Copyright by John T. Reed

What happened

Cambridge, MA police received a 911 call reporting a possible break in at a home in that city. It was a break-in. Harvard professor Louis Gates forgot his keys and had to break into his own home. The 911 caller made no mention of the two persons breaking in being black. She said one (Gates’ driver) might be Hispanic and that she did not see the other.

Several Cambridge police responded to the call. The first on the scene accosted the men who entered the home. When one said it was his home, the cop asked for ID and proof that it was his home (e.g., a drivers license with that street address). The fear was that the real home occupants were being held at gun point or bleeding to death, etc. Gates then launched into a tirade that accused the cop of racial profiling.

After confirming that no crime was being, or had been committed, the cop told Gates that he, the cop, was leaving. Gates followed the cop outside continuing his tongue lashing. The cop repeatedly warned Gates to quiet down and threatened him with arrest if he did not. Gates continued the tongue-lashing and was arrested and booked. Charges were later dropped.

Gates

1. Gates did nothing illegal per se. His tirade was unseemly, childish (references to the cop’s “mama”), gratuitous, and slanderous. He owes Officer Crowley an apology, not to mention gratitude for the response to the 911 call and the possible danger the police were risking to respond. Had they been actual burglars or worse, Gates would certainly owe a huge debt of gratitude to the police for their quick response and investigation. It is possible that Gates himself may someday have occasion to call Cambridge 911. In that event, he will want them to do precisely what they did in this case prior to the following-the-cop-outside tirade.

Gates refuses to apologize—to his discredit. Since he represents Harvard, the University ought to apologize to the police. There is a difference between freedom of speech and being an obnoxious jerk. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Harvard to apologize. If it had been a white professor giving a black cop a hard time about racism, Harvard would probably have a whole different perspective. (My wife and I are Harvard graduates.)

Crowley

2. The cop was perfectly professional until he arrested Gates. As far as he knew, he might have been risking his life when he confronted the men. The arrest strikes me as actually being for “contempt of cop,” not the disorderly conduct charge the cop claimed. Contempt of cop is not a crime. Police are somewhat spoiled by the vast majority of people being deferential toward them. On the rare occasion when a citizen is disrespectful, they sometimes react as if the disrespect is illegal behavior by invoking a broadly-defined part of the criminal code like disorderly conduct.

In crowd-control situations, cops typically put up with all sorts of verbal abuse and use admirable professional restraint. In one-or-one or small group situations, they sometimes fail to resist the temptation to make a contempt-of-cop arrest or worse. The various incidents of cops beating high-speed chase perpetrators like Rodney King have been studied and found to result from a combination of elevated adrenaline from the chase and reaction to the contempt-of-cop behavior inherent in leading police on a high-speed chase. In such car chases, the greater danger is innocent bystanders being injured by the perp or the police. Follow-up studies were done to learn how both the beatings and the dangerous car chases can be eliminated.

Whether the rest of us would be able to behave differently than the cops in those situations is impossible to say. The vast majority of us have never faced such a situation in our lives. Cops face them routinely. The restraint they are supposed to exercise requires an extreme, perhaps superhuman, switching of mental gears when risking their lives one minute and, n the next, interacting in Marquis-of-Queensbury fashion with surrendering criminals who just endangered their lives.

Arresting a loudmouth jerk for contempt of cop, while inappropriate, is not racist. Neither was the cops responding to the 911 call and demanding ID. In view of Gates’ way-out-of-line tirade, I have trouble seeing how Crowley owes him an apology.

Gates probably could not win a lawsuit for false arrest or violation of his civil rights. The line between disorderly conduct and legal conduct is somewhat blurred. I wasn’t there. Few people were.

Obama

3. Obama was wrong to comment on the incident at all. For one thing, it was way below his pay grade. For another, it had none of the connection to race relations in America that he suggested. But to chip-on-their-shoulder blacks, everything is about race in America.

He subsequently should have said “I was wrong” in a straight-forward manner. Instead, he made a convoluted, half-assed hint that perhaps, maybe he was mistaken. The Cambridge cops behaved professionally. The Harvard professor and the Harvard Law School graduate did not. The Cops knew the facts. The Harvard know-it-alls did not bother to obtain them.

The contempt-of-cop arrest was not stupid, as Obama characterized it. Rather, it was a dubious overeaction that was understandable to most because of the extreme provocation by Gates. Gates seemed to be doing his utmost to get arrested so he would have something to bitch about. Obama owes the Cambridge police an apology—a real one—not that mealy-mouthed I may have possibly used words that enabled some idiots to misinterpret my true meaning or however he worded it. He said the police “acted stupidly.” Not a lot of nuance possible there. Indeed, he said we can all agree on that. Speak for yourself nouveau noir guy. And apologize clearly now that you know there was no racial bias or stupidity on the part of the police.

I do not know what to make of Professor Louis Gates. His Wikipedia bio is full of awards, academic positions, and accolades, but I wonder how many he would have received for identical work on white culture if he had been white. The burden of proof is on all blacks who succeed in fields where affirmative action is standard policy—college and university admissions, academia, government—to prove that they objectively earned their accomplishments. Gates strikes me as a darker-skinned Ward Churchill, that is, a professional ranter-and-raver race hustler who achieved his station in life by using his minority ancestors (perhaps imaginary in Chuchill’s case) for all it was worth.

‘Whitey’

To Gates’ discredit, his 1968 application to be an undergraduate at Yale included the paragraph,

As always, whitey now sits in judgment of me, preparing to cast my fate. It is your decision either to let me blow with the wind as a nonentity or to encourage the development of self. Allow me to prove myself.

To Yale’s discredit, they accepted him into both Yale college and Yale Law School and hired him to teach there anyway, or perhaps to prove their non-racist bona fides. A cheap trick by Gates that worked. Ultimately, though, Yale's slow learners were not totally devoid of intelligence. They denied him tenure and he went to Cornell, Duke, then Harvard.

His main shtick seems to be that black literature is insufficiently studied and celebrated because of a white bias against it in spite of its merit. My impression is that black literature and historical figures have been elevated beyond their actual true accomplishments or impatvia an affirmative-action program for literature and historical figures. I read that kids no longer study Thomas Edison in many public schools. He has been removed to make way for obscure black historical figures.

When one of my sons was in middle school and mentioned some black African tribal leader he was studying, I said, “I never heard of him. What did he do?” I was prepared to learn that the man in question had been unfairly left out of history books because of racism, but the answer to the “what did he do question”—which I looked at my son’s text to answer, was “not much.” Basically, he was a relative big shot in his African region in his time but he had little effect beyond that—about the equivalent of some sixth century white European warlord we also never heard of. It appeared to me that the word had gone out to put more blacks in the text books and they simply found the highest ranking black historical figures, regardless of objective standards, and elevated them over more important whites to fill politically-correct history and literary text book racial quotas.

I do not think Obama hates whites

Some have said Obama’s unwarranted and hair trigger leap to a racism conclusion, like Gates’ hair trigger racist tirade at the Cambridge cop, indicates that Obama hates white people.

Obama is white. His DNA is 50.000% white; precisely the same percentage that it is Kenyan. He was raised 100% white by 100% white people. He called himself Barry until he was an adult. I read somewhere that he and a white girlfriend lived together in New York City during and/or after his graduation from Columbia College. I am not aware of any evidence from his “white” period—still more than half of his life—that he ever hated whites. Since he knew so many of them so intimately, I suspect he knows they are not worthy of hate as a group. But then that’s not the mind set that sells on the South Side of Chicago.

He doesn’t hate whites, but he wants to be popular with those who do, like his wife, “Skip” Gates, and adopted father Jeremiah Wright.

His father got his mother, then a single college girl, pregnant when she was 18 in November of 1960. They got married 2/2/61. The African wife he never divorced was not invited to the wedding. President Obama was born on 8/4/09. Obama senior graduated from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in June 1962 and left to study for a masters degree at Harvard. Apparently, Obama, Sr. did not see Obama, Jr. or Obama, Jr.’s mother during the rest of the marriage which ended in divorce in January, 1964. Apparently Obama, Jr.’s only in-person contact with his father after infancy was a brief visit when Obama, Jr. was 10.

It appears that Obama was severely psychiatrically scarred by his father’s near total lack of interest in, and abandonment of, him, not to mention his mother’s not much greater interest in him. She moved to Indonesia as a twice-divorced single mother with Obama’s half sister when Obama was ten.

At same point within the several years after his graduation from Columbia in 1983 when he lived in New York City, he decided to become a black guy. He moved to the blackest Congressional district in the nation—IL 1st District on the South Side of Chicago—and worked thereafter in various black political organizations. When he decided to become black, he had been a white guy for 26 years and he was way behind his black peers in knowing how blacks act, talk, think, and the details of black culture and experiences. He had grown up in Honolulu, perhaps the most racially mixed and racially tolerant place on earth.

Like the convert to Catholicism who is more Catholic than the Pope, Barack had a lot of catching up and proving himself to do. Joining Jeremiah Wright’s church, marrying Michelle, going to Louis Farrakhan’s (South Side of Chicago Muslim leader) Million Man March, writing about using cocaine in a book, etc. seem to have been the main ways Obama sought South Side of Chicago street cred.

Now, after 22 years of straining to prove to himself and his fellow blacks that he is one of them, he has difficulty turning it off. His hair trigger leap to accuse the Cambridge Police (off all police departments to accuse of such a thing—Cambidge, MA is often called the “People’s Republic of Cambridge”) of racial profiling is apparently his 22-years of “See, I really am black” protestations escaping in an uncharacteristically unguarded moment.

He is a mirror image of Michael Jackson—rejecting his “original” race and obsessively, manically trying to prove his bonafides in the new one.

‘Harry, I have a gift’

His beer summit was a manifestation of his approach to life that is essentially, “Harry, I have a gift of smooth talk that charms even the most savage beasts.” I expected the beer summit would be held in a private room in the White House. No. They did it on the lawn in front of cameras like the Yalta Conference—where momentous events actually took place and should have been preserved and reported on for posterity. They clinked beer mugs. Joe grabbed a handful of peanuts. Barack grabbed a handful of peanuts. They all looked awkward and ill at ease. Barack pretended to be comfortable. Must-see TV.

In fact, Obama’s misplaced confidence that he can smooth talk everyone on earth into liking him and agreeing with him—including Gates and Officer Crowley, not to mention Ahmadinejad, Putin, and Kim Jong-Il, may yet get us into World War III.

Showcase of his overconfidence

As far as anyone can tell, the beer summit accomplished absolutely nothing except to enable two guys to get themselves a free beer and their families private tours of the White House. It was supposed to be a showcase of Obama’s awesome, mediating, bring-us-together skills. Instead, it was a showcase of his overconfidence and rookie lack of leadership instincts. Never have so many watched so few accomplish so little.

Obama supposedly has a date not yet set to have a beer with Sean Hannity. I suspect that’s now off.

Treatment of the 911 caller

The 911 caller was treated abominably. She did absolutely nothing wrong. She was a private person who had the right to be left alone. Indeed, as you would expect of a Cambridge resident, she spent half the 911 phone call and half her subsequent press conference protesting her perfect political correctness. I think it will be a long time before she makes another 911 call no matter what she sees or hears.

It is now a staple of TV and radio to make fun of some 911 callers. How many people are going to die or suffer serious injury in the future when a citizen sees something suspicious and decides not to call 911 out of fear of ridicule or persecution for doing so?

It ought to be a violation of public policy to release 911 call recordings unless absolutely necessary. Furthermore even when released, any portions unnecessary as evidence in court that might subject the caller to regret should not be released. People should not be discouraged from calling 911 when injury might result from lack of the call. Even the 911 calls about McDonalds running out of chicken nuggets should not be released because a person dumb enough to do that is also smart enough to save a life with another 911 call.

Indeed, blacks are more likely to be injured by this discouragement of 911 calls because most potential callers are white (by population of the country) and the calls they will henceforth be most reluctant to make will be those where the suspect is black. Since most black crime victims are victimized by other blacks, discouraging whites from reporting possible crime by black people is not a great idea.

John T. Reed