Cambridge Confrontation Raises Public Consciousness

White Cambridge police Sergeant James Crowley knew exactly what he was doing when he and his men visited the home where “two black men with backpacks” had been seen forcing their way into a house.

Inside the house he found a belligerent old man who made too much noise and whom Sgt. Crowley had to arrest because the black was creating a disturbance. Erring on the side of keeping the street quiet, this was the only thing a reasonable police sergeant could do.

Eminently reasonable: even Sgt. Crowley’s fellow officer, who was a black man, concurred with the action.

This sergeant was no rookie. He even taught other officers how to deal with black people in police situations. Knowing exactly how to deal with blacks was his specialty. Remember, too, that Sgt. Crowley was a sergeant; his was not a stumbling lurch of a new officer desperately trying to restore order. No, this was a clear headed sergeant warning this black man that he would arrest him if he did not settle down.

Well, the black man did not contain himself. So the only thing the Cambridge, Mass., sergeant could do was naturally to put handcuffs on him, throw him in a cruiser, book him and take his picture. All of this was the natural result of getting loud in the face of a police order to be quiet.

An officer of the law was telling this black man that the police detail was going to arrest him if he kept up the clatter; it was, of course, happening outside now where people could see and hear it plainly, and that was what made it a disturbance: it was in front of a neighborhood by the time it reached its peak. Something had to be done to bring it to a close. Letting the black or in fact anyone of any race or ethnic background get away with yelling at the police squad did not seem the right way to snuff an awkward confrontation; arrest was the police standard procedure.

Sgt. Crowley felt he had handled the difficult problem exactly right. He had state power, he was a sworn officer of the city and part of his duty was to investigate all such suspicious instances. In the end, the man was raising a ruckus out in the street and had to be stopped. People might otherwise conclude that the police were not keeping order in the neighborhood. The charge: disorderly conduct.

Sgt. Crowley analyzed the situation like a Cambridge police officer.

But what was he basing his actions on when he approached the Gates home. Basically on a report delivered through a 911 telephone call from Lucia Whalen, 40, a first generation Portuguese-American who was asked by another to make the 911 call because the other woman had no telephone. She did. Whalen described the two men on the Gates porch, saying they were older and that she could not say their race; when pressed, she said one of the men might be Latino but Whalen was not sure of that at all.

Somehow, that report as delivered to Sgt. Crowley, said “two black men with backpacks” were at the Gates house. Originally it had a couple of men with suitcases; now it was a case of two blacks, possibly with burglarious tools. That change happened in the police network. It took a neutral report and made it an actionable situation. And further, this particular address had been burglarized not long ago.

For Gates, police involvement was a surprise. He was just getting home from a trip to China. To anybody who has just flown from China to Boston knows that the individual is exhausted. He is Henry James Gates Jr.

Born September 16, 1950, he is, according to Wikipedia, “an American literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor and public intellectual. He was the first African American to receive the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship. He has received numerous honorary degrees and awards for his teaching, research, and development of academic institutions to study black culture. In 2002, Gates was selected to give the Jefferson Lecture, in recognition of his ‘distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.’ The lecture resulted in his 2003 book, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley.

“As the host of the 2006 and 2008 PBS television miniseries African American Lives, Gates explored the genealogy of prominent African Americans. Gates sits on the boards of many notable arts, cultural, and research institutions. He serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, where he is Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Michael Kinsley referred to him as ‘the nation's most famous black scholar.’" This is a heavyweight intellectual.

As for Gates’ analysis on how the confrontation happened at his house, it came from entirely different preconditions than what motivated Cambridge police. “This is what happens to black men in America!” shouted Gates. Knowing Gates background, this could be an editorial aside to the action inside his house. Gates wanted to know what the police were doing there.

For their part, police asked to see Gates’ identification. He showed it after a slight delay. That would have been the end of it. But Gates kept saying that this is the kind of thing that happens to black men in America. He repeated it and repeated it, to the amazement of many other homeowners who later learned of the confrontation or saw some now infamous video clips; those homeowners couldn’t fathom why Gates wouldn’t have simply been pleased that the police responded quickly to a report of a possible unlawful entry at his home. ‘Show your ID and then thank the cops,’ was not an uncommon response.

But why did Gates persist in hollering, “This is what happens to black men in America?” Well, partly because Gates has a large ego; this is not strange for a man with his considerable reputation. But there was more; Gates was making a specific point – that this is exactly how police act with blacks – throughout time and space. Police approach black citizens differently than other people.

Maybe one can agree or disagree on this contention. But Gates does believe it.

And when police said they were going to charge him with making noise in his neighborhood, they made him louder because to him they were obviously squelching his right to criticize police. Out on the street he would at least be heard. Neighborhood people could hear and repeat and know; this has been for years the black man’s only soap box. And that is how Gates used it. After all, he has the loudest voice in African studies in the academic world. Still, this was not an academic situation; he was being arrested because he was yelling and wouldn’t stop.

Eventually the charge was dropped. That happened at the time that reporters around President Barak Obama asked for his opinion. He said the Cambridge Police “acted stupidly” in the matter. Of course Obama knew little of the case. He has, however, a friendship with Gates. He knows Gates’ reputation in the academic world. So he said what first came to mind: police must have made a stupid error.

How could Obama reach such a conclusion? Unlike any other top official in the United States, he grew up black. That makes one’s presuppositions diametrically different. A black person for many years had separate toilets, separate drinking fountains, separate swimming pool, separate restaurants, separate churches. All blacks in those days feared police. Black feared police because they were, for many years, the protectors of property and wealth and all the property and wealth belonged to the whites. These are not mythical tales, they are harsh realities.

So Obama heard of the Gates case and overreacted. Of course all the damage had now been done. Now the president had to try an extraordinary maneuver, he invited Gates and Sgt. Crowley to drop by the White House for a beer and some sharing of views. They came. They sat for pictures. They were just talking so there were no speeches.

In the end, the sergeant and black intellectual “agreed to disagree.”

So where does all this leave America?

Everyone lives in a construct day to day and conducts himself or herself according to how that construct allows. Police live in the law enforcer mode; a yell is one specific act that is interpreted in a certain way; a report somehow turns from neutral to adversary because of “two black men with backpacks.”

Those who are black see the exact same world and interpret it completely differently. A yell is a form of communication where nothing else works. Police act differently when they meet a black on police business. Blacks themselves act differently.

When he called for the beer meeting at the White House, Obama hoped to get the two men to see things a little differently – they could not. Each feels completely exonerated and neither made any victory or concession speeches. So it was all a failure, this White House meeting.

Well, maybe not.

What did happen was that a serious consideration was given to a black. It has happened because the president is black and these sorts of confrontations, presuppositions and insults have all faced Obama throughout his life as an American black. He cannot end them. But he can show the whole nation that black people – and all the rest of the nation – that such problems still exist and must be faced and fought. Obama asks America to rethink its race ideas.

That is no small request.

8/2009