost at once, “You’re only doing this because I’m a black man!” If I were a cop, I would take this kind of remark—with all its innuendo of impending lawsuit and career-ending uproar—as a malefactor’s gambit to back me away from performing my duty. After all, Gates DID BREAK INTO HIS HOUSE. He should most certainly have appreciated that he had placed himself in a delicate situation, and have shown enough intelligence to recognize that his innocence was far from transparent—either to the police or to his neighbors. Indeed, one would have thought that a Harvard professor would possess enough sense to alert the neighbor adjoining whatever door he intended to pry open of his harmless design. Well, maybe not… not these days.
d) If the two cops had indeed backed off after being greeted at the door by an indignant and belligerently BLACK man, and if it later turned out that the man was indeed an intruder and had walked off with Professor Gates’s irreplaceable files, documents, and research, the two hapless men in blue would forever after have been branded nincompoops, at the very least—and probably also accused of half-investigating a crime in progress once they found that black people were involved.

The level of demagogy instantly reached by these trifling events will not help race relations in the United States. If the Cambridge police “behaved stupidly”, as the President told the world, then the President himself behaved disingenuously in seizing upon an incident whose details were an utter mystery to him in order to preach the sermon, yet again, Black Men Can’t Get a Fair Shake. Most of us have heard this homily too many times. I myself have devoted countless hours in my teaching career to giving certain students a little extra tutelage because, through no fault of their own, they were raised and educated in an impoverished environment. If they had the will and the wits to better themselves, I found the time. I have just this summer, however, watched from ring-side as a very competent female coach lost her job due to some patently trumped-up complaints that appeared in her file quite late in the school year (after most of us had left for the summer) and all at once. The gist of every charge? That she didn’t give her black players as much consideration as the whites. This is the button you push first when you want to make trouble, and everyone knows it—including the white males who jettisoned the unfortunate woman from their department.

Let’s get this straight. All different kinds of people have life hard for all different kinds of reason: short men, tall women, the overweight, the homely, the visually impaired, the deformed, the soft-spoken, the sensitive, the shy, the deeply traumatized, the unlettered, the over-educated, and—perhaps most of all—the punctiliously honest. Any one of these “afflictions” could be, in certain circumstances, a far worse handicap to professional and social success than having dark skin, which has indeed become a clear asset in certain circumstances (as the President well knows). People of Caucasian and Asian provenance are growing very weary of hearing people of African descent insist that they need and deserve special favors to make their way. In fact, I know personally of several African-Americans who have tired of being associated with this humiliating refrain; but they, of course, run the risk of being called “race traitors” if they speak up, since they stand in the way of unlimited freebees.

I tell you in all candor: if I ever have to break into my own house, and if a squad car pulls into my driveway five minutes later, I intend to be very, VERY obliging. I will have put a couple of human beings in a most awkward position—people who hope to see their children again later that evening. Professor Gates, whose work I have enjoyed on occasion, behaved stupidly. He needs to dig out an anthology of the ancient Greek poets, if one is yet to be found on Harvard’s campus, and look up Mimnermus. “Oude tis estin / anthropon ho Zeus me kaka polla didoi”—“There is no one among men to whom Zeus does not give many miseries.”