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A Stranger in Mine Own House: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and the Police in "Post-Racial" America
This past Thursday, the renowned Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., author of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, was reminded
that sometimes, there's just one.
It is the way that a woman who worked down the street from Prof. Gates' home, Lucia Whalen, looked at him as he stood on his porch with his luggage, attempting to nudge his jammed
front door open. That look that somehow confuses a nearly sixty year
old bespectacled professor with a blue blazer who cannot walk without
the aid of a cane, as a crafty black burglar practicing his illicit
deeds at 12:30 PM in the afternoon.
It is the way that Officer James Crowley, who responded to Ms.
Whalen's misguided vigilance, looked at the MacArthur fellowship
winner standing in his own foyer, as if to make humiliatingly literal
the W.E.B. Du Bois lament from The Souls of Black Folk, "Why did God
make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?" Gates,
understandably exhausted from the return flight from China he had just
taken, responded to the officer's insistent questioning of his
identity with frustration -- but did indeed prove his ownership of the
residence and right to be there.
One cannot help but be reminded, thinking of Professor Gates' home,
where photographs of he and Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, and Nelson
Mandela must have looked down at plenty of black men from their places
on the walls, of the Dave Chappelle routine where white officers
assault a black man in his living room. Proud of their "top-notch"
police work, they conclusively proclaim, "Apparently, this n----r
broke in and hung up pictures of his family everywhere. An open and
shut case."
To his minuscule credit, Officer Crowley's report claims that he did
realize it was Gates' home early into the incident. But to what
hopefully is his eternal regret, instead of leaving the situation
immediately once the crime he was called in for was proven to be a
mistake, Crowley continued to exchange harsh words with Gates and
unnecessarily radio for backup. The officer then demanded that
Professor Gates step out of his home, and in front of a gathering
crowd of neighbors and onlookers, a man who was one of TIME's 25 most
influential Americans in 1997, was arrested for "disorderly conduct."
This charge, always unfailingly ambiguous, is easily recognized by
many blacks as an offense that is not in any legal code, but still
manages to elicit punishment from authority daily: failure of a black
to show proper deference to a white police officer. Gates' refusal to
be humiliated in his own home and insistence on calling the incident
what it was -- racial profiling -- was more than anything, a direct
challenge to the fragile hierarchy of superiority and propriety that
Officer Crowley attempted to enforce. The war of words between Crowley
and Gates was a contest about dignity, imbued with the intricacies of
hundreds of years of domination and deference between white and black,
felt most acutely in the rituals of policing and criminal justice.
Arguably the most profound existential dilemma that racism presents to
those that are confronted with it is what could be called an "utter
substitutability." In its most relentless form, it is the wholesale
indifference to human individuality. It seeks to erase our singularity
in the pursuit of some gain, whether it be material, psychological,
emotional, or political. It is the terrifying reality that sometimes,
in the course of a police investigation, criminal trial, act of
violence, or discriminatory practice, any black person can stand in
for any other, and be made to bear the burden for all.
The singular promise of the Barack Obama era, even if his health care,
education, and economic stimulus plans are unsuccessful, is that it
signals what is a decisive shift in what racism means for black life.
The truth of the matter is that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. will be fine.
The event undoubtedly is traumatic and will take a psychic toll on
him, his colleagues, and his students -- who must certainly be
wrestling with a deep unsettling of their sense of belonging in a
place like Cambridge -- but the consequences of this incident will be
limited. Beyond his own personal courage and resilience, Gates'
counsel, the esteemed law professor Charles Ogletree, has already seen
the charges dropped. Moreover, Gates' celebrity ensured that his case
was watched with close scrutiny by global media, black activists, and
intellectual elites of all backgrounds. Someone like Gates does not
remain "substitutable" for long anymore.
But if we can step back and see how easily this happened to someone
like Gates, arguably the most famous academic in the country, it
should encourage us to be more vigilant about the toll that continuing
racial disparities in law enforcement are taking on blacks,
particularly the working class and poor, in America. The
disproportionate policing of amorphous criminal statutes like
"disorderly conduct" and "disobeying the lawful order of a police
officer" have served to introduce thousands of otherwise law-abiding
people into the criminal justice system. This puts undue stress and
costs on police forces and communities, undermining the capacity to
stem crime at its roots. When applied to juveniles in particular, this
type of policing only stigmatizes and alienates youth, exposing them
further to deleterious influences that ultimately encourage them to
turn away from school and legitimate employment.
To make matters worse, this expansively punitive penal system fuels
employer discrimination against blacks. A seminal experimental study
by Princeton sociologist Devah Pager shows that even black men without
criminal records receive fewer callbacks for entry-level employment
than whites with criminal records. One can only expect this
discrimination to expand far beyond employment when criminal court
proceedings are instantly available online in most states, and some
non-violent convictions are grounds to deny students access to federal
funding.
These are not the stories that make headlines in news outlets from CNN
to TMZ. There are not Harvard lawyers on retainer to expunge their
records and win them noelle prosequi judgments. Al Sharpton is not
offering to stand at their arraignments, and student activists are not
chomping at the bit to pressure their arresting officers. Instead, a
nation turns aside in an indifference built sturdily upon received
"wisdoms" of race and class, ignoring a mountain of evidence about the
catastrophic isolation of an increasing swath of Americans. All, of
course, while at the same time applauding themselves for a
"post-racial" politics that spends more time admonishing aspiring
rappers than criticizing disproportionate suspension and expulsion
rates, public school funding disparities, and overcrowded prisons.
These are the type of people who are confined, often for the duration
of their lives, to that one way of looking at a black man Gates
experienced again for a brief moment. In the just outrage we have
summoned in defense of this brilliant scholar, it is fitting testimony
to his life's work that we should give voice to their plight as well.
Brandon M. Terry is a doctoral student at Yale University in Political
Science and African American Studies. He is also a graduate of Harvard
where he received an AB in Government and African and African American
Studies, and studied under Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
CORRECTION: Lucia Whalen is not a residential neighbor of Professor Gates, she works nearby in Cambridge about one hundred yards from his home. This description of her and the sentence ending the second paragraph, which was based on the misinformation that she was a neighbor, have been removed accordingly.
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Please, Please, Please stop referring to the situation black and Hispanic men face with the police as racial profiling. The correct term for what's going on around the country is a defacto general warrant against black and Hispanic men has been in place for years.
Consider this: the NYPD will stop and frisk over 600,000 people in 2009 (a record), only about 8,000 (1%) of the stops will lead to an arrest. 90% of those stopped will be minorities who "fit the description" or were "acting suspiciously." In some communities, 80% of the young men have been stopped, many more than once. A woman from the Bronx told me her 14 yearold son is repeatedly stopped. The 100 to 1 ratio between stops and arrests suggests the police, who are pressured (and rewarded for arrests) to make arrests, have replaced probable cause with the law of averages.
Racial profiling is a non-legal term which refers to the affect and execution of a general warrant. General warrants are enforced against a group on the basis the group is engaged in unlawful activity. Members of the group are suspect simply by belonging to the group. NY police officials justify their stop and frisk program by saying "most crime victims are minority" and "stops occur in high crime areas."
General warrants were specifically outlawed by the Constitution (4th ammendment) because the founding fathers understood their purpose to be political (intimidation and self-serving) rather than law enforcement.
In the USA there seems to have been an unspoken compromise at the end of the Civil War. End slavery and then put every single black man behind bars. Some emancipation that. That policeman, pushing that distinquished gentleman to the brink, should be forever barred from holding public office and indeed serving in any capacity whatsoevr in a public capacity. Sick people like him, not blacks and hispanics, are what is wrong with your society. They are a cancer destroying the very fabric of what is stated in the constitution.All men are created equal except in the minds of the Crawleys of the world.
If the neighbour is short-sighted (not unheard of among the retired set) she might have quite literally been unable to see anything but the color of Gates' skin from a window inside her own house. She'd be able to see a man on the porch, and tell that it was a black man, but not might not have been able to see his features well enough to identify the figure she saw as the owner.
If my supposition ISN'T the case, however, then the possibility that calling the police was a malicious act starts looking a lot more likely, IMO.
I am white. I was raised in NYC. I have been roughed by the cops for looking like a suspect while just minding my own business. I have reported crimes that the cops told me to forget about.
I would never ever think of mouthing off to a cop, any cop, out of respect for the position and the knowledge that I could be arrested. Heck, you cannot even mouth off to an airline attendant these days without being pulled from the aircraft!
What in the world was an intelligent man thinking when he decided to go off on a police officer?
I know what would happen to me...and would figure I deserved it.
Maybe if everyone looked first at the situation we could separate the real bigots from the rest of us who are just trying to get through the day together.
nice try mazzella...oh yeah! you will mouth off all right. when big loud obnoxious black cops bust into your house on flimsy warrants and point loaded guns at your wife and teenaged daughters in various stages of undress..you will bluster. you will probably go out of your head. you're talking smack simply because what happens to black folk almost never happens to you.whites would never accept the treatment we blacks do. if you think they will..look at northern ireland. look at what the colonist did when king georges redcoats dissed them.if whites were being treated the way blacks are in this country with 1 out of every 3 of their young men either in prison or under prison supervision..or riddled with 41 or 56 bullets like diallo or sean bell...innocent and unarmed...it would be just like northern ireland was for most othe last century . bombs would be going off every half hour.cars emergency vehicles and fire trucks would burn on every street and we would be living under martial law and we would never be able to get rid of the dick cheneys and alberto gonzales that stink up this planet.
Thanks. We need more brilliant men and women to take up the mantle. I was wondering who would speak for us.
Spot on!
Would you like some cheese with that whine?
Probably the most obvious sign the legal system is messed up is that the Department of Justice is blatantly lying about the racial composition of drug-related prison data:
http://www.tremblethedevil.com/my_weblog/2009/04/even-without-lies-the-damage-is-already-done.html
No matter what this policeman says his actions were stupid and inappropriate. I am not African American but I would have reacted in much the same manner to the officer had he shown up at my front door. I would have expected no less than a presentation of the facts at hand, a backing off and verifying the professor's status as owner of the property, and that done...apologize for the inconvenience and leave. I would have gone ballistic in Gate's place and am very sensitive about the sanctity of my own home. It should be noted that Gates was arrested for a "public display" in his own foyer!!!!! How private and area can one's own home be?
A very public apology and a review of this case within the department is definitely in order. If this is not addressed, then warrents, etc. become useless protections against overextended authority.
this is an incredibly SEXY piece of writing. i LOVED it. brought tears to my eyes, chills to my spine, and softness to my hard heart.
beautiful work, brandon.
The truth is law enforcement is out of hand, what they say is always the truth, and what they do is always in the best interest of the land. We all know it is a bunch of baloney, law enforcement do what they want to do and if you try to film it watch out you may be the next attraction, all of this is seen on TV any number of times, hell they teaser old ladies, young children and people in wheel chairs it doesn't seem to bother any of them, if it did there would be changes, but they get away with to much to often and don't think they will ever be filmed doing the stuff they do.
I used to think that the police were the good guys after seeing so much of what they get away with I don't want to butt heads with them even if I'm in the right maybe if I was younger it would be different, but I don't think I would live through it now.
Did the police officer feel threatened by an unarmed nearly 60 year old man that walks with cane? Yes! He felt mentally inferior, he felt powerless and he had to arrest Gates to show he had the upper hand! It's a classic case of cop(white or black)/black "suspect"! This system targets black males for incarceration..believe me... I know this from personal experience...cops have always attempted to provoke me and my counterparts into criminality. From the time I was a teenager to the present I've been unjustifiably searched, threatened, provoked and treated rudely by police, but dig this, I HAVE NO CRIMINAL RECORD AND HAVE BEEN 100% COMPLIANT AND COURTEOUS. My white counterparts have been engaged in assaults, theft, high speed chases and have recieved little or no punishment! Two white men in Powhatan County (a Virginia County) were given a manslaughter 15 and 12 year charge after murdering Tahliek Taliaferro, with an AKA 47. (Their testimony stated that the gun steered out of control, (although Semi Automatic) they felt threated) There ARE Thousands of other examples of unfair judgements that left blacks unfairly incarcerated
Let's not pretend that there is no disparity between blacks and whites in the judicial system...because I like million of other AFRICAN AMERICANS HAVE EXPERIENCED IT!! WHY ARE THERE NO CHARGES FILED AGAINST THE POLICE OFFICER...I DON"T POLITICAL APPEASEMENT ...I WANT APPROPRIATE PUNISHMENT RENDERED...THAT"S THE ONLY WAY TO CURB INAPPROPRIATE POLICE BEHAVIOR...INCLUDING THE MORE SEVERE FORMS OF POLICE BRUTALITY
I wonder if Brandon Terry read the police report?
Seems to me that Mr. Gates was uncooperative.
"I didn't care if this black 60 year old man with a cane really lived here, he didn't give me the proper deference that I deserve so I showed him if he said something about his rights I could arrest him for disorderly conduct in his own home." Gates was lucky because he is who he is other wise he would still be sitting in jail.
I'm white and I know that there are many police office on the streets that think they are owed deference from everyone, if you ask them a question it's like they are doing you a favor answering it and I'm an older person. When my son got his drivers license I told him if he got pulled over to say yes sir, or yes mam and do what ever they told him to do, other wise they just may crack your head in, well now they have tasers it's easier to taser people and get away with it because their is no blood and gore left, but some still just love to punch them out as their fellow officers either help or look on and do nothing, it's that blue line they live by. I've seen police officers taser a child who was handcuffed and in the cruiser because all 80 lbs of her wouldn't stop talking that is what is going on today.
evry call an officer responds to is a life or death call untill it is over.
1. neighbor reports 2 black men trying to force entry into home.
2. officer (Sgt.) responds solo and finds 1 black male inside home.
3. asks suspect to produce i.d. and step outside of home.
4. suspect refuses both.
step outside of this for a moment. The cop has reason to believe there are 2 people in the home. The 1 he sees is not cooperative. It may be his home but he refuses to prove that and is being beligerant to the officer.
5. Disorderly conduct. Merited.
Terry is wrong to characterize the white neighbor as a "vigilante".
Just my observation on police attitudes - I don't compare my experience to that of black people in general:
So I'm walking down the street, and I crossed a minor side road controlled by a walk signal without waiting for the WALK sign. A motorbike cop was watching for speeders by the side of the road, and called out to me that I hadn't stopped. What happened then was weird.
He was obviously expecting me to show fear and deference, but I maintained a cool air of indifference. When he saw that I wasn't going to call him Sir or anything like that he then gave me a ticket for jay-walking. Now he was within his rights, but the subtext was that he was giving me the ticket because I didn't back down to his aggression. You had to be there, but that was clearly the issue.
For the record, people don't look any 'whiter' than me.
See Ahmed Rehab's Profile
Excellent article Brandon.
It may be that the police showed racisim, but giving the police a hard time when they are observing what looks like a crime in progress is (a) disorderly conduct, and (b) really stupid. They should all just call it even and forget the whole thing.
That used to be my attitude, but I now realize the world isn't that simple. If it had been me, I think I would have behaved exactly as the Professor did. Sometimes you just have to stand up for what is right.
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