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graniteclimber
Trad climber
Nowhere
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 24, 2009 - 04:06pm PT
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Blacks aren't "supposed" to get angry, for any reason, even in their own houses.
White men like Rush Limbaugh can get as angry as they want, even in front of a large live audience and on national TV.
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graniteclimber
Trad climber
Nowhere
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 24, 2009 - 04:09pm PT
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"Dumb-ass" or not, when an arrest is made, the first question should be whether there was an arrestable crime. If being a dumb-ass was a crime in and of itself, blahblah would be locked up for life. Just kidding blahblah. LOL.
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graniteclimber
Trad climber
Nowhere
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 24, 2009 - 04:25pm PT
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One cop supporting another. That's news? Did you see my earlier comment about integrity and honesty when cops defend cops?
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Mighty Hiker
Social climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Jul 24, 2009 - 04:26pm PT
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And Obama has been a big enough man to apologize for what he said. He sure didn't learn THAT from Bush and Cheney. I'd much rather have leaders who can occasionally admit fault and mistakes, and apologize for them.
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blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
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Jul 24, 2009 - 04:36pm PT
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"The African American LEO supports the arrest of Gates:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090724/ap_on_re_us/us_harvard_scholar_arresting_officer
The evil one"
I'm starting to lose it: I read the link, and it's not at all clear why the black cop is supporting the arrest. Because Gates' response to the cop was "a little bit stranger than it should have been"? Gates should was arrested for that??
Now I think I want to switch sides and support Gates.
(Not really--my position on this is what lots of people are saying--BOTH Gates and the cop seem out of line, although we don't know exactly what happened and if we did that could shift the blame one way or the other.)
GC--you got me pretty good for saying I should be locked up for life for being a dumbass--cheers!
I'm glad people are having a somewhat intelligent/reasoned discussion about this. If this group reflected society as a whole, I think we'd be a lot further along on solving race problems.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Jul 24, 2009 - 05:40pm PT
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"I wanted to make clear that in my choice of words, I think, I unfortunately, I think, gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sergeant Crowley specifically,”
that's soooooome apology...'i think that by calling the police STUPID that some people might have thought i was calling the police STUPID and i regret that some people actually think STUPID is an insulting term because i'm the president and i can tell you that if i call somebody STUPID i'm not maligning them at all...you see, i highly respect STUPID people; i think we should have more STUPID police officers; that's why i've gone out of my way to hire so many people that i think are STUPID; just to prove to all of you who think STUPID is an insulting term that it's actually not, and you're STUPID for thinking it is, and by calling you STUPID, i'm actually praising you'
i guess it depends on what the meaning of the word is is
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S.Powers
Social climber
Jtree, now in Alaska
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Jul 24, 2009 - 05:41pm PT
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"That sounds like a course designed to perpetuate racism, t*r."
True that!
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Captain...or Skully
Social climber
way, WAY out there....(OMG)
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Jul 24, 2009 - 05:42pm PT
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Cops......Don't get me started on the TOOL!
Eff them. I can protect myself.
I mostly have to protect myself FROM them.
Beware the TOOL!
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graniteclimber
Trad climber
Nowhere
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 24, 2009 - 05:57pm PT
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"my position on this is what lots of people are saying--BOTH Gates and the cop seem out of line, although we don't know exactly what happened and if we did that could shift the blame one way or the other"
blahblah, you nailed it.
But I hold Crowley to higher standard because it occurred while he was on the job and it was in his line of duty.
I don't know if Gates said what Crowley claimed he said. Let's assume he did. If he said those things while on the job (lecturing to his students or even while talking to a student in his office) that would be more out of line then if he said them in his home after the cop's surprise (to him) visit.
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GDavis
Trad climber
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Jul 24, 2009 - 07:20pm PT
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Wait, what happened to Micheal Jackson??
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Mungeclimber
Trad climber
sorry, just posting out loud.
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Jul 24, 2009 - 07:26pm PT
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No charges filed. Prima facie evidence that the arrest was a control thing, and not based on a substantive violation of the law.
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JuanDeFuca
Big Wall climber
Stoney Point
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Jul 24, 2009 - 07:29pm PT
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Smoking Refer and shooting hoops all day is not what I voted for.
Juan
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pyro
Big Wall climber
Calabasas
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Jul 24, 2009 - 10:11pm PT
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I'm glad I didn't vote for that Obama!
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graniteclimber
Trad climber
Nowhere
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 25, 2009 - 03:39pm PT
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Some of you wonder why Gates had a chip on his shoulder!
Henry Louis Gates: Déjà Vu All Over Again
Stanley Fish (who is white by the way)
I’m Skip Gates’s friend, too. That’s probably the only thing I share with President Obama, so when he ended his press conference last Wednesday by answering a question about Gates’s arrest after he was seen trying to get into his own house, my ears perked up.
As the story unfolded in the press and on the Internet, I flashed back 20 years or so to the time when Gates arrived in Durham, N.C., to take up the position I had offered him in my capacity as chairman of the English department of Duke University. One of the first things Gates did was buy the grandest house in town (owned previously by a movie director) and renovate it. During the renovation workers would often take Gates for a servant and ask to be pointed to the house’s owner. The drivers of delivery trucks made the same mistake.
The message was unmistakable: What was a black man doing living in a place like this?
At the university (which in a past not distant at all did not admit African-Americans ), Gates’s reception was in some ways no different. Doubts were expressed in letters written by senior professors about his scholarly credentials, which were vastly superior to those of his detractors. (He was already a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the so called “genius award.”) There were wild speculations (again in print) about his salary, which in fact was quite respectable but not inordinate; when a list of the highest-paid members of the Duke faculty was published, he was nowhere on it.
DESCRIPTIONThe Associated Press Henry Louis Gates, Jr., during a book signing in 2006.
The unkindest cut of all was delivered by some members of the black faculty who had made their peace with Duke traditions and did not want an over-visible newcomer and upstart to trouble waters that had long been still. (The great historian John Hope Franklin was an exception.) When an offer came from Harvard, there wasn’t much I could do. Gates accepted it, and when he left he was pursued by false reports about his tenure at what he had come to call “the plantation.” (I became aware of his feelings when he and I and his father watched the N.C.A.A. championship game between Duke and U.N.L.V. at my house; they were rooting for U.N.L.V.)
Now, in 2009, it’s a version of the same story. Gates is once again regarded with suspicion because, as the cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson put it in an interview, he has committed the crime of being H.W.B., Housed While Black.
He isn’t the only one thought to be guilty of that crime. TV commentators, laboring to explain the unusual candor and vigor of Obama’s initial comments on the Gates incident, speculated that he had probably been the victim of racial profiling himself. Speculation was unnecessary, for they didn’t have to look any further than the story they were reporting in another segment, the story of the “birthers” — the “wing-nuts,” in Chris Matthews’s phrase — who insist that Obama was born in Kenya and cite as “proof” his failure to come up with an authenticated birth certificate. For several nights running, Matthews displayed a copy of the birth certificate and asked, What do you guys want? How can you keep saying these things in the face of all evidence?
He missed the point. No evidence would be sufficient, just as no evidence would have convinced some of my Duke colleagues that Gates was anything but a charlatan and a fraud. It isn’t the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate that’s the problem for the birthers. The problem is again the legitimacy of a black man living in a big house, especially when it’s the White House. Just as some in Durham and Cambridge couldn’t believe that Gates belonged in the neighborhood, so does a vocal minority find it hard to believe that an African-American could possibly be the real president of the United States.
Gates and Obama are not only friends; they are in the same position, suspected of occupying a majestic residence under false pretenses. And Obama is a double offender. Not only is he guilty of being Housed While Black; he is the first in American history guilty of being P.W.B., President While Black.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Jul 25, 2009 - 04:12pm PT
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If you want to see what kind of person and professor Gates is, then rent the PBS video, African American Lives in which his ancestry along with Oprah, Chris Rock, and some others, is explored through DNA and genealogy. He comes across there as soft spoken and with a good sense of humor. Among other things he gets to laugh at is the fact that he turns out to be half white on both sides of his family. After seeing the video, I can't help but think he had to be VERY provoked to lose his cool as that just isn't his style.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Jul 25, 2009 - 04:20pm PT
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http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0724/p09s03-coop.html
OPINION
Gates, race, and 'driving while black'
By Michele Bratcher Goodwin
from the July 24, 2009 edition
MINNEAPOLIS, MINN.
Gates's story resonated with me – a black law and medical school professor – and I wish it had not, because it recalls my pain in similar encounters.
I remember the time I was pulled over in Indiana about seven years ago. The gum-chewing officer demanded to know: "What's the situation here?"
A look of disbelief blossomed into terror across the faces of my two white colleagues from Europe, as I explained to the officer that the men were colleagues and I was driving them to the airport. Unsatisfied with that answer, he went to the passenger side of the car, to confirm this from my Italian colleague. Only then did he let us proceed.
Or there was last year in Chicago, when I was pulled over after leaving the Mercedes Benz repair shop. The officer came to my car wanting to know whether the car was mine. I explained that it was and that I was on my way to work at the University of Chicago. Yet he continued to ask, several times, whether the car belonged to me. Each time, I answered "Yes." The irony is that he was holding the registration papers, insurance card, and my driver's license. What more proof could I offer?
My frustration deepened precisely because the officer had verification of my ownership. His further delay wasted his time and mine. I refuse the cloak of victimhood, but after he pulled away, I called my husband – a white professor – and wept long and hard.
Perhaps the incident that troubles me most deeply, and which remains difficult to talk about, occurred 10 years ago, my daughter was in pre-school.
We were pulled over at night, after being followed for (I would later learn) 31 miles by an unmarked car driven by an officer not in uniform. When I asked for his identification, the man hurled racial epithets and screamed "I am the police," while beating on my car with his flashlight.
Fortunately, for my daughter and I, my friend, a white social worker whose seat had been in full recline, sat up and began screaming. When the officer saw her he stopped beating my car. I immediately called the police. As the officers arrived, we were told to drive off.
It was my friend who followed-up, filing the police complaint. It was a terror that she will not forget. I recently looked at the internal investigation report to prove to myself that it wasn't just a horrible dream.
We will never know exactly what happened at Gates's home July 16. But in a city full of noisy college students, police regularly deal with loudness and tumultuous behavior. So doesn't it seem odd that officers chose to arrest a slight, gray-haired man who relies on a cane to walk – after they confirmed it was his home?
Despite some of my experiences, I know that most officers are well-meaning and sophisticated; they deal with emotionally-charged situations in homes all the time and often provide relief. Think of the reaction when a mom finds out her child has been injured or assaulted.
In the spirit of helpfulness, why not search the home for a burglar, to protect Gates, whom they knew belonged there?
Black professors expect that if they work hard, accumulate multiple degrees, write prolifically, defy low expectations, and exceed the highest standards, they'll be insulated from stereotypes and maltreatment. But fair or reasonable treatment is not a societal goal reserved for only the well-educated. Everyone deserves at least that, even in Cambridge.
Michele Bratcher Goodwin is a professor of law and a professor of medicine and public health at the University of Minnesota.
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graniteclimber
Trad climber
Nowhere
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 25, 2009 - 04:33pm PT
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"The past is just that - the past."
Right now, right here, blacks are still more "suspect" then whites.
"The police where ostensibly protecting HIS property. They were suspicious that someone or someones had gained unlawful entry to the premises and they were acting to protect Gates' interests. He should be intelligent enough to discern the difference between that scenario and one where a person truly IS disrespecting him."
According to Gates, the police were still suspicious of him even after he had explained who he was and produced ID.
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graniteclimber
Trad climber
Nowhere
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 25, 2009 - 04:36pm PT
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"Or there was last year in Chicago, when I was pulled over after leaving the Mercedes Benz repair shop. The officer came to my car wanting to know whether the car was mine. I explained that it was and that I was on my way to work at the University of Chicago. Yet he continued to ask, several times, whether the car belonged to me. Each time, I answered "Yes." The irony is that he was holding the registration papers, insurance card, and my driver's license. What more proof could I offer?"
How often does this happen to a white woman?
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Bob D'A
Trad climber
Boulder, CO
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Jul 25, 2009 - 04:38pm PT
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Juan wrote: Smoking Refer and shooting hoops all day is not what I voted for.
Juan
No you voted for the cokehead, drunk, silver spooner.
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