It’s 1999, summer, and night has just fallen. I’m a faculty fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard, and another young black faculty member, Arnold, and I are walking down Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, near the campus. A passing police car veers abruptly across the avenue to cut off our path. The officer orders us against the hood of his car and frisks and cuffs us. No explanation, despite our repeated requests for one, despite identifying ourselves as Harvard faculty members. The officer doesn’t want identification; he doesn’t even ask for it.
Instead, Arnold and I are made to stand in the blue strobe of the patrol-car lights as three or four more cars roll up, passers-by staring. Finally, a police car arrives with a white woman in the back seat. She scrutinizes Arnold and me. After an interminable beat, she shakes her head “no,” saying something to the officer behind the wheel. Her car pulls away and, in quick order, so do the others.
The officer who stopped us unlocks the cuffs. He explains that a house has been broken into in the adjoining neighborhood. “And you’re stopping all black men on the street!?” Arnold or I or both of us said.
He doesn’t reply. He doesn’t apologize.
In that instance, and in others before and since, I used, or attempted to use, my class privilege to extricate myself from, or at least lessen the potential threat of, an encounter with the police. That night, Arnold and I had been joking and laughing (maybe even shucking and jiving) before being stopped. Yet though we’d done nothing wrong, I immediately switched to a mainstream style of speaking when addressing the officer, and called attention to my professional status. It was reflexive. I’d been in situations like that since I was a kid, and had responded at times in an accommodating manner; at others, belligerently, and had come to understand that the best way, however demeaning, is accommodation.
So when I read the details of the confrontation between Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James M. Crowley of the Cambridge police, I recognized the situation.
Gates acknowledges having brought up race. Gates, in an interview with his daughter for the online magazine The Root, recalled asking Crowley, “Is this how you treat a black man in America?” (The official police report says that Gates stated it as accusation, pugnaciously, repeatedly, and loudly.) The subtext of Gates’s words, even calmly articulated, is clear. Gates was accusing Crowley of behaving in a racist manner; by extension, Gates was calling Crowley a racist, to his face, in front of other officers, at least one of whom is black.
Those are fighting words. And Gates knows it.
The brouhaha surrounding the July 16 arrest strikes me most for the reasonable voices that have lost all sense of reason in response. From President Obama to the countless others who have weighed in, all focus has been, in one way or another, on the victimization of Gates. Professor Gates has become a stand-in for the “average black man,” subjected to humiliation and abuse at the hands of a racist police force. But Gates, while obviously black, is not a stand-in for the many African-Americans, men and women, who daily are victims of profiling and worse.
Was Gates profiled? Richard Thompson Ford makes a compelling argument on Slate that Gates was not. Sgt. Crowley was responding to a potential crime in progress; he was performing his duty, by all indications, in a professional manner.
The more interesting question, it seems to me, is, was Crowley himself profiled—as a racist police officer? The answer is, unequivocally, yes—not only by Gates but by the rest of us, in newspapers and magazines, online and on TV, even by the White House.
Yet many commentators and self-described acquaintances and friends of Gates have defended his response to Crowley, based on their impressions of Gates’s character. “I know Gates,” Richard Thompson Ford asserts in his otherwise interesting analysis, “and find it very hard to imagine him engaged in ‘disorderly conduct.’”
But Ford misses the point. Gates understands what it is to be black in America; he knows the rules of the game. His 1994 memoir, Colored People, tells us so.
The word “‘nigger’ was hung on me so many times,” Gates wrote, “that I thought it was my name.” So it would seem to follow that he would know just as well as I do how to respond to the police—which is to say, don’t argue, don’t provoke. But Gates chose to escalate the encounter.
Gates is also keenly aware of the distance between himself and other, less-privileged blacks. Witness the 1998 Frontline special “The Two Nations of Black America,” in which we learn about the homeless men in Harvard Yard whom Gates greets on his way to work each morning. Gates understands himself to be something other than just any black man. He’s an exemplar of contemporary African-American success in mainstream America—academic, author, filmmaker: “Head Negro in Charge,” as Boston magazine titled its 1998 profile of him. Gates is not to be confused—even by himself—with the number of black men and women who live in poor, depressed communities and who are for those reasons regularly harassed, profiled, and worse by authorities.
The problem appears to be that Gates wants it both ways. When asked by Sgt. Crowley for identification, Gates first produced his Harvard faculty ID—not his passport (which, as he was just returning from an overseas trip, he would have had handy) or his driver’s license, either of which would have indicated his address, quelling any doubt that he resided at the house. The not-so-subtle message (though still infinitely more subtle than the angry threats the police report states Gates yelled at Crowley): Gates was identifying himself as a local Brahmin, not to be messed with.
I act similarly—when stopped by the police for traffic violations, for example. I always manage to bumble my University of Illinois faculty ID out along with my license. First and foremost, I’m attempting to offset any stereotypes that, I fear (and that experience has taught me), the officer may have about me. But if flashing my faculty ID will keep me from getting written up (like the crying jags that many women can supposedly unleash when pulled over), all the better. As often as not, it’s worked.
Not so for Gates with Sgt. Crowley.
Is profiling someone like me or Gates less wrong than profiling someone of lower income or social status? No. It’s just so much rarer for us than for so many less-privileged blacks, and recourse is so much more accessible, that I’m loath to find Gates’s or my profiling emblematic in any way.
And it’s therein that President Obama’s response (and Gov. Deval Patrick’s relative lack of response) truly disappoints. The president’s playful invitation to get the three of them together at the White House for a beer diminishes the significance of what is, in fact, a grave national problem. The cases of Sean Bell, Abner Louima, and Amadou Diallo —true victims of racial profiling—demand that we treat the matter seriously.
Much of Professor Gates’s public posture since his arrest has been obdurate and inflammatory. Yet if he is truly committed to making a “teachable moment” of this event, as President Obama has suggested, Gates should use his high profile, along with the national visibility and access to the White House that the encounter has proffered to him, to invite the Cambridge officers and representatives of other police forces to the table and initiate a frank national discussion about race, privilege, profiling, and policing. The roundtable should be inclusive, with experts from government, the academy, and community organizations. President Obama should encourage it, and Governor Patrick endorse it. Such a conversation could lead to policy recommendations that are long overdue.