The more things change, the more the stay the same

The first two parts of “Gates-gate,” a socio-political drama in three parts, suggest the validity of the old French saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Part 1: a local affair, in Cambridge, Massachusetts: Henry Louis Gates Jr. returned from a trip to China, ironically working on a television documentary on the heterogeneous racial, ethnic and national genealogy of Americans. When he and his driver were trying to open his front door, finding that it was jammed, a neighbor thinking that they might be burglars called the police.  The police investigation led to the arrest of Gates in his own home, with Gates asserting racial profiling, with Sgt. James Crowley, the arresting officer, charging Gates with disorderly conduct.  The charges were subsequently dropped.

The characters in the affair are noteworthy.  Gates is a distinguished professor at Harvard, a renown scholar and public intellectual.  As a student of African American culture, he is careful and sober, not a flaming radical.  Crowley, ironically, is a police academy expert on racial profiling, teaching a course on the subject at the Lowell Police Academy.  And in many ways the two are on the same side of the cultural wars.  Both Gates and Crowley have cooperated with the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Crowley having participated in a 3- day workshop on Racial Profiling at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles in 2007, Gates delivering the Center’s Third Annual “State of Antisemitism” Lecture in New York in 1994.  These were odd antagonists in what turned out to be a major national affair.

Part 2: the local becomes national. The event was first covered by The Harvard Crimson, but given Gates’ prominence, and the irony that he was apparently arrested for breaking into his own home, it became a national story, covered by the national media.  As such affairs go, it followed the conventional black and white script.  There were those who clearly saw the ugly face of racism pure and simple, and there were those who sided with the cop and stressed the importance of maintaining and respecting law and order.  The usual suspects played starring roles in the performance: Reverend Al Sharpton, Rush Limbaugh, et. al. And then many others chimed in, with more and less insights.  Professional observers of the problem of racial profiling noted that bias is often not conscious.  It emerges from psychological perceptions of the other, and in a society with a long history of racism, these perceptions do not change quickly or easily.  Accepted prevailing practices may be fashioned to overcome this problem, but they do not necessarily succeed. (link) It was observed that “a proud cop” met “an arrogant professor,” but if the professor were white, an arrest would not have resulted. (link)

Further, a close look at the case as it developed in its details revealed both that race mattered in its classic form (link), and that the real problems are political correctness and reverse racism.  The case followed the conventional script of the cultural wars about race and class.  But this was different.  Barack Obama is President, and Gates is the President’s friend.  Part Three reveals how much things have changed.