Henry Louis Gates' booking photo
Editor's note: This article was originally published on July 21 at 3:23 ET. It was republished, with expanded content, on July 22 at 12:40 ET.
I would rather be Gov. Mark Sanford than the Cambridge police officer who arrested Henry Louis Gates for disorderly conduct. Can you imagine putting handcuffs on the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and executive editor of The Root? This after questioning him about the possibility that he’d broken into his own house! Honestly, I’d rather eat a handful of change. A lot of thought-provoking things have been said about this situation elsewhere, but I am most struck by Adam Serwer’s perspective in The American Prospect. He argues that of all the terrible facts of this situation, the most disturbing one is that Gates's own neighbor was the one who called the police. “I'm not ascribing malice here—it's the nature of race that people react to it without forethought—but the idea that a black man can be mistaken for a criminal trying to enter his own house in his own neighborhood should remind us all that we're hardly living in a post-racial paradise,” he writes. Would the incident have occurred had Gates been white? Probably not, says Serwer. Even worse, “I can imagine the entire situation degenerating into something horribly tragic had Gates not been middle-aged, had he not been a college professor, and had this not occurred a nice neighborhood in Cambridge.”
What Serwer alludes to, but does not say outright, is that racial profiling is a blunt and clumsy tool. It relies on the grossest generalizations derived from the basest stereotypes. And therefore, this method of profiling is bound to be wrong all the time. If Gates had been white, would his neighbor have assumed that there was a robbery happening or even thought that his behavior was suspicious? Probably not. Because a snap racial judgment of a white person would probably have led her to the correct assumption: the door was stuck. Now, of course, the elephant in the room is the assumption that black people commit all the crime in America. They don’t. They don’t even commit a majority of the crimes in America (according to the FBI Uniform Crime Report of 2007). It just seems that way on TV.
That’s why I can’t imagine why cops use racial profiling. I mean, do you have to go to an actual police academy to learn it? You can’t build a profile around "two black guys pushing a door." I watch a lot of crime dramas, from CSI to Cold Case, and I have never seen a cop say, “Well, arrest a bunch of black people. I’m sure one of them will have done it.” And if one were going to use profiling, can’t it be a little more sophisticated than “any guy of color”? Can you imagine the FBI’s Behavorial Science Unit producing profiles that say, “What we’re looking for is a black guy standing, living, sitting, driving, or eating in a mostly white, upper-middle-class neighborhood.” It’s ridiculous.
Profiling may catch some criminals, but it also erodes the trust and respect that must exist between police officers and the people they serve and protect, and it divides members of a community. Now Gates has to live in that house knowing that his neighbors are watching him suspiciously and may call the police if he gets out of line. That’s going to take more than a block party to fix. Wouldn’t it have been much easier for the police to figure out who lives there before you knock on the door? And don’t give me that nonsense about a crime in progress. If the officer had time to meet the 911 caller outside of Gates’s home (as he stated in the police report), he had time to do a little more due diligence before he knocked on the door. Suspecting people of a crime based on no more than the color of their skin is dehumanizing and, it seems to me, a lot of effort for not much result.
And just a quick question while I’m thinking about this case: is it against the law to yell at a police officer? I’m no constitutional scholar; but I’m fairly sure that we Americans have not only “freedom of speech,” but the freedom to modulate our volume as well. Arresting people for shouting (on their own porch and in broad daylight) seems like bullying—or at the very least, a waste of police resources.
The downside to profiling is always easiest to see when absurd situations like this one occur, but we need also be cognizant of the damage it does to the less well-known. The charges against Gates have been dropped, and so I wonder if people will just shake their heads and laugh instead of worrying, like I am, about the next time a black man with a backpack has to push on his front door to get it open.
Gates's lawyer speaks about the incident at The Root.
