Susanna J. Sturgis: Writer • Editor • Martha's Vineyard

The Gates Incident

July 22, 2009

Last Thursday, July 16, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. (widely known as Skip, but though I admire his writings I've never met the man so I won't call him that) was arrested at his home in Cambridge for disorderly conduct. He was booked at the police station and released upon payment of $40 bail. Yesterday, July 21, the charges were dropped. The repercussions, however, are ongoing. One might be tempted to say that the incident has been blown out of proportion, but it's not at all clear what its proper proportions are. Here are the basics, as I glean them from various news reports, mostly from the Boston Globe and the Washington Post (sketchy details are in parentheses and followed by a question mark):

Returning from a research trip to China, Prof. Gates found his front door stuck shut. He summoned his (cab?) driver up to the porch. He couldn't get it open either. A neighbor (passerby?) thought someone was trying to break into the house. She called the police. Responding officer was Sgt. Joseph (according to the police report; James in the news stories) Crowley. An altercation followed, the details of which are, to put it in academic terms, contested. Part of it took place in Gates's own living room, and Gates had established that he did indeed live there. Today's Globe summarized it thus:

Thursday afternoon, Gates had just arrived home from a trip abroad when a Cambridge police officer, alerted to a possible break-in at the house, appeared at the professor’s front door and demanded to see identification. According to a police report, Gates was arrested for disorderly conduct after he became belligerent, yelled at Crowley, repeatedly called him a racist, and declared that the officer had no idea who he was “messing with.’’

Gates denies raising his voice at Crowley other than to demand his name and badge number, which he said the officer refused to give. Crowley wrote in the police report that he had identified himself. Gates also denies calling Crowley a racist.

Gates is black, Crowley is white, and there's no shortage of people commenting on the racial aspects of the incident. Based on nothing but the news reports and my own experience over the years, including the many stories people have told me about their experience, I see the fingerprints of race and racism all over the story. Starting here: Would the (white?) woman who called the police have thought a crime was being committed if the two men on the porch in broad daylight had been white? (Keep in mind that the neighborhood, near Harvard Square, is very upscale and mostly white.) If she really lived in the neighborhood and wasn't just a casual passerby, why didn't she recognize Prof. Gates?

As to what followed -- well, I've been party to altercations 10 minutes after which I wouldn't swear to what I'd said, never mind what the other person(s) said, and I'm going to assume that neither Gates nor Crowley knows exactly what he said or the other guy said. Gates was just back from China, after all, and probably exhausted. I'm also going to assume that their memories, like mine in similarly heated situations, immediately launched into damage-control mode and started smoothing out the roughest edges in order to make their role look as rational or at least explicable as possible. Here it helps to remember that, yes indeed, "guilt turns to hostility," and the more disgusted you are with your own behavior the more pissed off you're going to be with the other guy -- who caused it, after all, didn't he? You never would have acted like that if he hadn't been there.

Add in the long sordid history of black people vs. the white criminal justice system, and the suspicion (I'm guessing here) in the Cambridge Police Department that the decks are more stacked against them the closer they get to Harvard Yard, and you've got a big ugly mess. It's hard enough for two individuals to sort through and make amends for a private, purely personal blow-up, but once an altercation with racial implications hits the newspapers, public figures start locking themselves into public statements, the possibility of private reconciliation is nowhere.

What strikes me about the comments quoted in the newspapers is that the overwhelming majority of them ignore the class aspect of this particular altercation, and classism along with it. An exception is Cambridge mayor E. Denise Simmons, who said, in part, "The incident did illustrate that Cambridge must continue finding ways to address matters of race and class in a frank, honest, and productive manner" and then went on to describe some of the city's efforts to do that.

Questions like "Do you know who I am?" (attributed to Prof. Gates) set off alarm bells in my head, and the ringing would be all the louder in the vicinity of Harvard, whose inmates really do tend to assume that they're the center of all civilization worth saving. Class-based arrogance and the resentment it inspires have a long history in Cambridge, especially in the environs of Harvard.

In a phone interview quoted in this morning's Globe, Dr. Gates offered to educate Sgt. Crowley about "the history of racism in America and the issue of racial profiling." That sounds pretty arrogant to me, especially since Dr. Gates is currently vacationing on Martha's Vineyard. Plenty of Harvard and other Ivy League people come here, white and black. The island's year-round working people are their support staff. Except when we're working for them, we're pretty much invisible. Maybe we and some members of the Cambridge PD could get together and teach the professor something about class?