Black Harvard Professor arrested after breaking into his own home?

vlaurelio · Jul 24, 2009

Trader_Jorge said:

Actually, it's more about that revealing moment where Obama let his guard down and accidently showed off his racial prejudice (developed under the tutelage of Jeremiah Wright)...
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no major damage done and he won't make the same mistake twice

Mr. Clutch · Jul 24, 2009

Trader_Jorge said:

The black officer that was there on the scene supports the arrest and says that Gates acted strangely.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-ap-us-harvard-scholar-arresting-officer,0,4731766.story

This story keeps on getting better and better! Thanks for this freebie, OBAMA!

...approval ratings must be tanking even further. hopefully the dometic policy agenda tanks with it.
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Well there you go. I'm not sure how you can argue it was racism after this.

Maybe Gates is in the midst of a nervous breakdown.

El_Conquistador · Jul 24, 2009

vlaurelio said:

no major damage done and he won't make the same mistake twice
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If offered, I would not trade brains with you.

GOOD DAY

Lil Pun · Jul 24, 2009

Trader_Jorge said:

The black officer that was there on the scene supports the arrest and says that Gates acted strangely.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-ap-us-harvard-scholar-arresting-officer,0,4731766.story

This story keeps on getting better and better! Thanks for this freebie, OBAMA!

...approval ratings must be tanking even further. hopefully the dometic policy agenda tanks with it.
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Why does T_J hate America?

OK, I'll stop feeding.

Lil Pun · Jul 24, 2009

Mr. Clutch said:

Well there you go. I'm not sure how you can argue it was racism after this.

Maybe Gates is in the midst of a nervous breakdown.
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Yes, a black person agrees with the arrest so that is indisputable proof that racism was not involved. Look, I have said several times during this discussion that I don't believe race was involved in the officer's motives for arresting Mr. Gates but just because a black person agrees with something does not mean you can rule out racism. That kind of thinking is, well I'm sorry it is idiotic.

Mr. Clutch · Jul 24, 2009

Lil Pun said:

Yes, a black person agrees with the arrest so that is indisputable proof that racism was not involved. Look, I have said several times during this discussion that I don't believe race was involved in the officer's motives for arresting Mr. Gates but just because a black person agrees with something does not mean you can rule out racism. That kind of thinking is, well I'm sorry it is idiotic.
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He was a black man that was on the scene where allegedly a white cop was being racist to another black man. You act like he's just a random black person off the street.

Of course, the white cop could have been incredibly clever and subtle about it to the point that the black officer didn't notice the racism Gates thought was so obvious, but somehow I doubt it.

This is the best evidence we have of what really happened. Unless you somehow think a black cop would cover up a racist white cops actions?

vlaurelio · Jul 24, 2009

Trader_Jorge said:

If offered, I would not trade brains with you.

GOOD DAY
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can you link any proof that Obama's approval rating has tanked because of this? if not, then STFU!

vlaurelio · Jul 24, 2009

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090724/ap_on_re_us/us_gates_profile

AP said:

Gates, an intellectual drawn back into the arena

AP National Writer Hillel Italie, Ap National Writer – 1 hr 32 mins ago

Decades ago — long before Harvard, long before his books and documentaries — Henry Louis Gates Jr. and some friends nearly set off a brawl trying to integrate a West Virginia club.

Gates and the others were circled by a white mob. The owner screamed at the black students to leave, slamming one of them against the wall. The club was shut down, but Gates had been marked: West Virginia police, he would write in his memoir, placed him on a list of those who might be detained should race riots break out during election time.

"Someone in authority had decided I was dangerous?" he wrote. "I mean, I liked to think so."

Gates rarely has been considered a dangerous man. Gregarious, outgoing, media savvy — yes. But in the years after the incident in Keyser, W.Va., his unrelenting focus on black life in America was intellectual. He has written essays, compiled reference works, searched for slave narratives, produced documentaries, assembled a mighty team of colleagues at Harvard.

"He's unquestionably one of the great public intellectuals. He puts people together, he makes a million speeches. He's on airplanes a lot. I think he has 50 honorary degrees by now," says David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, for which Gates has been a contributor.

Now a dispute with police has brought Gates down into the arena once again.

Reached Thursday by telephone, Gates told The Associated Press he had no further comments to make about the incident, in which he was suspected of breaking into a house — his own — and then charged with disorderly conduct when he raged at a police officer.

"I'm tired," he said.

The charge was quickly dropped, but the news did not end, for Gates is the most well connected of men, a friend of at least two presidents (Clinton and Obama) and a scholar whose arrest was worthy of mention at a White House press conference.

Responding to a reporter's question Wednesday night, Barack Obama said he didn't know all the facts but that the police "acted stupidly" by citing Gates for disorderly conduct. He later said he regretted his comments, though he believed that both Gates and the officer overreacted.

Gates' life has been an almost perfect arc of energy and ascent. A mill worker's son, he graduated with honors from Yale and has devoted himself to discovering and explaining the very marrow of the black past.

As head of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, Gates has consciously attempted to build upon Du Bois' scholarship and to live out, and up to, his place in what Du Bois called "The Talented Tenth" of black elites.

Gates' projects have included an encyclopedia of Africans and African Americans, an anthology of African American literature and documentaries about Abraham Lincoln and "The Wonders of the African World." His books include an influential work of cultural criticism, "The Signifying Monkey"; and a compilation of essays, "13 Ways of Looking at a Black Man," which features pieces on Colin Powell, Louis Farrakhan and O.J. Simpson's murder trial.

"He does all of these things — the historical work, the literary theory work — because they excite him," says Princeton scholar and sometime Gates collaborator Kwame Anthony Appiah.

"One of the things it takes to do so many things is he has a gift as an organizer, as a manager. You have to learn to identify the parts you have and those you don't and then find the right people. He's fantastically good at that, and does it with enormous enthusiasm that energizes the other contributors, too."

"There are people who talk about President Obama being a three-dimensional chess player, operating on a lot of levels at once, and that's a good description of Skip," says fellow Harvard professor Lani Guinier, using the nickname Gates has had since childhood.

"He's entrepreneurial. He has an eye for investments and for networks that are a potential source of support. He has an eye for talent, for bringing in the best people he can to Harvard. And he has an eye for the media, for positioning himself and knowing how to present a story."

He has told his own story in a memoir, "Colored People." Gates was born in 1950 in Piedmont, W.Va., then a segregated mill community. His first knowledge of whites was through television, in sitcoms such as "The Life of Riley," which featured a factory worker, like Gates' dad. His family initially had little interest in protest, wondering why blacks would want to eat at white-owned restaurants since it was well established that whites couldn't cook.

"Civil rights took us all by surprise," wrote Gates, whose life was changed, as millions were, by the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing the "separate but equal" laws in public schools.

Just two years later, Gates began at the Davis Free Elementary School, integrated in 1955 and virtually the only place in Piedmont where blacks and whites gathered together. Gates arrived more determined than afraid. He was "marked out to excel," an early reader and writer "blessed with the belief that I could learn anything."

"I was all set to become the little prince of that almost all-white school," he wrote.

He was an A student who loved history and geography and would practice the way African leaders' names were pronounced by following the newscasts of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. He gave the valedictory address at high school and graduated summa c*m laude from Yale, where he majored in history.

To his eventual embarrassment, he wrote in his Yale application:

"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."

He was substantial enough to get into Yale anyway, politicized enough to protest racism and the Vietnam War, but never so disheartened by his country that he didn't consider himself a part of it.

As a scholar, he has advocated African American history as part of American history, distrusting "the rhetoric of crisis" and unwilling to enter the "sweepstakes of oppression." Change has been effected from the top. At Harvard, Gates is credited with turning the school's African American studies program into a "hub" for intellectual history, Appiah said, with fellows and faculty advisers including Guinier, William Julius Wilson and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka.

Gates' pull is also political. He is close to the Clintons and initially supported Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential run. He has met Obama often enough to host a fundraiser for the Illinois Democrat's successful U.S. Senate race in 2004 and Gates has said that he contributed the maximum allowable amount to Obama's presidential campaign.

He would seem worthy of mention in "Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience," but since Gates helped edit it, he left himself out. Appiah, the reference book's coeditor, suggested an entry.

"It would say that he was a central figure in the investigation and the development of African-American studies as it developed in the late 20th century, both as an intellectual and as an organizer of intellectual projects," Appiah said.

"He combined this with an interest in his field that led him to want to explain it to a wider public as a writer and a filmmaker. He cared deeply about African American culture and tradition, but he's also a deeply committed American nationalist patriot. He realized that it's natural for the one to be the other."
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bnb · Jul 24, 2009

As an aside... I liked this quote from the Tribune article linked by Jorge:

"The facts of the case suggested that the president used the right adjective but directed it to the wrong party."
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(made by the police union rep).

basso · Jul 24, 2009

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Lil Pun · Jul 24, 2009

Big video is big...

vlaurelio · Jul 24, 2009

bnb said:

As an aside... I liked this quote from the Tribune article linked by Jorge:

(made by the police union rep).
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lets assume we all agree that Gates acted "stupidly"

how do you describe the actions of a cop for arresting someone who acted "stupidly"?

bnb · Jul 24, 2009

Just commenting on the cleverness of the line.

I think the rest has been hashed out to death.

Southern Select · Jul 24, 2009

vlaurelio said:

lets assume we all agree that Gates acted "stupidly"

how do you describe the actions of a cop for arresting someone who acted "stupidly"?
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logicx · Jul 24, 2009

vlaurelio said:

lets assume we all agree that Gates acted "stupidly"

how do you describe the actions of a cop for arresting someone who acted "stupidly"?
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Noble. Honorable. Generous.

He should have used pepper spray, a taser, or a nightstick, especially on this idiot...

Bandwagoner · Jul 24, 2009

Obama said he should have CALIBRATED his words differently. What the hell does that mean.

logicx · Jul 24, 2009

CaseyH said:

Obama said he should have CALIBRATED his words differently. What the hell does that mean.
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It layman's terms "I'm full of crap, I don't want to apologize, I'm just as bitter-racist as my black, Harvard, elite, scholar, professor friend"...he also said something about the fact that he didn't "illuminate" the situation or something...I don't know...crap

Oh yeah, the President also seemed to mention something about he wasn't speaking directly towards the police officer...or the Cambridge police...kind of...police in general...acted stupidly...responding to this one event...

eh...

logicx · Jul 24, 2009

Oh yeah, I forgot the whole "These issues are still sensitive in America" that the President said during the press conference. WHAT ISSUES Mr. President? Race issues? Gee, who brought race into this...was it the evil, white, racist police officer? No...no...it wasn't him...ok...then who...

Oh yes! It was your friend, Mr. President. Your friend brought race into this situation, not the police officer doing his job that you said acted stupidly, that you now won't apologize to.

Yes, we're all very sensitive here in America about race issues...

ChrisBosh · Jul 24, 2009

logicx said:

Oh yeah, I forgot the whole "These issues are still sensitive in America" that the President said during the press conference. WHAT ISSUES Mr. President? Race issues? Gee, who brought race into this...was it the evil, white, racist police officer? No...no...it wasn't him...ok...then who...

Oh yes! It was your friend, Mr. President. Your friend brought race into this situation, not the police officer doing his job that you said acted stupidly, that you now won't apologize to.

Yes, we're all very sensitive here in America about race issues...
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E Z there, relax , I don't think the prez should be getting involved with a matter such as this in the first place, he should be busy enough with other things. Now according to a AP report he wants to have beer with the Prof and cop, jeez, does this guy not get enough of himself? He has way too much time on his hands....it seems like he feels he does not get enough air time.

logicx · Jul 24, 2009

ChrisBosh said:

E Z there, relax , I don't think the prez should be getting involved with a matter such as this in the first place, he should be busy enough with other things. Now according to a AP report he wants to have beer with the Prof and cop, jeez, does this guy not get enough of himself? He has way too much time on his hands....it seems like he feels he does not get enough air time.
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I do need to relax, you're right...but I work with people like this professor and I know people like him...they cry racism at the smallest little thing. They're bigots themselves and they don't see it. The difference between them and Mr. Gates is that Mr. Gates is a "friend" of the President. That's what makes it worse. Our President can't even use common sense or exercise restraint in this situation. Ok, I'll stop.

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