This Week's Note from Post-Racial America

Harvard's star African-American studies professor Henry Louis Gates got hauled to jail by the cops for breaking into his own house because the lock was broken. That's racist. So is the lady who called them, who also works for Harvard.

The Boston Globe has the police report, and it reads like Crash. …

Gates came home in the afternoon with another black friend. The lock on his front door was jammed, and he had to throw his shoulder into the door to get it open. A white lady saw the two men and thought, ̶Oh, two black guys are breaking into the house,” so she called the cops. By the time they showed up, Gates had successfully gotten into his own home and was doing whatever free God-loving Americans with the same rights as you and me do when they enter their homes.

Gates sounds like an ornery cuss, and the insult of having to explain himself to the police for having to enter his own home seems to have caused him to lose his temper. As Gates was yelling at him, the officer insisted on moving the conversation outside—allegedly because the “acoustics of the kitchen and the foyer” made it hard for the cop to use his radio. But low and behold, once they got outside, Gates' “tumultuous behavior…outside his residence” got very disorderly very fast. So Gates got popped for yelling at a cop.

So in case you were wondering: No, not even the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, in the sanctuary of his own home, which is itself practically in the middle of the most prestigious university in the world, which is Gates' employer and playground, is immune from getting hassled because he is black.


This is one of those instances in which a person who's spent a little too much time in the rarified air that his hard work and abilities has earned him finds out that the money and prestige and elite zip code that he thought would protect him from racism don't, that the smoke and mirrors of wealth and fame don't stop the police from seeing a “nigger” when they see a black person, especially when that black person is at a crime scene. I'm sorry you had to find that out in such a humiliating fashion, Dr. Gates.*

Thankfully, according to this report, “he… is now resting comfortably in his summer home in Martha's Vineyard.”

*Actually, I'm not. I've never been a fan of his scholarship or his views on the obligations of “successful blacks” to the larger black community. Given his views, I have to say this couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.