Henry Louis Gates ’73 arrested at Harvard, charges racial profiling
Updated Tuesday 11:17 a.m. Former Yale professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. ’73, the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard and one of the country's most prominent black intellectuals, was arrested Thursday by Cambridge police officers investigating a reported break-in.
The only problem: The house Gates was accused of breaking into was his own.
According to a police report, Gates told an officer that he was being targeted because "this is what happens to black men in America," which seems like a...
It's not racism. It's just a crackdown on that horrible Tumultuous Behavior crime wave.
See:
http://notionscapital.wordpress.com/2009/07/21/tumultuous-behavior-crime-wave-in-cambridge/
Give me a break. Read the report. The police got a call. They had to investigate - they're obligated by law. When they got there, they see a guy trying to jimmy his way into a house. They ask him for ID. The guy flips out and starts verbally abusing the cops for doing their jobs.
Honestly, race might have had something to do with the caller's concern; there's no proof that it had anything to do with the way the officers handled the situation.
I would hope that if I were trying jimmy a lock on my jammed door, the police would ask me for ID and make sure that I'm really the resident and not a burglar.
/not white, not an idiot
We don't read about the extent of the very serious problem called racial profiling. It happens to ALL African-Americans, no matter who they are. To see how racial profiling plays out in arguably the poorest town in the US, go to bhbanco.org. In Benton Harbor, MI, drug planting by cops is done on a daily basis. Innocent incarerations are sky high.
His front door is a racist.
Checking "World of Science" a data base that does cover ethnology etc. we discover that H L Gates has an "H" factor (the "impact" through citations to his published work) of 4 - abysmal! The media refer to him as a scholar - hardly by that standard.
Gates did not show a drivers license, only a Harvard ID card which proved nothing. The Police acted correctly and if Gates is the man he claims to be, he should apologize. I am sooo tired of elitist whining and self entitlement.
Wow.