Gates' Liberal College Town No Stranger to Racial Dust-Ups
Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate students Aimee Smith, top, and Eric Wade hang posters before a rally supporting affirmative action held at the MIT student center March 18, 2003, in Cambridge, Mass. (Douglas McFadd/Getty Images)
Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. says he is ready to move on from his arrest July 16, 2009, by a white police officer, hoping to use the encounter to improve fairness in the criminal justice system and saying "in the end, this is not about me at all." (Demotix)
Racism Allegations in Recent Past at Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Mass.
At least in the popular mind, flare-ups between police and minorities tend to occur in the 'hoods and barrios of poverty-ridden American cities. But the liberal bastion of Cambridge, Mass. (per capita income: $31,156; black population: 12 percent), the home of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has its own complex encounters with racial attitudes.
Five years ago, Harvard's S. Allen Counter, a black professor of neuroscience, was stopped by Harvard campus police in what many saw as a racial-profiling incident.
About three years later, an assistant professor at MIT, James Sherley, raised a ruckus over his failure to get tenure, a decision that he claimed was race-based.
Those claims were never proved, but MIT has embarked on what it calls the Initiative on Faculty Race and Diversity to address the university's problems in hiring black faculty.
And last week, Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested [ http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=8163051&page=1 ] after one of his neighbors called police saying that two black men were trying to break into Gates' house. The scholar, who had a tense encounter with the police, was charged with disorderly conduct.
To be sure, there's debate about whether Gates engaged in a battle of wills with a Cambridge police officer. But whatever the case, authorities dropped the charges Tuesday.
Gates, for one, is still angry and considering his legal options.
These incidents indicate that for liberal institutions and communities like Cambridge, race can be a complicated and, at times, paradoxical issue.
On the one hand, U.S. universities have created hundreds of departments for African-American studies -- of which Harvard's is arguably the most preeminent. But on the other hand, racial diversity among faculty at U.S. universities -- which columnist Stephanie Ramage calls "bastions of equality and enlightenment" -- is, on the whole, lagging.
Nationwide, just over 5 percent of all full-time faculty members at colleges and universities are black, according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. The percentage of black faculty at almost all high-ranking U.S. universities is significantly below the national average.
William Jelani Cobb, a history professor at historically black Spelman College in Atlanta, says that while working at a highly respected East Coast university a few years ago, he had to pull out his ID to prove he was, in fact, a faculty member.
For many black academics, he says, Gates's experience won't be all that surprising.
"Most of us don't have the luxury of having an existential moment about it," he says.
A different sort of concern is raised by Ramage, who has written about race and academia as an editor of Atlanta's Sunday Paper newspaper.
Black and white intellectuals, she says, have in a way created an academic system of "silos," such as black studies or Asian studies departments. In the short term, these may benefit particular scholars like Gates, but ultimately, they may "make a mockery of" true racial egalitarianism, says Ramage.
"Those outside academia ... are suspicious that there's some very intellectual sleight of hand going on: Why are we instructed to be inclusive, but then the institutions they build are in fact not?" she says.
Meanwhile, news of Gates's arrest is a hot topic in Cambridge and America's other college towns.
"There is such a level of outrage that's been expressed to me," Gates told The Root Web site in a lengthy interview [ http://www.theroot.com/views/skip-gates-speaks ]. "The blogs are going crazy; my colleagues at Harvard are outraged. ... But really it's not about me -- it's that anybody black can be treated this way, just arbitrarily arrested out of spite."
No more than five or six minutes elapsed from the time the police were alerted to the possibility of a break-in at a home in a quiet residential neighborhood and the awful clamping of handcuffs on the wrists of the distinguished Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.
If Professor Gates ranted and raved at the cop who entered his home uninvited with a badge, a gun and an attitude, he didn’t rant and rave for long. The 911 call came in at about 12:45 on the afternoon of July 16 and, as The Times has reported, Mr. Gates was arrested, cuffed and about to be led off to jail by 12:51.
The charge: angry while black.
The president of the United States has suggested that we use this flare-up as a “teachable moment,” but so far exactly the wrong lessons are being drawn from it — especially for black people. The message that has gone out to the public is that powerful African-American leaders like Mr. Gates and President Obama will be very publicly slapped down for speaking up and speaking out about police misbehavior, and that the proper response if you think you are being unfairly targeted by the police because of your race is to chill.
I have nothing but contempt for that message.
Mr. Gates is a friend, and I was selected some months ago to receive an award from an institute that he runs at Harvard. I made no attempt to speak to him while researching this column.
The very first lesson that should be drawn from the encounter between Mr. Gates and the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, is that Professor Gates did absolutely nothing wrong. He did not swear at the officer or threaten him. He was never a danger to anyone. At worst, if you believe the police report, he yelled at Sergeant Crowley. He demanded to know if he was being treated the way he was being treated because he was black.
You can yell at a cop in America. This is not Iran. And if some people don’t like what you’re saying, too bad. You can even be wrong in what you are saying. There is no law against that. It is not an offense for which you are supposed to be arrested.
That’s a lesson that should have emerged clearly from this contretemps.
It was the police officer, Sergeant Crowley, who did something wrong in this instance. He arrested a man who had already demonstrated to the officer’s satisfaction that he was in his own home and had been minding his own business, bothering no one. Sergeant Crowley arrested Professor Gates and had him paraded off to jail for no good reason, and that brings us to the most important lesson to be drawn from this case. Black people are constantly being stopped, searched, harassed, publicly humiliated, assaulted, arrested and sometimes killed by police officers in this country for no good reason.
New York City cops make upwards of a half-million stops of private citizens each year, questioning and frequently frisking these men, women and children. The overwhelming majority of those stopped are black or Latino, and the overwhelming majority are innocent of any wrongdoing. A true “teachable moment” would focus a spotlight on such outrages and the urgent need to stop them.
But this country is not interested in that.
I wrote a number of columns about the arrests of more than 30 black and Hispanic youngsters — male and female — who were doing nothing more than walking peacefully down a quiet street in Brooklyn in broad daylight in the spring of 2007. The kids had to hire lawyers and fight the case for nearly two frustrating years before the charges were dropped and a settlement for their outlandish arrests worked out.
Black people need to roar out their anger at such treatment, lift up their voices and demand change. Anyone counseling a less militant approach is counseling self-defeat. As of mid-2008, there were 4,777 black men imprisoned in America for every 100,000 black men in the population. By comparison, there were only 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white men.
While whites use illegal drugs at substantially higher percentages than blacks, black men are sent to prison on drug charges at 13 times the rate of white men.
Most whites do not want to hear about racial problems, and President Obama would rather walk through fire than spend his time dealing with them. We’re never going to have a serious national conversation about race. So that leaves it up to ordinary black Americans to rant and to rave, to demonstrate and to lobby, to march and confront and to sue and generally do whatever is necessary to stop a continuing and deeply racist criminal justice outrage.
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