While i fully understand the right and the necessity of voicing opposition to this type of profiling and treatment by the police, particularly because it highlights pervasive racial profiling AND abuse of power by certain police, who think everyone should be hyperdeferential to them because they (many, not all) have not only actual penii but surrogate ones as well...
The problem with the whole "isn't it awful that this HARVARD PROFESSOR got racially profiled? his whole station in life and accomplishments totally overruled by his race?" is manifold: one, it implied that somehow its OK to profile lower-class, non educated black people, two, it assumes that just because someone is an Ivy League professor that s/he couldn't have been committing a crime. Not that Gates was, nor that he was outside of his rights in his own home, but the pearl-clutching "do you know who he is?" only underscores class biases rather than extending a full spectrum of humanity (i.e. a poor black person can be and often is innocent; a professor could be a criminal, YOU DON'T KNOW and THAT's why profiling is wrong.)
I have never been treated with anything but courtesy and respect by the police. of course not. I'm a petite white female. However, I know that police can be unpleasant, at best, to other people when they feel that their power isn't respected. its the same as respecting my amazing friends who serve in uniform but recognizing that the institution does breed a number of desentitized people who abuse their power whether with civilians or with, say, women who are raped in the military and blamed for reporting the crime. The underlying issue is that these two particular institutions protect themselves at all cost.
OF COURSE the cambridge pd stands behind this guy. The code is, you're putting your life on the line, we're asking you to trust us and your fellow cops to have your back so that you will do this dangerous job. So we'll protect you from everything, and if theres a problem thats for us to deal with internally. this often becomes a bunker mentality - if you've never been in the military/police, you have no authority or oversight and are intruding on our chain of command, which is vital for everyones safety.
I wish I had a solution, or first-hand insight, into this phenomenon whereby the necessary feeling of protection that allows a person to go into danger, professionally, every day, becomes a sense of entitlement to abuse power, which in turn is reinforced when the institutions have to come through on those same promises of protection.
These two forces combine in a toxic way where two forms of entitlement, two forms of feeling protected by virtue of affiliation with an institution of power, clash with each other. Again, I see the political exigencies here, I just wish that both parties could have NOT escalated the situtation in the press (or, indeed, on Dr. Gates' porch) but instead could have said, hey, we're both human, we both made mistakes in how we handled this. THAT's progress.
instead, we get everyone's worst sterotypes playing out - that academic, he thinks he's so smart, above the law, he has to obey like everyone else, that cop was just doing his job, and finally, wah wah white man is the victim of everyone else getting "special" treatment (probably the most repugnant to me personally because it is uuugggglllllyyy racism veiled beneath a veneer of "fairness" and other code words that come courtesy of nixon's southern strategy and its descendents)
(The President, by the way, contributed to the situation when, in appropriately standing up for his friend and calling a spade a spade, he also reinforced the bunker mentality of those who are already sensitive about "race cards" and whatnot, and think they are under siege personally when people of color try to call attention to imbalances of power when they think they're just "following orders." Saying "they behaved stupidly" is not the same as, Philadelphia-race-speech-style, pointing out what the psychodynamics were that maybe precipitated each camp's reaction.)
but see also: those cops, they're always racist, parochial meatheads, abusing their power, can't trust them ever (not an attitude anyone benefits from if you live in a poor neighborhood and dont trust the cops to pursue, I don't know, your child's murderer/a drug dealer/rapist etc.)
It's a shame Gates and Crowley chose the inflammatory route instead of a more statesmanlike approach that would have shown them taking the high road AND maybe changed people's minds. however, I also see issues where by saying that I play into expectations that somehow black men in particular shouldn't stand up for themselves, or seem angry, and should instead uncle-tom stuff like this to continue passing or better yet, serving as some paragon of racial sainthood to educate the masses. That's not anyone's job.
