The Professor of Race?
Posted August 4th, 2009by Ilan Stavans
The arrest for disorderly conduct of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., at his Cambridge home, on July 16, 2009, has left a sour aftertaste. Responding to a 911 caller who described two men breaking into the Cambridge house, Sgt. James M. Crowley was greeted by Professor Gates, who quickly became annoyed that a police officer was asking him to identify himself. Professor Gates was just back from a long trip to China to shoot a PBS documentary and it’s possible that, exhausted as he was, he was not easily tickled by an unwelcome visitor. Instead of offering Sgt. Crowley his driver’s license, at the policeman’s request, Gates first produced only his Harvard ID, which, like any other university card, doesn’t contain an address. Only later did he show his license. In the next minutes the incident quickly got out of hand. Since Sgt. Crowley wasn’t responding to the radio calls from the Cambridge Police Department, the central command sent more officers to the scene, a fact that made Professor Gates even angrier. By then, he was complaining that the treatment he was receiving was because he was a black man in America.
Over the last three decades, Professor Gates has done invaluable work in the study of race and culture among African Americans. He is known for his affable demeanor and inexhaustible energy, although after a hip operation his physical mobility has been somewhat curtailed. Unfortunately, this incident brought out the worst in him. I don’t believe Sgt. Crowley was engaged in racial profiling. On the contrary, it was Professor Gates who, indirectly, had profiled the white police officer as an automatic racist without having had the chance to understand his motives. To this date, Professor Gates believes he is owed an apology. Shouldn’t he be the one to apologize instead? Years ago, when he arrived at Harvard as a star academic, among one of his first errors was to introduce himself at the Cambridge police station: “I’m the black guy with the Mercedes,” he is said to have announced. He clearly wants to avoid being confused with the black guy without one.
Even more troubling was President Barack Obama’s impulsive reaction to the incident. Upon hearing about it, he described the police arrest as “stupid,” a comment for which he was made to apologize. Then, he invited Professor Gates and Sgt. Crowley for a beer at the White House so that the guys would be able to sort things out in a friendly fashion. Why doesn’t the president invite a poor black man who is, indeed, racially profiled by the police in Cambridge—or anywhere else in this land of opportunity—for a beer, as well? Why is it that our first black president is eager to jump to a conclusion about the sorrowful scene in Cambridge but says nothing when the “little guy” undergoes a far less deferential treatment? Is it because our leader, who has been careful enough not to make too much of his blackness, sides with the powerful and not with the powerless?
My impression of the whole affair is that the dialogue about race we’ve been having in this country is still couched in a black-and-white paradigm while the majority of the population has been living in technicolor for quite some time. Would the nation have responded in similar fashion to the arrest of a Puerto Rican professor? I doubt it. Would Professor Gates had responded similarly if the police officer had been Asian? I don’t believe it, either. Is beer at the White House a solution to racial profiling? And would anyone be talking about the affair had President Obama kept his attention on healthcare reform? The lowest point came when both Professor Gates and President Obama suggested that the July 16 tete-a-tete was a fitting “teaching moment.” A teaching moment for what? To show how Professor Gates is as much defined by class as he is by race? My overall impression is that, like Michael Jackson, he became white a while back. And President Obama did also. It is the poor black man who is still black, and so are millions of Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and others whose skin color and the lack of a Mercedes identifies them as dangerous in the eyes of the law.
