All posts tagged "Henry Louis Gates"

We're moving into the phase of the coverage of the Henry Louis Gates incident where people reprimand themselves for caring so much, but I'd like to point out that the reason the incident has captured the public attention is that it touches on so many extremely important issues of daily life in the United States that don't get sufficient coverage, precisely because few things get the immediacy of news coverage like this arrest of Gates has. With that in mind, I'd like to point everyone to this long, but involving post from Digby on one of the must frustrating aspects of the discussion about the incident---the way a lot of people reflexively jump to "Gates was stupid to talk back", instead of talking about the much more important issue, which is that the cop was not just stupid but malevolent in not dropping the case the second that he realized that Gates was in his own home, no matter what kind of hot-headed things Gates may have said Now, let's be clear about this: I think the likely truth is that the cop wildly exaggerated and even made up some parts of the incident when he wrote the report, knowing that he'd just tossed a Harvard professor in jail for not doing anything illegal. When I read bloggers reflexively assume that the police report is reliable in any way, I just get more upset because it's just more evidence that a whole lot of people out there are more naive about power and authority than you'd think. Is it really possible that so many of my fellow Americans have never been on the receiving end of unfair treatment from a bunch of asshole cops? Same story with the people who chastise Obama for calling the cop's move "stupid". Can you hear yourselves saying that? Since when is it a given in America that we're so slobberingly worshipful of police authority that it's forbidden to call obviously stupid cops stupid? Obama didn't even say the cop was stupid. He said the actions were stupid, which strikes me as an objective assertion of truth on par with saying that the sky is blue.

[rebelmouse-image 24863033 original_size="250x220" expand=1]In my prior posts on the arrest of Harvard prof Henry Louis Gates in his own home by Cambridge police officer Sgt. James Crowley I have mentioned that class privilege plays a role in this debacle as much as race does. A lot of the debate about the incident dances around the topic but misses the big picture -- race and class are always factors because we are human beings colored by experiences and classification within this country's historical framework of those two elements.