Charges Dropped Against Henry Louis Gates, But Men Of Color Still Doomed

The arrest of Henry Louis Gates is just the latest high-profile racial profiling case to hit the media, but in a lot of ways it’s the most instructive. And now that the charges have been dropped, we have to ask: is it even possible for a minority man in this country to be famous, respectable, old or crippled enough to not be a threat to the police? And if not, just what the hell are the rest of us supposed to do?

Gates’ case is a perfect model in a number of ways: the sixty-year old stands at a mere 5′ 6″ and walks with a cane, so he wasn’t a physical threat. He’s a generally mild-mannered professor, so it’s not like cops found him with no shirt on flashing huge prison tats, blaring Public Enemy and throwing empty 40’s in the street. That, and he was inside his home and produced personal and Harvard identification, so there shouldn’t have been any confusion about who he was. There really isn’t any serious defense against this clear-cut case of racial profiling, and the charge (disorderly conduct) would never have come about if Cambridge Police had simply apologized for the misunderstanding and walked out the door with their hats in their hands. What else could he have done?

Media reports of Gates’ case have also included testimonial from his lawyer, a fellow Black Harvard professor who was stopped and questioned as a robbery suspect while walking around on campus. And remember back when NYPD Chief Douglas Zeigler, the highest ranking uniformed Black officer on the force, got a taste of what the department does every day when he was forced out of his police SUV at gunpoint by two White officers who didn’t recognize him? Both men were highly respected professionals, presumably not smoking spliffs and playing dice. The sad truth is that there really isn’t any way a minority can defend against this: no matter how you dress or act or what job you have or how clean-cut you look, your number’s probably gonna be up at some point, and you just kind of have to deal with that.

The rub in all this actually comes about in this passage from The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, commenting on Gates’ disorderly conduct charge:

I bet he did exhibit “loud and tumultuous behavior.” I likely would too. Actually, I wouldn’t. But I don’t work for Harvard. And my mother taught me how black men are to address the police.

It’s a sad truth, and it’s a common thread in all of these stories: they all included Black men of high accomplishment having the audacity to say, “You’re kidding, right?” to the police instead of “Yes sir, no sir.” White kids generally don’t have to have this conversation with their mothers or fathers, and they certainly don’t have to have the part about the police just looking for an excuse to take you in because of your race. And the worst part of it is that it’s not paranoia: if a well-regarded Harvard professor can’t catch a break, what chance does your average Latino or Black dude have?

If this is our yoke to bear, and it pretty clearly is, what can we do about it? I mean, we elected a Black President, we’re probably getting a Latina on the Supreme Court. We’ve had the rallies, the important laws, the Very Special Episodes, the racial-sensitivity training, Will Smith for the love of God. All of this is well and good, but it didn’t keep Ryan Moates from being detained by police and having a gun pulled on his wife while they were rushing to the hospital to say goodbye to his dying mother. What is there left to do?

I will step out of the editorial “we” for a moment to give a story and offer the only advice I can. A few years ago, I was invited to a black-tie function as the guest of CBS Sports, sitting at a table with Jim Nance and everything. Everybody in the place was wearing a tux, including myself. And when I got up to go to the bathroom, a table of old White men grabbed my arm and ordered a drink from me.

Now, I could have reacted in a number of ways. Certainly I had a right to yell and scream, calling them any number of names and demanding an apology and an explanation for why, in this room of everybody dressed identically, they assumed I was “the help.” But really, you can only kick and scream so much, and it can only do so much after a while before people tune it out, and in that instant I did the best thing I feel like I possibly could have. I gave him a look like he was the stupidest person in the world, told him pointedly that I was a guest like he was, and have spent the years since mocking him as an ignorant old moron.

Will that sort of thing get you in trouble with the police? Probably. But the point is to replace violent outrage or polite deference with mockery. And that’s all we can really do at this point, is enact a sort of Serenity Prayer for the Modern Minority Male: “Lord give me the intelligence and wit to mock the ignorant, the kindness to spare the well-intentioned, and the wisdom to know the difference.” That, and spitting in their food if you work in a kitchen, is all we have left until these waterheads are evolved out of the human race.

Skip Gates Arrested For Breaking And Entering… [Ta-Nehisi Coates]
Henry Louis Gates Jr. Arrested, Police Accused Of Racial Profiling [HuffPo]
Plainclothes officers in trouble - didn’t recognize off-duty chief [NY Daily News]