Gates-Crowley Drama: Forget Assumptions, Focus on Lessons

The policeman, regarding the outraged professor, might have thought, "You were seen trying to force your way into a house in a pricey neighborhood that every local cop knows damn well to protect. I put my life on the line everyday -- and you dare to keep questioning me about how I'm doing my job?" The scholar, whose study of race has inspired books and TV documentaries, could well have been thinking, "You're a public servant paid by taxpayers to serve and protect me. Not only are you refusing to acknowledge an influential community member who proved to you that he'd entered his own home -- you're threatening to arrest me for being outraged!"

I can just see the men -- each certain he was the one being misread and devalued -- silently screaming: "Who the hell do you think you are?"

When most of us ask that question, our real concern isn't finding out who the jerk we're challenging thinks he is. The real issue is who we think we are -- and whether said jerk understands our value and importance.

The facts seem simple: Gates, arriving home from a trip, found his front door jammed. After enlisting his driver in a futile effort to open it, he entered through a back entrance. Police, responding to a report of "two black men" trying to break in, asked Gates to step outside. The scholar, certain that officers had made dangerous assumptions about his identity, refused. Crowley entered the house, where, after a heated exchange, Gates presented identification showing his photo and address. When the angry Gates followed Crowley outside, still demanding his name, badge number and an apology, he was arrested. Charges were soon dropped. In an interview, Crowley described Gates as belligerent to the point of saying, "I'll speak with your mama outside." If true, the statement wouldn't just be regrettable, but would also suggest that the scholar's knowledge of street vernacular is at least two decades behind the times.

I've barely mentioned race, which some observers insist the misunderstanding boils down to. Gates isn't just a well-known man -- he's a well-known black man, who at 58, is small-statured, walks with a cane and is given neither to low-slung jeans, headrags or other markers that can cause the most upright young black men to appear suspicious to police. Anyone who has met Gates might question anyone who isn't legally blind treating this khaki-clad egghead as a potential burglar, but police protocol demanded that Crowley do just that. Even so, I always thought "disorderly conduct" meant hollering in the street, throwing potted plants, public drunkenness -- not peremptorily demanding the name and a badge number of a cop inside your home.

More shocking to me was Gates' declaration that before Monday, he "(hadn't) even come close to being arrested. I would have said it was impossible." It shocked me because my level-headed husband insists that every middle-aged black man he knows, however well-educated or well-heeled, has been stopped, goaded or harassed -- most more than once -- by police for no apparent reason. My law-abiding middle son is only 23, but has already experienced enough such incidents that when we recently watched a wailing police car pass by, he offered, "You know Mom, I have never once had a good encounter with a cop. Not one."

The only people who doubt that racial profiling is alive and well in the U.S. are those whose skin color protects them from it. (Clearly Barack Obama, who said the police acted "stupidly" -- and arresting any celebrity for questionable reasons sure ain't smart -- isn't among them.) Yet the story of the prof and the cop, like most stories involving human beings, is always more complex than finger pointers on either side cared to admit.

In fact, many innocent white men and women have been brusquely treated, threatened and abused by arrogant police. It's just as true that overbearing black officers sometimes mistreat citizens of color. Every human being who possesses great power at some point feels tempted to abuse it. What could be more frightening than the life-or-death authority possessed by police -- a power complicated by the dangerous nature of police work and the reflexive hostility with which many regard cops?

Yet white people's unpleasant brushes with police of any shade are more likely to be aberrations than those of blacks and Latinos, whose everyday dealings with officers too often feel oppressive, hostile or downright dangerous. That's a fact.

It's also a fact that in the Gates-Crowley drama, few who are commenting have any idea what they're talking about. Most have looked at the events as described and seen only that which reinforces what they already believe. They know nothing.

To really know what happened on the porch of that placid-looking house, you had to be there. You had to observe the interchange between the cop who felt he was doing his job and the resident whose rights in his own home felt abridged. You had to know the personalities of these men, to be able to see inside the thoughts, emotions and past experiences that pushed them to behave as they did.

To assume that racism was the prime motivator in this situation makes sense, considering black folks' history. That doesn't make it fair. Assuming Sgt. Crowley acted out of racism is little better than folks assuming I'm inferior because I'm black. We don't know Crowley, who leads racial profiling classes for the Cambridge police force and who on Thursday said he had no intention of apologizing to Gates. We do know that some police officers behave vengefully toward anyone who questions them. They're like stern parents who see the rest of us as hapless children required to fawn before them. Those who refuse to kowtow have every right to do so -- but flirt with very unpleasant consequences.

It's just as unfair to assume that Gates, who in his public appearances seems exceedingly mild-mannered, behaved arrogantly just because he's rich and famous. Oh, it's possible he behaved like an egotistic jerk -- but if that were illegal, millions of us would be perpetual jailbirds. I empathize with his insistence on getting the particulars of the public servant whom he felt disrespected him. Yet if he, too, was disrespectful, he could have handled things differently.

So much ruckus over such a small incident. Maybe it's a good thing. Nobody's dead or even wounded -- thousands of black, brown and even white men who've had run-ins with angry police weren't so lucky. The uproar has shed some much-needed light on the type of humiliating, dangerous, and avoidable incident that hundreds of lesser-known Americans regularly endure. It got us talking about police profiling, about which far too many Americans are clueless. Skip Gates now promises to bring his smarts and notoriety to examining the issue.

One more thing: Sgt. Crowley might reconsider that apology. It was a mistake, arresting a man on his own porch for insisting, even rudely, that a police officer identify himself and/or treat him respectfully. If any group on Earth needs to cultivate more patience, it's police officers. After deducing that Gates was indeed inside his own home, the officer should have taken a deep breath and walked way. Ultimately, it hardly matters whether Gates thought of himself as an aggrieved black man, a disrespected celebrity or a guy trying to get some acknowledgement in his own kitchen. Every American has the right to expect the brave officers charged with serving and protecting us to respect us as much as they deserve to be respected. Apologizing would be courageous in a culture in which admitting mistakes and honoring the complexity of others' humanity seem threatened with extinction. It would set a good example for everyone.