Water buffalo incident at the University of Pennsylvania
“Eenie, meenie, minie, mo”
Princess Michael and “Back to the colonies!”
The Henry Louis Gates Affair
Harvard men rating women
“Eenie, meenie, minie, mo”
2003-03-03-Parker-Eenie-meenie-minie-mo
On planet offended, eenie meenie ain't no mo
by Kathleen Parker
Townhall.com, 2003-03-03
[This situation is described briefly
here.]
[1]
When it comes to sensitivity, America has no rival.
Today our surrender of reason to emotion seems nearly complete.
[2]
For evidence look no further than the March 4 trial in which
two black women are suing Southwest Airlines for discrimination
after a flight attendant uttered the following:
“Eenie, meenie, minie, mo;
pick a seat, we gotta go.”
[3]
If you’ve been taking your vitamins and eating plenty of brain food,
you may be experiencing the first hint of a primal scream just now.
You also probably understand without excessive mental strain
what the attendant meant:
[4]
“We’re taking off. If you don’t have seat, pick one.”
Pretty please with sugar on top.
But the two women,
Louise Sawyer, 46, and
Grace Fuller, 48,
heard it another way.
[5]
“It was like I was too dumb to find a seat,” said Fuller.
When the other passengers tittered, Fuller says she felt “alienated.”
As a quick aside, who doesn’t feel alienated
when packed into a large flying missile potentially aimed for tall buildings?
[6]
Meanwhile, isn’t it possible the other passengers thought the attendant,
then-22-year-old
Jennifer Cundiff, was cute?
That her attempt at humorous cajoling and gentle prodding
met qualifications for appreciative tittering?
[7]
But no, Sawyer and Fuller are certain that
the rhyme was directed at them specifically because they are black.
Could they also possibly be dangerously self-absorbed?
Just a thought.
[8]
The basis of the complaint is that the Eenie-Meenie rhyme
used to include a racist slur, and indeed it did.
I’m old enough to remember when people used the “N” word.
I also remember my parents telling me that nice people didn’t use that word
and that if I did,
I’d be beaten to within an inch of my life.
[9]
Of course, today my parents would be locked up
for offending my tender sensibilities,
and I’d be in foster care.
As it turned out, I remembered always to say,
“Catch a tiger by the toe.”
[10]
Cundiff, on the other hand, is young enough to be my daughter
and says she never heard the racist version.
She says
she learned the rhyme from fellow Southwest employees
who use it to motivate passengers to sit down and buckle up.
[11]
One would have thought that such an obviously frivolous lawsuit
would be dismissed or never filed.
The women’s claims of physical and emotional distress
in fact were thrown out.
But U.S. District Judge
Kathryn Vratil determined that,
because of its history,
the rhyme “could reasonably be viewed as objectively racist and offensive.”
[12]
No it couldn’t, but the trial will make good copy, so I shouldn’t complain.
When your livelihood depends on the consistent stupidity of human beings,
one can only bask in today’s unparalleled bounty.
[13]
Still, our culture of extreme sensitivity—
and the environment of intolerance it creates—
portends a scary future when
all aspects of our lives, from thought to speech,
are regulated and micromanaged by allegedly well-meaning bureaucrats
with legal powers to prosecute or otherwise ruin.
[14]
A recent example of the latter
can be found at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
where Martha Lamb, a guest lecturer in social work,
lost her job by citing an old racist expression that offended some students.
[15]
The example was indeed offensive and proffered in the spirit of demonstrating
how things have changed since Lamb was a student in North Carolina in the ‘60s.
People used to joke, she said, that the NAACP really stood for
“Niggers Ain’t Acting Like Colored People.”
[16]
Fast forward, Lamb is no more.
After some students walked out and the rest eventually dropped the course,
the diagnosis was that Lamb’s historical anecdote so offended students
that they couldn’t learn anything.
University officials have said that Lamb violated the school’s policy
requiring teachers to provide a “comfortable” environment for students.
Lamb resigned in early February.
[17]
Clearly racial slurs are unacceptable, but is history also off limits?
And by what logic should education ensure that students always be comfortable?
Understanding and enlightenment, purportedly the goals of education,
do not come pain-free, I’ve noticed.
[18]
But what matter? Present-day sensitivity trumps discomfort-causing reality.
For her lack of sensitivity,
Lamb now faces a future tarnished by insinuations of racism.
[19]
Meanwhile, Judge Vratil and the two offended women—
forevermore imprinted in broader minds as the Eenie-Meenie Sisters—
are taking the American judicial system down another notch,
away from reason toward a future defined by bureaucracy,
the ultimate expression of which, we might note,
is oppression and tyranny.
2005-08-15-eenie
Eenie Meenie Minie Update
by Ted Frank
Overlawyered.com, 2005-08-15
Grace Fuller claims that she suffered two epileptic seizures
because a flight attendant used the phrase
“Eenie, meenie, minie, mo, pick a seat, we gotta go”
to passengers boarding an open-seating flight late;
Fuller and her travelling companion, both African-Americans,
ascribed racist meaning to the phrase,
and sued under a variety of federal and state claims.
Some claims were thrown out, and
a jury did what a judge should’ve done sooner,
and bounced the rest.
(Feb. 9, 2004; Jan. 22, 2004 and links therein).
The United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit
affirmed the district court judgment for defendants.
After a full trial, and briefing for an appeal,
the cost to Southwest Airlines of “Eenie Meenie Minie Moe”
was surely in the six digits.
But, though the law in questions
permit plaintiffs to recover attorneys’ fees if they are successful
(surely the only reason an attorney agreed to bring this suit),
defendant Southwest Airlines
is going to have to swallow the cost of this ridiculous suit.
The opinion creates no precedent,
so if Sawyer wants to sue someone else for using a nursery rhyme,
she can do so in the future.
(
Sawyer v. Southwest Airlines Co., No. 04-3109 (10th Cir. Aug. 10, 2005)
(hat tip to P.N.)).
Princess Michael and “Back to the colonies!”
2004-05-27-Times(UK)-Princess-Michael-colonies
'You need to go back to the colonies'
Princess Michael has caused an uproar by
allegedly insulting noisy black patrons at a trendy restaurant
By Alan Hamilton and Nicholas Wapshott
Times Online (UK), 2004-05-27
[1]
THE loose cannon of the Royal Family has fired another embarrassing salvo,
this time at a group of noisy black diners in an upmarket New York restaurant.
[2]
But Princess Michael of Kent, no stranger to controversy,
strenuously denied last night that she had uttered racist remarks
during a fracas with fellow customers at Da Silvano,
a trendy West Village venue at Sixth Avenue and Houston Street, on Monday.
[3]
The breathtaken but influential diners think otherwise,
and have told the New York Post that the Princess, 59,
gravely insulted them by demanding that they cut the noise level
and suggesting they “go back to the colonies”.
[4]
Nicole Young, a television fashion correspondent, public relations consultant
and one of the five diners at the table next to the Princess,
told the Post:
“I was stupefied; I have never experienced anything like that in my life.”
[5]
Simon Astaire, the Princess’s spokesman at Kensington Palace,
said last night that he had spoken to the Princess,
who is in the US to attend the graduation of her daughter,
Lady Gabriella Windsor.
“The report is simply untrue,” Mr Astaire said.
[6]
“Princess Michael went with two male friends for dinner after the cinema.
She sat down; the table next to her was very loud and abusive,
loud comments to the extent that the host (one of the Princess’s companions)
complained to the manager.
It continued over the evening,” Mr Astaire said.
“The host complained and asked them to quieten down, which they did not.
Then the host suggested they move tables.
Any suggestion that she made a racist comment is simply untrue.
She did not make a racist comment.”
[7]
According to the Post,
Ms Young was dining with
Merv Matheson, an investment banker,
Philmore Anderson, a music mogul,
A. J. Callaway, a reporter, and
Tamara Reynolds, an entertainment lawyer.
They had been in the fashionable Tuscan restaurant for some two hours
when Princess Michael arrived with her friends at 10pm
and was seated at the next table.
[8]
In Ms Young’s version of events,
the Princess had been seated for ten minutes
when she slammed her open palm on the black diners’ table
so hard that the table shook and glasses moved.
She then said: “Enough already! You need to quiet down.”
[9]
According to the Post,
the black diners were stunned into several minutes of silence.
Mr Matheson said it was “like being in a school classroom”.
[10]
The diners recovered their composure,
ignored the royal decree
and turned up the volume of their conversation.
The Princess demanded a new table.
As she got up she circled the offending commoners, leant towards one of them,
pumping her fist, and is reported to have said:
“You need to go back to the colonies.”
[11]
Confronted by an infuriated Ms Young,
the Princess made an instant correction.
“I did not say ‘back to the colonies’.
I said ‘you should remember the colonies’.
Back in the days of the colonies there were rules that were very good.
You think about it. Just think about it.”
[12]
The dumbstruck diners were left wondering
whether the Princess was referring to
British imperial domination of Africa and India, or to
the days before 1776
when the American colonies lived under the rule of the Crown.
[13]
“I honestly couldn’t believe something like this could happen in New York City.
It was ridiculous,” Mr Callaway told the Post.
[14]
No one was more upset than Silvano Marchetto, the restaurant owner,
who confirmed that there had been a rumpus between customers.
[15]
“I felt awkward and uncomfortable,
upset that someone would make an inappropriate comment to other customers.
I tried to mediate the situation, and was happy it didn’t get uglier,”
Mr Marchetto said, adding:
“She obviously thinks she’s in her country;
well, this is our restaurant, not hers.
[16]
“Princess Michael came in with Douglas Kramer, who is a regular here,
and another man who I didn’t recognise.
She was sat next to the five black people who had been there for some time.
They were all laughing,” he said.
[17]
“Then Nicole Young came up to me and said, ‘That woman told us to be quiet.’
I told her, ‘You do what you like.’
Then Ms Young said the Princess had told them to get back to our colony.
[18]
“I didn’t hear it myself, that is just what she said.
They asked me to move her to another table,
so I showed her to the other room.
Nicole Young went over to the table and spoke to her, then I was called over.
So I went over to the Princess’s table
to make sure that nothing was going to happen.
And after that it was all quiet. I don’t know exactly what happened.
I read about it in the Post.”
[19]
When she joined the Royal Family,
the Princess quickly earned herself the sobriquet “Princess Pushy”.
2004-05-30-NYT-Princess-Michael-colonies
The Princess Diatribes
By ALEX KUCZYNSKI
New York Times, 2004-05-30
[1]
ONE could not pick a much worse place in New York City
to pitch a public hissy fit
than
Da Silvano, the tightly packed Greenwich Village restaurant
that is famously popular with gossip columnists,
and the people gossip columnists like to put in their gossip columns.
[2]
So it was bad enough that
Princess Michael of Kent,
known to the press in England as the Pushy Princess,
exploded in a decidedly unroyal pique
at a table of noisy diners
last Monday night,
and exhorted them, in the words of the diners,
to “
go back to the colonies.”
[3]
But it was worse that the diners she yelled at
were
well-connected black New Yorkers.
The five diners --
a banker, a music industry executive, a lawyer,
a public relations consultant and a television reporter --
construed her remark as racist.
[4]
Princess Michael told
The New York Post,
which first reported the incident on Wednesday, that she said,
“You should remember the colonies,”
a remark she said
was meant to remind the boisterous diners
of a time when people had manners.
[5]
The princess had been visiting New York
before attending the graduation of her daughter, Lady
Gabriella Windsor,
from Brown University, in Providence, R.I.,
which is scheduled for tomorrow.
[6]
For Princess Michael, the episode of restaurant rage
is just another incident in a résumé of sometimes out-of-bounds behavior.
And the headlines from around the world
(England, France, Italy, Scotland, Australia) --
“Fury at Royal Colonies Jibe” and “Outrage at Royal Racism” --
are doing nothing to help her out of this, her latest public relations pickle.
[7]
She and her husband, Prince Michael,
have attracted controversy since their wedding in 1978.
In an echo of the fabled Wallis Simpson,
she was divorced, and Catholic.
The prince was forced to give up his right to succession to the throne --
he was born eighth in line -- in order to marry her.
[8]
More recently,
the prince and princess have come under scrutiny by the British press
because of their unusual housing situation.
When the couple married, the queen said
they could live in Kensington Palace for their lifetimes
and pay a nominal rent.
But in 2002, the queen, facing pressure from members of Parliament,
shortened their tenure at Kensington until the end of the decade.
The queen also agreed to pay a more substantial rate for their accommodations
from her personal savings.
[9]
A regular visitor to New York,
the princess has an active social life that includes Le Cirque lunches
and the opening of the American Ballet Theater,
with a socially energetic group that includes
Barbara de Portago, Mario Buatta, Marisa Berenson, Kenneth Jay Lane,
the art collector Doug Cramer (one of her Da Silvano escorts)
and Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia.
[10]
A canvass of New Yorkers in the Upper East Side swim last week
yielded both approving and disapproving anecdotes.
One guest at a benefit lunch for New York-Presbyterian Hospital,
held two weeks ago,
said she and her table mates were shocked
to notice Princess Michael talking loudly on a cellphone
after guests had been seated
and the audience had been asked to remain quiet during speeches.
[11]
Mr. Buatta, the decorator, said that
he had been to half a dozen dinners in New York for Princess Michael
in the last year, most recently at Swifty’s,
and that he finds her generally well behaved.
[12]
“Oh, she’s harmless,” he said.
“She probably gets a little carried away from time to time.”
[13]
Mr. Buatta said that he could well imagine
the princess expressing anger with the Da Silvano diners.
But a princess can’t go to a restaurant and shout at patrons for being noisy,
he said.
“It’s kind of a funny attitude,” Mr. Buatta said.
“I wouldn’t go over there pushing my title.
You come over to this country and you have to deal with us on our terms.”
[14]
Sibilla Clark,
at whose Park Avenue apartment the princess stayed during last week’s visit,
said that
Princess Michael has her quirks but that she is certainly not a racist.
“She might have a little bit of an imperious manner about her,
but she would never have been so rude,”
Mrs. Clark said.
[15]
Through her representative in England, Simon Astaire,
Princess Michael declined to comment for this article.
[16]
In England, where the press is famous for its tendency to pigeonhole members of the royal family for life,
the tabloids long ago began referring to Princess Michael as
“Princess Pushy” and “Pushy Galore.”
The names have stuck.
[17]
In 1985,
news reports revealed that
the princess’ father,
Baron Gunther von Reibnitz,
had been an honorary member of the Nazi Party.
(Born
Marie-Christine von Reibnitz in what today is the Czech Republic,
the princess was raised by her mother and stepfather in Australia.)
[18]
In 1986, Princess Michael outraged members of the royal family
when she said in a magazine interview conducted by Carol Thatcher,
the daughter of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that
she came from a “better background
than anyone else who’s married into the royal family since the war,
excepting Prince Philip.”
She also criticized the English people for lacking ambition
and complained that her public obligations as princess were boring.
[19]
Mrs. Clark, the princess’ New York host, who has known her for 30 years,
said Princess Michael told her a version of the events at Da Silvano
different from that of the adjacent table.
“She told me that when they decided to move tables, she said,
‘Let’s go to the colonies,’ ”
Mrs. Clark said, explaining that
“the colonies” would refer to the restaurant’s back room, or “Siberia.”
[20]
“I have never been to this restaurant, but I hear that it is very noisy,”
Mrs. Clark said.
“They must have heard the word ‘colonies’ and taken it the wrong way.”
[21]
Nicole Young, a public relations consultant
who was one of the guests on the receiving end of Princess Michael’s comments,
said that wasn’t the case.
“From the time she got there, she made it clear she was not happy,”
Ms. Young said last week.
[22]
At the moment the princess was placing her order with the waiter,
Ms. Young’s table, engaged in noisy banter, exploded in laughter.
“So she leans over, in between me and a friend of mine,
and slams her hand on the table and says, ‘Enough already!’ ”
Ms. Young said.
“The restaurant goes silent. Then she said, in this tone,
‘You’ve got to quiet down. We can’t even hear the waiter.’ ”
[23]
After the princess withdrew, Ms. Young said,
her friends decided to get even louder
just to further irritate the princess.
“O.K., so maybe that was rude, but whatever,” Ms. Young said.
“Now, of course, we’re talking louder than ever
and we’re laughing at her.
So she gets the waiter to move her to another table.
As she comes walking by, she stops and says right into A. J.’s ear,
‘Go back to the colonies.’
And she moves on.”
[24]
A. J. Calloway, Ms. Young’s table mate,
who is a television correspondent for the show “Extra”
and a host on Black Entertainment Television,
said that at first he thought the princess’ behavior was a joke.
“It was so outrageous, at first I was like, ‘O.K., whose friend is she?’ ”
Mr. Calloway said on Friday.
He said he was disappointed that the princess was denying their story.
[25]
Mr. Lane, the jeweler, said that the incident,
as described by Ms. Young and Mr. Calloway,
just did not sound like the princess he knew.
“She would never call someone a colonial,” he said.
The Henry Louis Gates Affair
Below are a number of articles dealing with this by now very well known affair.
But first here are some observations of mine that I have not noticed in the MSM.
First, an incidental point.
Notice how large the house Gates was occupying is.
(See
this or
this (scroll down for photo), or
visit
maps.google.com, type in 17 Ware St Cambridge,
and click on “Street view”.)
If the front door was “jimmied” or jammed,
why did Gates not just use another door?
I used to live in a house much smaller than that,
but it had a front door, back door, and basement door,
all opened by the same key (so I did not have to carry so many keys).
Does Gates’s apparently large house really only have one door?
In fact, don’t Fire Codes require that
all dwellings have at least two outside doors?
But, of course, this issue doesn’t affect
the problematic aspects of the subsequent story.
But now on to my main point:
How would a typical white guy have reacted in Gates’s situation?
Well, for this at least, I will nominate myself as a typical white guy,
with a typical middle-class background.
Suppose I returned from a trip and had to break something,
especially something visible from the front, to enter my house.
Maybe this is normal behavior in the black community,
but it surely isn’t in the white.
It raises red flags in one’s mind as constituting “breaking and entering,”
because that is exactly what it is.
Now, breaking and entering can be either legal or illegal,
but I think it is highly probable that
far more instances of breaking and entering are illegal than legal,
so anyone observing this act would be justified in
strongly suspecting the probability (but not the certainty)
that a crime had been committed,
and would, if a conscientious citizen, call the police to report it.
I would be well aware of this possibility, and would be prepared
for a visit from the police within the next ten to fifteen minutes
to check up on things,
to find out if the person who broke in and entered
had the legal right to do so.
And again, the odds would be that the act was illegal.
In any case, when the police arrived,
I would be well aware that I would be a suspect in a criminal act,
and surely not be assumed to be the homeowner
wondering why the police were paying a visit.
As I said, all this would pass through my mind
immediately after I had broken and entered, if not before.
As a result, when the police did come to the house,
I would realize that they would have entirely natural suspicions about me
and treat me as a suspect, which indeed I would be to them.
It would be
my responsibility to, by my manner,
assure them that I was not a criminal,
and would cooperate with them in any way I could
to prove that I had done nothing illegal.
But now how did Gates react?
Well,
according to the New York Times,
When Professor Gates first saw Sergeant Crowley at his door,
he said in an interview, he expected him to say,
“How can I help you, sir?”
The conclusion seems inescapable:
Either Gates is a complete idiot
or has no sense of his responsibility to law enforcement.
But what is worse,
why on earth is the black “elite” defending him in this situation?
Where are the black commentators who will defend the actions of the police,
and urge Gates to stand down and cool his ire?
Yes, I understand that in many other cases,
blacks may well have been mistreated by the police.
But that does not, I believe, justify outrage over what happened to Gates.
There may (or may not) be a legtimate historical grievance.
But please, black community,
make your case (or cases)
in instances where the wrong-doing is more clear cut than in this one.
Miscellaneous Articles
2009-07-16-Gates-Youtube-original-911-call
911 Caller: 'They Were Pushing the Door In'
Youtube.com, 2009-07-16 (2:50 audio clip)
Note: You can see the location,
and get a photo of the house front,
at
maps.google.com.
Just type in 17 Ware St Cambridge.
2009-07-16-Gates-Crowley-original-incident-report-9005127
Incident Report #9005127
Cambridge MA Police Department
James Crowley, Reporting Officer
2009-07-16
2009-07-24-NYT-Gates-Crowley-prelim
Officer Defends Arrest of Harvard Professor
By LIZ ROBBINS
New York Times, 2009-07-24
The Cambridge police sergeant who arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. last week said in radio interviews on Thursday that he was disappointed by President Barack Obama’s comment that the Cambridge police department had “acted stupidly” in the case, and said that he would not apologize as Professor Gates had requested.
The officer, Sgt. James Crowley, spoke to two Boston radio stations on Thursday. In a 22-minute interview on WEEI, a Boston sports-talk station, he offered his account of the arrest last Thursday, which came as he investigated a report of a break-in at Professor Gates’s home in Cambridge.
Charges of disorderly conduct against Professor Gates, a leading African-American scholar, were dropped on Tuesday, and the police and Mr. Gates issued a joint statement calling the incident “regrettable and unfortunate.” But President Obama continued to fuel debate in his nationally televised news conference Wednesday evening, using a reporter’s question about the incident to address the national issue of racial profiling, though he acknowledged that he did not know all the facts of the Cambridge case and that Professor Gates was a friend of his.
In the WEEI interview, Sergeant Crowley, who is white, responded to the president’s comments. “I think it’s disappointing that he waded into a local issue, and really, something that plays out here,” he said. “As he said at the beginning of the press conference, he didn’t know the facts, and he certainly doesn’t, based on those comments.”
Sergeant Crowley said that he arrested Professor Gates because the professor got angry after being asked for identification and proof of his address, and continued his “tirade after being warned multiple times.” The sergeant was adamant that he was following police procedures in making the arrest.
Professor Gates said in an interview Tuesday that he wanted a personal apology from the sergeant, and that he might still consider suing the police department.
“As I said yesterday, that apology will never come,” Sergeant Crowley said on Thursday. “It won’t come from me as Jim Crowley, it won’t come from me as a sergeant in the Cambridge police department.”
He added: “I know what I did was right. I have nothing to apologize for.”
Professor Gates did not immediately respond to an e-mail message seeking comment on the sergeant’s remarks.
On Thursday morning, the mayor of Cambridge, E. Denise Simmons, said she had been in contact with Professor Gates, and had apologized to him on behalf of the city of Cambridge, but she said she had not yet spoken to Sergeant Crowley. The mayor said she was still gathering information about the arrest, and planned to have meetings with the police department. On Tuesday she issued a statement saying that she was “pleased” that the charges had been dropped.
Though the joint statement he issued with the city, the police force and the Middlesex district attorney’s office on Tuesday said the matter was resolved, Professor Gates has continued to speak about the incident in national media interviews, and President Obama’s remarks kept it in the spotlight.
“The president did say that he was friends with Professor Gates,” Mayor Simmons said in a telephone interview. “Like the rest of us, he had not yet heard all the facts. I don’t want to make a comment based on the president’s comments.”
Although the mayor, who is black, would not comment when asked if she had any concerns about racial profiling in the city’s police department, she said that she hoped the incident would spur an instructive dialogue about race.
“Is there a problem with race issues in the county? Yes,” she said. “Is there a problem with it in Massachusetts? Yes there is. In Cambridge, we are a small part of society, and we’re trying to be proactive.
“I am looking at this situation as opportunity to have open and candid conversations around our city. How do we make this a place where everyone can feel safe?”
Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley have offered differing accounts of the incident, which occurred as Professor Gates was returning from a trip to China where he had been filming a PBS documentary. The front door of the house was stuck closed, and his taxi driver helped him to pry it open. A neighbor, seeing the activity at the door, called 911, saying that two black men were breaking into the house.
Sergeant Crowley said that when he arrived on the scene in response, he asked Professor Gates for identification showing that he lived at that address. Professor Gates has said that he thinks Sergeant Crowley did not believe he lived there because he is black.
On the radio program, Sergeant Crowley said, repeating what he said was in the police report, that Professor Gates showed him a Harvard ID card, but not a driver’s license with his address. “That would have been helpful,” the officer told the WEEI hosts, John Dennis and Gerry Callahan.
But Professor Gates said in an interview on Tuesday that he had given the officer his Massachusetts driver’s license as well as his Harvard ID.
“He asked me if I could prove I was a Harvard professor,” Professor Gates said. “I thought that was unusual. He proceeded to ask me another question, and I said, ‘I’m not going to answer that question, I want to know your name and your badge number.’ ”
According to Sergeant Crowley, the question he asked was, “Is there anybody in the home with you?”
The officer said this was routine in cases of a possible break-in, when an intruder might be in the building
But Professor Gates said the officer did not seem concerned with his safety, and that he refused to give the professor his information.
Next, the sergeant said, he warned Professor Gates to calm down and lower his voice, and to step outside to his front porch. Sergeant Crowley said he gave the professor two warnings, the second while holding a set of handcuffs, but that the professor continued berating him. “The professor at any point in time could have resolved the issue by quieting down and/or by going back in the house,” he said in the radio interview.
Professor Gates said on Tuesday that it was Sergeant Crowley who became angry.
The only apology Sergeant Crowley offered on Thursday was for not knowing Professor Gates. “I apologize that I was not aware who Professor Gates was,” the officer said. “I am still just amazed that somebody of his level of intelligence would stoop to such a level, berate me, accuse me of me being a racist, of racial profiling.”
Sergeant Crowley was an instructor at the Lowell Police Academy for five years, teaching a class on racial profiling and how officers can deal with certain situations, according to the Associated Press.
Before joining the Cambridge force, Sergeant Crowley was in the national spotlight as a Brandeis University police officer. He was on duty on July 27, 1993 when the Boston Celtics star Reggie Lewis suffered a massive heart attack during a private workout on campus. Sergeant Crowley, who knew of the player’s previous collapse during an April playoff game, tried to resuscitate Mr. Lewis, who was black, by administering CPR, but was unsuccessful.
In the news conference Wednesday evening, most of the questions put to President Obama were about health-care policy, but the final one about the national implications of Professor Gates’s arrest. “I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry," President Obama said after noting his friendship with the professor. "Number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. And number three — what I think we know separate and apart from this incident — is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately, and that’s just a fact."
On Thursday, Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, clarified President Obama’s comments to a pool reporter on Air Force One. “Let me be clear: he was not calling the officer stupid, O.K.?” Mr. Gibbs said. He added that the president was simply saying that “at a certain point the situation got far out of hand, and I think all sides understand that.”
Sergeant Crowley did not respond to a request for an interview with The New York Times.
In Cambridge on Thursday, his father, Daniel Crowley, 75, spoke from the family home where James Crowley grew up. The elder Mr. Crowley said that his son was the third of four sons, and that all four work in law enforcement; the oldest is a Middlesex County deputy sheriff and the other three are all officers in Cambridge.
“Obama’s comments turned me off,” Mr. Crowley said. “I voted for him; I can’t say I would again.”
He said his son James, who is a married father of three, had “close friends of all colors” growing up, and went to the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. “My son is a hard worker,” Mr. Crowley said. “I know what he’s like. He’s a good person. What’s the big deal? They’re making a whole lot out of nothing.”
2009-07-24-NYT-Gates-Crowley-final
Sergeant Who Arrested Professor Defends Actions
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
New York Times, 2009-07-24
BOSTON —
[1]
The police sergeant
whom President Obama accused of acting “stupidly”
in arresting a prominent black Harvard professor
offered his own account of the incident on Thursday,
adding a new dimension to a drama that has transfixed the nation.
[2]
The arrest of the professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr.,
was dominating talk shows and dinner conversations
even before Mr. Obama discussed it on Wednesday at his news conference.
But the president’s comments
seemed to further polarize the national debate over
whether the sergeant, James Crowley, who is white,
was right to arrest Professor Gates for disorderly conduct
while investigating a possible break-in
at the professor’s home in Cambridge, Mass.
[3]
Police unions and other law enforcement groups
lined up behind Sergeant Crowley on Thursday,
calling his actions justified,
while the Congressional Black Caucus defended Mr. Obama’s remarks
and called on Congress to address the issue of racial profiling.
[4]
Commissioner Robert C. Haas of the Cambridge Police Department
said he would convene a panel to investigate the incident,
but added that his officers were “deeply pained” by Mr. Obama’s comments
and that
Sergeant Crowley had followed protocol.
[5]
At heart, the dispute between Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley
centers on two things:
which one of them treated the other rudely and
whether they properly identified themselves.
Professor Gates, 58, says
the sergeant repeatedly refused to reveal his name or badge number;
Sergeant Crowley, 42, says
the professor initially refused to provide identification,
then produced only his Harvard ID card, which included no address,
to prove he lived in the house.
[6]
Sergeant Crowley, a native of Cambridge,
told a local sports radio station on Thursday that
Mr. Obama “didn’t know all the facts” and that
Professor Gates —
a prolific scholar of African-American history
and one of the nation’s leading black intellectuals —
had been oddly belligerent from the start of their encounter on July 16.
[7]
“From the time he opened the door it seemed that
he was very upset, very put off
that I was there in the first place,”
Sergeant Crowley told the station, WEEI.
“Not just what he said, but the tone in which he said it,
just seemed very peculiar —
even more so now that I know how educated he is.”
[8]
Sergeant Crowley’s visit
to the professor’s yellow wood frame home near Harvard Square
was prompted by a 911 call from a passer-by
who reported two black men trying to force open the front door.
The men were in fact
Professor Gates, just home from a trip to China, and his cab driver;
Professor Gates said earlier this week that
his door was jammed
and he had asked the driver for help shoving it open.
[9]
After getting in
and calling Harvard’s maintenance department to come fix the door,
Professor Gates said,
he saw Sergeant Crowley on his porch.
The sergeant was disrespectful from the beginning, the professor said,
asking him to step outside without explanation
and demanding identification while refusing to provide his own.
[10]
But Sergeant Crowley said Thursday that he was only protecting himself
when he asked Professor Gates, whom he did not recognize,
to come out and identify himself.
Daytime break-ins are not unheard of in the neighborhood, he said.
[11]
Sergeant Crowley described the woman who reported the possible break-in —
who works at Harvard Magazine, on Professor Gates’s street —
as “reliable,” and said that
while the professor did not “look like somebody who would break into a house,”
his tone was troubling.
[12]
In the police report he filed,
Sergeant Crowley said Professor Gates had refused to step outside
and, when told the sergeant was investigating a possible break-in, said,
“Why, because I’m a black man in America?”
According to the report,
Professor Gates also accused the sergeant of being racist
and yelled that he “wasn’t someone to mess with.”
[13]
Sergeant Crowley said he tried to identify himself several times
but the professor was shouting too loudly to hear.
[14]
“He was arrested after following me outside the house,”
Sergeant Crowley said on the radio,
“continuing the tirade even after being warned multiple times —
probably a few more times than the average person would have gotten.
He was cautioned in the house, ‘Calm down, lower your voice.’ ”
He added,
“The professor at any point in time could have resolved the issue
by quieting down and/or by going back in the house.”
[15]
But in an e-mail message on Thursday,
Professor Gates rebutted the sergeant’s description of his behavior
and said he had
“used no racial slurs,”
“employed no profanity” and
“made no threats.”
[16]
“I most certainly don’t consider myself above the law,
and am profoundly grateful for all of the services performed by the police,”
he wrote.
“But I do not believe that standing up for my rights as a citizen
should be against the law.”
[17]
Asked about the sergeant’s repeated refusal to apologize for the arrest,
Professor Gates wrote:
“I think that Sergeant Crowley has backed himself in a very tight corner,
and I think that is most unfortunate.
My offer to listen to a heartfelt and credible apology is a sincere one,
and continues to stand.”
[18]
The president commented on the matter again Thursday.
In an interview with ABC News that was to be broadcast on “Nightline,”
Mr. Obama said
he was “surprised by the controversy surrounding my statement
because I think it was a pretty straightforward commentary that
you probably don’t need to handcuff a guy, a middle-aged man who uses a cane,
who’s in his own home.”
[19]
He said that he had heard Sergeant Crowley was an “outstanding police officer,”
but added that with all that is going on in the country
,
“it doesn’t make sense to arrest a guy in his own home
if he’s not causing a serious disturbance.”
[20]
The police dropped disorderly conduct charges against Professor Gates
on Tuesday.
[21]
Joseph Johnson,
the investigator for the Cambridge Police Review and Advisory Board,
said the board’s members would meet next week
to decide whether to investigate the incident.
Mr. Johnson said the board had not received any complaints about Sergeant Crowley in the last year,
and that it was still trying to determine
whether he had been the subject of earlier complaints.
[22]
Commissioner Haas said the panel he planned to convene would perhaps
“figure out how we can do things in a better way
so we can de-escalate situations.”
[23]
But he described Sergeant Crowley, who joined the department in 1998,
as “a stalwart member” of the police force.
[24]
“I don’t consider him a rogue cop in any way,” he said, later adding,
“I don’t believe that Sergeant Crowley acted with any racial motivation at all.”
[25]
Charles J. Ogletree, a Harvard professor
who is acting as Professor Gates’s lawyer,
said he had looked into Sergeant Crowley’s professional record
but would not say whether he had found anything troubling.
[26]
Mr. Ogletree added that Professor Gates had not ruled out a lawsuit,
but that for now,
he was focusing on
how to keep the country talking about issues of race and law enforcement.
2009-07-24-CNN-Gates-Lashley
CNN Interviews Cambridge Cop Sgt. Leon Lashley
About Professor Gates Arrest
by Anderson Cooper
CNN/Youtube.com, 2009-07-24 (4:22 video clip)
“This is definitely not a case where it was involved in racism.”
2009-07-24-AP-Gates-Lashley
Black officer at scholar's home supports arrest
By BOB SALSBERG (AP)
Associated Press, 2009-07-24
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. —
A black police officer
who was at Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s home
when the black Harvard scholar was arrested
says
he fully supports how his white fellow officer handled the situation.
Sgt.
Leon Lashley says Gates was probably tired and surprised
when Sgt. James Crowley demanded identification from him
as officers investigated a report of a burglary.
Lashley says Gates’ reaction to Crowley was
“a little bit stranger than it should have been.”
Asked if Gates should have been arrested,
Lashley said supported Crowley “100 percent.”
Gates has said he was the victim of racial profiling.
President Barack Obama says the officers “acted stupidly.”
Lashley called Obama’s remark “unfortunate”
and said he should be allowed to take it back.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE.
Check back soon for further information.
AP’s earlier story is below.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — A multiracial group of police officers on Friday stood with the white officer who arrested a prominent black Harvard scholar and asked President Barack Obama and Gov. Deval Patrick to apologize for comments the union leaders called insulting.
Obama said Wednesday that Cambridge police “acted stupidly” during the disorderly conduct arrest of his friend, Henry Louis Gates Jr., in his own home near Harvard University. Gov. Deval Patrick said Gates’ arrest was “every black man’s nightmare.”
Dennis O’Connor, president of the Cambridge Police Superior Officers Association, said Obama’s remarks were “misdirected” and the Cambridge police “deeply resent the implication” that race was a factor in the arrest.
“President Obama said the actions of the CPD were stupid and linked the event to the history of racial profiling in America,” O’Connor said. “The facts of the case suggested that the president used the right adjective but directed it to the wrong party.”
Officers responded to Gates’ home on July 16 after a woman called 911 and said she saw two black men with backpacks trying to force open the front door. The woman, Lucia Whalen, has not responded to repeated attempts for comment.
Gates has said he returned from an overseas trip, found the door jammed, and that he and his driver attempted to force it open. Gates went through the back door and was inside the house on the phone with the property’s management company when police arrived.
Police said he flew into a verbal rage after Sgt. James Crowley, who is white, asked him to show identification to prove he should be in the home. Police say Gates accused Crowley of racial bias, refused to calm down and was arrested. The charge was dropped Tuesday, but Gates has demanded an apology, calling his arrest a case of racial profiling.
Gates, 58, maintains he turned over identification when asked to do so by the police. He said Crowley arrested him after the professor followed him to the porch, repeatedly demanding the sergeant’s name and badge number because he was unhappy over his treatment.
Crowley has refused to apologize, saying he followed protocol.
2009-07-25-NYT-Gates
Obama Shifts Tone on Gates After Mulling Debate
By PETER BAKER and HELENE COOPER
New York Times, 2009-07-25
[17]
Sgt. Leon Lashley,
an African-American officer at the Gates house that day,
separately told The Associated Press that
he supported Sergeant Crowley’s actions “100 percent.”
2009-07-27-Gates-PPG-Dailey
The Harvard professor teaches Victimology 101
By
Ruth Ann Dailey
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2009-07-27
It’s this simple:
Sometimes a black American faces conflict
because he’s standing up to racism.
Sometimes a black American faces conflict
because he’s acting like a jerk.
...
A rueful Mr. Obama
hoped that this episode would become a “teachable moment.”
It can, if everyone -- especially a professor -- is willing to learn.
2009-07-27-Gates-Crowley-NYT-2-Cambridge-Worlds-Collide
2 Cambridge Worlds Collide in Unlikely Meeting
By DON VAN NATTA Jr. and ABBY GOODNOUGH
New York Times, 2009-07-27
Sgt. James M. Crowley’s initial response was to
a bare-bones report of a crime in process
in a neighborhood that had seen
23 cases of breaking and entering so far this year,
many during daylight hours.
...
When Professor Gates first saw Sergeant Crowley at his door,
he said in an interview, he expected him to say,
“How can I help you, sir?”
Instead the officer told him to step onto the porch.
Sergeant Crowley expected the professor to do what he had asked.
Instead Professor Gates told him, “No, I will not.”
...
In interviews last week,
Sergeant Crowley said he remained calm
throughout his time with Professor Gates,
never raising his voice.
He was surprised, he said,
that the professor refused his initial request to step outside.
“I didn’t know who he was,” the sergeant told a local radio station.
“I was by myself.
I was the only police officer standing there,
and I got a report that there were people breaking into a house.
That was for my safety first and foremost.
I have to go home at night to
three beautiful children and a wife who depend on me.”
...
After a week of filming a documentary in China and a stop in New York,
Professor Gates returned July 16 to a city that has been his home for 18 years
and a neighborhood, Harvard Square,
that he calls “one of the most tolerant places on earth.”
Still weary from the 14-hour flight and nursing a bronchial infection,
Professor Gates was bewildered, he said, to find his front door jammed,
as if someone had tried to jimmy the lock.
He enlisted the driver who had picked him up at Logan Airport —
whom he described as burly and dark-skinned but Moroccan, not black —
to help wedge it open.
When the sergeant asked Professor Gates to step outside
instead of greeting him cordially,
and proceeded to demand identification
even after Dr. Gates said he was a Harvard professor who lived in the house,
Professor Gates said he had felt not only confused but also indignant.
His resentment grew, he said,
when he asked Sergeant Crowley to identify himself and received no response.
(The sergeant has said that he provided his name several times
but that Professor Gates very likely could not hear over his own shouting.)
...
2009-07-30-Harbaugh-Washington-Post-Gates-Lashley
Does the
Washington Post report
the relevant and significant news relative to the key issues of the day?
Well,
certainly not in the highly charged case
of whether Henry Gates was a victim of racism.
Recall the
CNN interview
where Cambridge Police Sergeant Lashley,
who is African-American
and actually heard part of the interaction between Gates and Crowley,
said:
“This is definitely not a case where it was involved in racism.”.
Recall the
AP story
which contained the following:
Asked if Gates should have been arrested,
Lashley said supported Crowley “100 percent.”
Recall the
NYT story
which reported on the AP story, and contained the following:
Sgt. Leon Lashley,
an African-American officer at the Gates house that day,
separately told The Associated Press that
he supported Sergeant Crowley’s actions “100 percent.”
Yet from 07-24, when those stories about Sergeant Leon Lashley began,
to today, Thursday, 07-30,
the only mentions of Leon Lashley,
according to
the search engine as www.washingtonpost.com
were contained in two photo captions (
07-28,
07-29),
which showed him as part of a larger scene.
In other words,
the
Washington Post from 07-24 to 07-30 in their main text
has not printed a single word of reporting
concerning Lashley’s statements cited above.
The
Washington Post has given great coverage to the Gates/Crowley story,
with tsunamis of words branding the Cambridge police’s actions as “racist.”
What words are strong enough
to condemn the responsible parties at the Post
for not publishing the countervailing view
by an African-American sworn officer
who was on site for the confrontation?
How much more proof is needed to prove that
the editors of the
Post are craven stooges of, not only Zionist interests,
but also of
those parts of black America which demand censorship
of all views and speech incompatible with their goals?
2009-07-30-Gates-Examiner-Kane
Four 'teachable moments' from Cambridge Cops Caper
By Gregory Kane
Washington Examiner, 2009-07-30
2009-07-30-WP-AP-Lashley
Black cop at Gates home regrets ‘Uncle Tom’ label
The Associated Press
Thursday, July 30, 2009 7:34 PM
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. --
A black sergeant
who was at the home of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. when he was arrested
says
he’s been maligned as an “Uncle Tom”
for supporting the actions of the white arresting officer.
Cambridge Sgt. Leon Lashley
gave a letter to Sgt. James Crowley
to give to President Barack Obama
during their so-called beer summit with Gates
on Thursday night at the White House.
In the letter, which was also sent to CNN,
Lashley says
Gates “may have caused grave and potentially irreparable harm
to the struggle for racial harmony.”
Lashley says
he has become known as a traitor to his heritage by some
because he “spoke the truth” about the arrest.
Gates was charged with disorderly conduct by police investigating a burglary.
The charge was later dropped.
Black Children, White Police
2009-07-30-WP-Brown-Lessons-for-Black-Children
In New Times, Old Lessons for Black Children
[the as-printed title:
“The Time To Impart Lessons on Authority”]
Parents Teach Truths To ‘Post-Racial’ Youth
By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post, 2009-07-30 (
Style Section, page C-1)
[1]
These are not new lessons taught to black children sitting at the dinner table.
[2]
They are old lessons, repeated in an oral tradition for survival.
Told by
grandmothers with wrinkled hands,
grandfathers who saw something way back when,
worried mothers talking in hypotheticals.
[3]
They are lessons you don’t want to teach a child because it could
make him feel vulnerable,
crack her innocence,
pop this generation’s colorblind bubble.
[4]
So you wait until it’s absolutely necessary and relevant,
and explain it like this:
[5]
If you are ever stopped by the police, be polite.
Say: “Yes, sir. No, sir.”
Make no sudden movements.
Do not try to run.
[6]
Why? they ask.
[7]
And that’s when you tell them:
You are a black child in America.
There is a history here.
So, baby, just be careful.
[8]
“I tell them if a police officer comes up to you, all you have to say is,
‘Okay, officer. Yes, sir. Thank you.’
Then move on. Don’t say nothing smart,”
says James Thompson, whose son is 15 and tall for his age.
He goes to school in Bethesda, has white friends,
spends his time skateboarding through the streets.
He’s a baby, really, living in a “post-racial” world.
[9]
“That is one thing I’m scared of,” says Thompson,
a proud man who does not like to feel scared.
“They don’t know the danger that is out there.
They don’t know this happens all the time,
but it just happened to happen to a prominent man.”
[10]
The arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.
served as a lesson update for Dana Green, 40,
whose sons are 13 and 18.
“If they could take a prominent, highly respected black man out in cuffs,
then surely, my recent high school graduate,
who has yet to master an articulate vocabulary
and sometimes fails to wear a belt,
he would certainly be carried out in a body bag,”
says Green, an educator who lives in Bowie.
“I am telling them to comply first, appeal later.
That’s my motto in our house.”
[11]
For a lot of people -- black and white --
the incident in which
Gates was arrested on his front porch after talking back to police
prompted a “teachable moment” to examine the intersection of race and justice,
or perhaps misunderstandings between
two men from different backgrounds in Cambridge, Mass.
President Obama has invited both Gates and Sgt. James Crowley
to the White House for a beer Thursday evening.
Because talking things over
just might be the best way to resolve incidents like these.
Once a heated situation is defused and titles are pulled back,
we find two individuals with stories to tell.
[12]
Outside the White House, away from the peace beer,
people are carrying on their own conversations.
[13]
For some parents, the incident boiled down to four words: “I told you so.”
[14]
“Black parents are using this as a case in point of
what they have been saying all along,”
says Ronald Walters,
professor emeritus of politics at the University of Maryland.
“We live in a different era where kids are less racially conscious.
A lot don’t believe that stuff their parents talk about.
They say, ‘That is your era. Things are different now.’
But parents have been trying to make the case racism hasn’t gone away
and they are likely to confront it,
especially black males.”
[15]
Just two weeks ago,
Walters had the same conversation with his 17-year-old nephew,
who had stayed out too late.
“I picked him up at a Metro station,” Walters recalls.
“I was telling him,
‘If you don’t get hit in the head by a mugger,
you are going to be stopped by the cops.’
He said, ‘Yeah, Daddy told me that.’ ”
[16]
Why that conversation?
[17]
“Because they are stopped by the police all the time,” Walters says.
“That is part of the rite of passage for a black male.”
Parents teach their children that police are good, too. Heroes sometimes.
White parents, too,
teach their children that they should be respectful around police --
because police deserve respect.
...
2009-07-31-Harbaugh-Black-Children-White-Police
I want to offer some commentary on
the above Washington Post article by DeNeen Brown.
I am a white Anglo-Saxon protestant male, born in the 1940s,
with a thoroughly middle-class upbringing.
Here are the rules I, as a child,
was taught for how to deal with the police:
- Treat them with respect, deference, and courtesy.
- If they tell you what to do, do exactly what they tell you.
My family taught me those, also the schools and general culture reinforced them.
The reason given for those rules was quite simply that
the police are there to enforce the general rules of a civilized society.
If they ask you to do something,
it is in the interest of the broader society,
or required for an investigation they are doing.
In any case, why on earth would anyone
not want to cooperate with the police?
If you were a law-abiding child or adult,
the police were on your side.
Compare
the rules stated by DeNeen Brown in paragraph 5:
- If you are ever stopped by the police, be polite.
- Say: “Yes, sir. No, sir.”
- Make no sudden movements.
- Do not try to run.
Well, politeness was surely called for by the white rules.
(By the way, are black children not instructed to be polite as a matter of course?
Are black children only told to be polite to avoid police harassment?)
The “Yes, sir. No, sir.” comes under respect
(actually, we were told to call them “Officer”).
“Make no sudden movements.”?
Just common sense.
Why do anything which an officer might construe as a threat?
“Do not try to run.”?
That comes under cooperation.
Running (from the police) is the opposite of cooperation.
So, all those rules that blacks claim are called for as a response to racism
in fact are applied to white children just as being part of civilized society.
So, the question for the black community is:
If the rules are the same for both white and black children,
how on earth do you claim that
when the rules are given to your children,
the reason is racism?
One might also ask:
Suppose there was none of this “racism” and toxic history
that you, the black community, are always discerning.
In a racism-free world,
what rules would you give your children for dealing with the police?
Since the rules Brown cites are, she claims,
only called for due to racism and fear ,
just what are the rules for dealing with the police
you would favor in the ideal world
as the black community defined it?
By the way, my opinion, for which there is considerable evidence,
but no positive proof,
is that Jews have deliberately fanned your perceptions of racism,
so they will have an ally in their attempt to obtain hegemony over America
(and, of course, maintain perpetual support for Israel).
While this may have its attractions for the black community
(Hey, we’re victims! They owe us.)
it has the downside of preventing you
from dealing yourself with problems that you could easily deal with
(the obesity problem is an obvious example--talk about self-inflicted!).
To me, as a white man, it seems quite obvious that
many, if not most, of the problems blacks in America face
(e.g., obesity, drugs, violence, children born out of wedlock, unemployment)
are strictly self-inflicted.
But the argument that you face overwhelming racism at every turn
keeps you from seeing that and dealing with it accordingly.ok no further than the March 4 trial in which two black women are suing Southwest Airlines for discrimination after a flight attendant uttered the following: “Eenie, meenie, minie, mo; pick a seat, we gotta go.”
[3]
If you’ve been taking your vitamins and eating plenty of brain food, you may be experiencing the first hint of a primal scream just now. You also probably understand without excessive mental strain what the attendant meant:
[4]
“We’re taking off. If you don’t have seat, pick one.” Pretty please with sugar on top. But the two women, Louise Sawyer, 46, and Grace Fuller, 48, heard it another way.
[5]
“It was like I was too dumb to find a seat,” said Fuller. When the other passengers tittered, Fuller says she felt “alienated.” As a quick aside, who doesn’t feel alienated when packed into a large flying missile potentially aimed for tall buildings?
[6]
Meanwhile, isn’t it possible the other passengers thought the attendant, then-22-year-old Jennifer Cundiff, was cute? That her attempt at humorous cajoling and gentle prodding met qualifications for appreciative tittering?
[7]
But no, Sawyer and Fuller are certain that the rhyme was directed at them specifically because they are black. Could they also possibly be dangerously self-absorbed? Just a thought.
[8]
The basis of the complaint is that the Eenie-Meenie rhyme used to include a racist slur, and indeed it did. I’m old enough to remember when people used the “N” word. I also remember my parents telling me that nice people didn’t use that word and that if I did, I’d be beaten to within an inch of my life.
[9]
Of course, today my parents would be locked up for offending my tender sensibilities, and I’d be in foster care. As it turned out, I remembered always to say, “Catch a tiger by the toe.”
[10]
Cundiff, on the other hand, is young enough to be my daughter and says she never heard the racist version. She says she learned the rhyme from fellow Southwest employees who use it to motivate passengers to sit down and buckle up.
[11]
One would have thought that such an obviously frivolous lawsuit would be dismissed or never filed. The women’s claims of physical and emotional distress in fact were thrown out. But U.S. District Judge Kathryn Vratil determined that, because of its history, the rhyme “could reasonably be viewed as objectively racist and offensive.”
[12]
No it couldn’t, but the trial will make good copy, so I shouldn’t complain. When your livelihood depends on the consistent stupidity of human beings, one can only bask in today’s unparalleled bounty.
[13]
Still, our culture of extreme sensitivity -and the environment of intolerance it creates -portends a scary future when all aspects of our lives, from thought to speech, are regulated and micromanaged by allegedly well-meaning bureaucrats with legal powers to prosecute or otherwise ruin.
[14]
A recent example of the latter can be found at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where Martha Lamb, a guest lecturer in social work, lost her job by citing an old racist expression that offended some students.
[15]
The example was indeed offensive and proffered in the spirit of demonstrating how things have changed since Lamb was a student in North Carolina in the ‘60s. People used to joke, she said, that the NAACP really stood for “Niggers Ain’t Acting Like Colored People.”
[16]
Fast forward, Lamb is no more. After some students walked out and the rest eventually dropped the course, the diagnosis was that Lamb’s historical anecdote so offended students that they couldn’t learn anything. University officials have said that Lamb violated the school’s policy requiring teachers to provide a “comfortable” environment for students. Lamb resigned in early February.
[17]
Clearly racial slurs are unacceptable, but is history also off limits? And by what logic should education ensure that students always be comfortable? Understanding and enlightenment, purportedly the goals of education, do not come pain-free, I’ve noticed.
[18]
But what matter? Present-day sensitivity trumps discomfort-causing reality. For her lack of sensitivity, Lamb now faces a future tarnished by insinuations of racism.
[19]
Meanwhile, Judge Vratil and the two offended women -forevermore imprinted in broader minds as the Eenie-Meenie Sisters -are taking the American judicial system down another notch, away from reason toward a future defined by bureaucracy, the ultimate expression of which, we might note, is oppression and tyranny.
The Henry Louis Gates Affair
Below are a number of articles dealing with this by now very well known affair.
But first here are some observations of mine that I have not noticed in the MSM.
First, an incidental point.
Notice how large the house Gates was occupying is.
(See
this or
this (scroll down for photo), or
visit
maps.google.com, type in 17 Ware St Cambridge,
and click on “Street view”.)
If the front door was “jimmied” or jammed,
why did Gates not just use another door?
I used to live in a house much smaller than that,
but it had a front door, back door, and basement door,
all opened by the same key (so I did not have to carry so many keys).
Does Gates’s apparently large house really only have one door?
In fact, don’t Fire Codes require that
all dwellings have at least two outside doors?
But, of course, this issue doesn’t affect
the problematic aspects of the subsequent story.
But now on to my main point:
How would a typical white guy have reacted in Gates’s situation?
Well, for this at least, I will nominate myself as a typical white guy,
with a typical middle-class background.
Suppose I returned from a trip and had to break something,
especially something visible from the front, to enter my house.
Maybe this is normal behavior in the black community,
but it surely isn’t in the white.
It raises red flags in one’s mind as constituting “breaking and entering,”
because that is exactly what it is.
Now, breaking and entering can be either legal or illegal,
but I think it is highly probable that
far more instances of breaking and entering are illegal than legal,
so anyone observing this act would be justified in
strongly suspecting the probability (but not the certainty)
that a crime had been committed,
and would, if a conscientious citizen, call the police to report it.
I would be well aware of this possibility, and would be prepared
for a visit from the police within the next ten to fifteen minutes
to check up on things,
to find out if the person who broke in and entered
had the legal right to do so.
And again, the odds would be that the act was illegal.
In any case, when the police arrived,
I would be well aware that I would be a suspect in a criminal act,
and surely not be assumed to be the homeowner
wondering why the police were paying a visit.
As I said, all this would pass through my mind
immediately after I had broken and entered, if not before.
As a result, when the police did come to the house,
I would realize that they would have entirely natural suspicions about me
and treat me as a suspect, which indeed I would be to them.
It would be
my responsibility to, by my manner,
assure them that I was not a criminal,
and would cooperate with them in any way I could
to prove that I had done nothing illegal.
But now how did Gates react?
Well,
according to the New York Times,
When Professor Gates first saw Sergeant Crowley at his door,
he said in an interview, he expected him to say,
“How can I help you, sir?”
The conclusion seems inescapable:
Either Gates is a complete idiot
or has no sense of his responsibility to law enforcement.
But what is worse,
why on earth is the black “elite” defending him in this situation?
Where are the black commentators who will defend the actions of the police,
and urge Gates to stand down and cool his ire?
Yes, I understand that in many other cases,
blacks may well have been mistreated by the police.
But that does not, I believe, justify outrage over what happened to Gates.
There may (or may not) be a legtimate historical grievance.
But please, black community,
make your case (or cases)
in instances where the wrong-doing is more clear cut than in this one.
Miscellaneous Articles
2009-07-16-Gates-Youtube-original-911-call
911 Caller: 'They Were Pushing the Door In'
Youtube.com, 2009-07-16 (2:50 audio clip)
Note: You can see the location,
and get a photo of the house front,
at
maps.google.com.
Just type in 17 Ware St Cambridge.
2009-07-16-Gates-Crowley-original-incident-report-9005127
Incident Report #9005127
Cambridge MA Police Department
James Crowley, Reporting Officer
2009-07-16
2009-07-24-NYT-Gates-Crowley-prelim
Officer Defends Arrest of Harvard Professor
By LIZ ROBBINS
New York Times, 2009-07-24
The Cambridge police sergeant who arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. last week said in radio interviews on Thursday that he was disappointed by President Barack Obama’s comment that the Cambridge police department had “acted stupidly” in the case, and said that he would not apologize as Professor Gates had requested.
The officer, Sgt. James Crowley, spoke to two Boston radio stations on Thursday. In a 22-minute interview on WEEI, a Boston sports-talk station, he offered his account of the arrest last Thursday, which came as he investigated a report of a break-in at Professor Gates’s home in Cambridge.
Charges of disorderly conduct against Professor Gates, a leading African-American scholar, were dropped on Tuesday, and the police and Mr. Gates issued a joint statement calling the incident “regrettable and unfortunate.” But President Obama continued to fuel debate in his nationally televised news conference Wednesday evening, using a reporter’s question about the incident to address the national issue of racial profiling, though he acknowledged that he did not know all the facts of the Cambridge case and that Professor Gates was a friend of his.
In the WEEI interview, Sergeant Crowley, who is white, responded to the president’s comments. “I think it’s disappointing that he waded into a local issue, and really, something that plays out here,” he said. “As he said at the beginning of the press conference, he didn’t know the facts, and he certainly doesn’t, based on those comments.”
Sergeant Crowley said that he arrested Professor Gates because the professor got angry after being asked for identification and proof of his address, and continued his “tirade after being warned multiple times.” The sergeant was adamant that he was following police procedures in making the arrest.
Professor Gates said in an interview Tuesday that he wanted a personal apology from the sergeant, and that he might still consider suing the police department.
“As I said yesterday, that apology will never come,” Sergeant Crowley said on Thursday. “It won’t come from me as Jim Crowley, it won’t come from me as a sergeant in the Cambridge police department.”
He added: “I know what I did was right. I have nothing to apologize for.”
Professor Gates did not immediately respond to an e-mail message seeking comment on the sergeant’s remarks.
On Thursday morning, the mayor of Cambridge, E. Denise Simmons, said she had been in contact with Professor Gates, and had apologized to him on behalf of the city of Cambridge, but she said she had not yet spoken to Sergeant Crowley. The mayor said she was still gathering information about the arrest, and planned to have meetings with the police department. On Tuesday she issued a statement saying that she was “pleased” that the charges had been dropped.
Though the joint statement he issued with the city, the police force and the Middlesex district attorney’s office on Tuesday said the matter was resolved, Professor Gates has continued to speak about the incident in national media interviews, and President Obama’s remarks kept it in the spotlight.
“The president did say that he was friends with Professor Gates,” Mayor Simmons said in a telephone interview. “Like the rest of us, he had not yet heard all the facts. I don’t want to make a comment based on the president’s comments.”
Although the mayor, who is black, would not comment when asked if she had any concerns about racial profiling in the city’s police department, she said that she hoped the incident would spur an instructive dialogue about race.
“Is there a problem with race issues in the county? Yes,” she said. “Is there a problem with it in Massachusetts? Yes there is. In Cambridge, we are a small part of society, and we’re trying to be proactive.
“I am looking at this situation as opportunity to have open and candid conversations around our city. How do we make this a place where everyone can feel safe?”
Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley have offered differing accounts of the incident, which occurred as Professor Gates was returning from a trip to China where he had been filming a PBS documentary. The front door of the house was stuck closed, and his taxi driver helped him to pry it open. A neighbor, seeing the activity at the door, called 911, saying that two black men were breaking into the house.
Sergeant Crowley said that when he arrived on the scene in response, he asked Professor Gates for identification showing that he lived at that address. Professor Gates has said that he thinks Sergeant Crowley did not believe he lived there because he is black.
On the radio program, Sergeant Crowley said, repeating what he said was in the police report, that Professor Gates showed him a Harvard ID card, but not a driver’s license with his address. “That would have been helpful,” the officer told the WEEI hosts, John Dennis and Gerry Callahan.
But Professor Gates said in an interview on Tuesday that he had given the officer his Massachusetts driver’s license as well as his Harvard ID.
“He asked me if I could prove I was a Harvard professor,” Professor Gates said. “I thought that was unusual. He proceeded to ask me another question, and I said, ‘I’m not going to answer that question, I want to know your name and your badge number.’ ”
According to Sergeant Crowley, the question he asked was, “Is there anybody in the home with you?”
The officer said this was routine in cases of a possible break-in, when an intruder might be in the building
But Professor Gates said the officer did not seem concerned with his safety, and that he refused to give the professor his information.
Next, the sergeant said, he warned Professor Gates to calm down and lower his voice, and to step outside to his front porch. Sergeant Crowley said he gave the professor two warnings, the second while holding a set of handcuffs, but that the professor continued berating him. “The professor at any point in time could have resolved the issue by quieting down and/or by going back in the house,” he said in the radio interview.
Professor Gates said on Tuesday that it was Sergeant Crowley who became angry.
The only apology Sergeant Crowley offered on Thursday was for not knowing Professor Gates. “I apologize that I was not aware who Professor Gates was,” the officer said. “I am still just amazed that somebody of his level of intelligence would stoop to such a level, berate me, accuse me of me being a racist, of racial profiling.”
Sergeant Crowley was an instructor at the Lowell Police Academy for five years, teaching a class on racial profiling and how officers can deal with certain situations, according to the Associated Press.
Before joining the Cambridge force, Sergeant Crowley was in the national spotlight as a Brandeis University police officer. He was on duty on July 27, 1993 when the Boston Celtics star Reggie Lewis suffered a massive heart attack during a private workout on campus. Sergeant Crowley, who knew of the player’s previous collapse during an April playoff game, tried to resuscitate Mr. Lewis, who was black, by administering CPR, but was unsuccessful.
In the news conference Wednesday evening, most of the questions put to President Obama were about health-care policy, but the final one about the national implications of Professor Gates’s arrest. “I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry," President Obama said after noting his friendship with the professor. "Number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. And number three — what I think we know separate and apart from this incident — is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately, and that’s just a fact."
On Thursday, Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, clarified President Obama’s comments to a pool reporter on Air Force One. “Let me be clear: he was not calling the officer stupid, O.K.?” Mr. Gibbs said. He added that the president was simply saying that “at a certain point the situation got far out of hand, and I think all sides understand that.”
Sergeant Crowley did not respond to a request for an interview with The New York Times.
In Cambridge on Thursday, his father, Daniel Crowley, 75, spoke from the family home where James Crowley grew up. The elder Mr. Crowley said that his son was the third of four sons, and that all four work in law enforcement; the oldest is a Middlesex County deputy sheriff and the other three are all officers in Cambridge.
“Obama’s comments turned me off,” Mr. Crowley said. “I voted for him; I can’t say I would again.”
He said his son James, who is a married father of three, had “close friends of all colors” growing up, and went to the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. “My son is a hard worker,” Mr. Crowley said. “I know what he’s like. He’s a good person. What’s the big deal? They’re making a whole lot out of nothing.”
2009-07-24-NYT-Gates-Crowley-final
Sergeant Who Arrested Professor Defends Actions
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
New York Times, 2009-07-24
BOSTON —
[1]
The police sergeant
whom President Obama accused of acting “stupidly”
in arresting a prominent black Harvard professor
offered his own account of the incident on Thursday,
adding a new dimension to a drama that has transfixed the nation.
[2]
The arrest of the professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr.,
was dominating talk shows and dinner conversations
even before Mr. Obama discussed it on Wednesday at his news conference.
But the president’s comments
seemed to further polarize the national debate over
whether the sergeant, James Crowley, who is white,
was right to arrest Professor Gates for disorderly conduct
while investigating a possible break-in
at the professor’s home in Cambridge, Mass.
[3]
Police unions and other law enforcement groups
lined up behind Sergeant Crowley on Thursday,
calling his actions justified,
while the Congressional Black Caucus defended Mr. Obama’s remarks
and called on Congress to address the issue of racial profiling.
[4]
Commissioner Robert C. Haas of the Cambridge Police Department
said he would convene a panel to investigate the incident,
but added that his officers were “deeply pained” by Mr. Obama’s comments
and that
Sergeant Crowley had followed protocol.
[5]
At heart, the dispute between Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley
centers on two things:
which one of them treated the other rudely and
whether they properly identified themselves.
Professor Gates, 58, says
the sergeant repeatedly refused to reveal his name or badge number;
Sergeant Crowley, 42, says
the professor initially refused to provide identification,
then produced only his Harvard ID card, which included no address,
to prove he lived in the house.
[6]
Sergeant Crowley, a native of Cambridge,
told a local sports radio station on Thursday that
Mr. Obama “didn’t know all the facts” and that
Professor Gates —
a prolific scholar of African-American history
and one of the nation’s leading black intellectuals —
had been oddly belligerent from the start of their encounter on July 16.
[7]
“From the time he opened the door it seemed that
he was very upset, very put off
that I was there in the first place,”
Sergeant Crowley told the station, WEEI.
“Not just what he said, but the tone in which he said it,
just seemed very peculiar —
even more so now that I know how educated he is.”
[8]
Sergeant Crowley’s visit
to the professor’s yellow wood frame home near Harvard Square
was prompted by a 911 call from a passer-by
who reported two black men trying to force open the front door.
The men were in fact
Professor Gates, just home from a trip to China, and his cab driver;
Professor Gates said earlier this week that
his door was jammed
and he had asked the driver for help shoving it open.
[9]
After getting in
and calling Harvard’s maintenance department to come fix the door,
Professor Gates said,
he saw Sergeant Crowley on his porch.
The sergeant was disrespectful from the beginning, the professor said,
asking him to step outside without explanation
and demanding identification while refusing to provide his own.
[10]
But Sergeant Crowley said Thursday that he was only protecting himself
when he asked Professor Gates, whom he did not recognize,
to come out and identify himself.
Daytime break-ins are not unheard of in the neighborhood, he said.
[11]
Sergeant Crowley described the woman who reported the possible break-in —
who works at Harvard Magazine, on Professor Gates’s street —
as “reliable,” and said that
while the professor did not “look like somebody who would break into a house,”
his tone was troubling.
[12]
In the police report he filed,
Sergeant Crowley said Professor Gates had refused to step outside
and, when told the sergeant was investigating a possible break-in, said,
“Why, because I’m a black man in America?”
According to the report,
Professor Gates also accused the sergeant of being racist
and yelled that he “wasn’t someone to mess with.”
[13]
Sergeant Crowley said he tried to identify himself several times
but the professor was shouting too loudly to hear.
[14]
“He was arrested after following me outside the house,”
Sergeant Crowley said on the radio,
“continuing the tirade even after being warned multiple times —
probably a few more times than the average person would have gotten.
He was cautioned in the house, ‘Calm down, lower your voice.’ ”
He added,
“The professor at any point in time could have resolved the issue
by quieting down and/or by going back in the house.”
[15]
But in an e-mail message on Thursday,
Professor Gates rebutted the sergeant’s description of his behavior
and said he had
“used no racial slurs,”
“employed no profanity” and
“made no threats.”
[16]
“I most certainly don’t consider myself above the law,
and am profoundly grateful for all of the services performed by the police,”
he wrote.
“But I do not believe that standing up for my rights as a citizen
should be against the law.”
[17]
Asked about the sergeant’s repeated refusal to apologize for the arrest,
Professor Gates wrote:
“I think that Sergeant Crowley has backed himself in a very tight corner,
and I think that is most unfortunate.
My offer to listen to a heartfelt and credible apology is a sincere one,
and continues to stand.”
[18]
The president commented on the matter again Thursday.
In an interview with ABC News that was to be broadcast on “Nightline,”
Mr. Obama said
he was “surprised by the controversy surrounding my statement
because I think it was a pretty straightforward commentary that
you probably don’t need to handcuff a guy, a middle-aged man who uses a cane,
who’s in his own home.”
[19]
He said that he had heard Sergeant Crowley was an “outstanding police officer,”
but added that with all that is going on in the country
,
“it doesn’t make sense to arrest a guy in his own home
if he’s not causing a serious disturbance.”
[20]
The police dropped disorderly conduct charges against Professor Gates
on Tuesday.
[21]
Joseph Johnson,
the investigator for the Cambridge Police Review and Advisory Board,
said the board’s members would meet next week
to decide whether to investigate the incident.
Mr. Johnson said the board had not received any complaints about Sergeant Crowley in the last year,
and that it was still trying to determine
whether he had been the subject of earlier complaints.
[22]
Commissioner Haas said the panel he planned to convene would perhaps
“figure out how we can do things in a better way
so we can de-escalate situations.”
[23]
But he described Sergeant Crowley, who joined the department in 1998,
as “a stalwart member” of the police force.
[24]
“I don’t consider him a rogue cop in any way,” he said, later adding,
“I don’t believe that Sergeant Crowley acted with any racial motivation at all.”
[25]
Charles J. Ogletree, a Harvard professor
who is acting as Professor Gates’s lawyer,
said he had looked into Sergeant Crowley’s professional record
but would not say whether he had found anything troubling.
[26]
Mr. Ogletree added that Professor Gates had not ruled out a lawsuit,
but that for now,
he was focusing on
how to keep the country talking about issues of race and law enforcement.
2009-07-24-CNN-Gates-Lashley
CNN Interviews Cambridge Cop Sgt. Leon Lashley
About Professor Gates Arrest
by Anderson Cooper
CNN/Youtube.com, 2009-07-24 (4:22 video clip)
“This is definitely not a case where it was involved in racism.”
2009-07-24-AP-Gates-Lashley
Black officer at scholar's home supports arrest
By BOB SALSBERG (AP)
Associated Press, 2009-07-24
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. —
A black police officer
who was at Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s home
when the black Harvard scholar was arrested
says
he fully supports how his white fellow officer handled the situation.
Sgt.
Leon Lashley says Gates was probably tired and surprised
when Sgt. James Crowley demanded identification from him
as officers investigated a report of a burglary.
Lashley says Gates’ reaction to Crowley was
“a little bit stranger than it should have been.”
Asked if Gates should have been arrested,
Lashley said supported Crowley “100 percent.”
Gates has said he was the victim of racial profiling.
President Barack Obama says the officers “acted stupidly.”
Lashley called Obama’s remark “unfortunate”
and said he should be allowed to take it back.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE.
Check back soon for further information.
AP’s earlier story is below.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — A multiracial group of police officers on Friday stood with the white officer who arrested a prominent black Harvard scholar and asked President Barack Obama and Gov. Deval Patrick to apologize for comments the union leaders called insulting.
Obama said Wednesday that Cambridge police “acted stupidly” during the disorderly conduct arrest of his friend, Henry Louis Gates Jr., in his own home near Harvard University. Gov. Deval Patrick said Gates’ arrest was “every black man’s nightmare.”
Dennis O’Connor, president of the Cambridge Police Superior Officers Association, said Obama’s remarks were “misdirected” and the Cambridge police “deeply resent the implication” that race was a factor in the arrest.
“President Obama said the actions of the CPD were stupid and linked the event to the history of racial profiling in America,” O’Connor said. “The facts of the case suggested that the president used the right adjective but directed it to the wrong party.”
Officers responded to Gates’ home on July 16 after a woman called 911 and said she saw two black men with backpacks trying to force open the front door. The woman, Lucia Whalen, has not responded to repeated attempts for comment.
Gates has said he returned from an overseas trip, found the door jammed, and that he and his driver attempted to force it open. Gates went through the back door and was inside the house on the phone with the property’s management company when police arrived.
Police said he flew into a verbal rage after Sgt. James Crowley, who is white, asked him to show identification to prove he should be in the home. Police say Gates accused Crowley of racial bias, refused to calm down and was arrested. The charge was dropped Tuesday, but Gates has demanded an apology, calling his arrest a case of racial profiling.
Gates, 58, maintains he turned over identification when asked to do so by the police. He said Crowley arrested him after the professor followed him to the porch, repeatedly demanding the sergeant’s name and badge number because he was unhappy over his treatment.
Crowley has refused to apologize, saying he followed protocol.
2009-07-25-NYT-Gates
Obama Shifts Tone on Gates After Mulling Debate
By PETER BAKER and HELENE COOPER
New York Times, 2009-07-25
[17]
Sgt. Leon Lashley,
an African-American officer at the Gates house that day,
separately told The Associated Press that
he supported Sergeant Crowley’s actions “100 percent.”
2009-07-27-Gates-PPG-Dailey
The Harvard professor teaches Victimology 101
By
Ruth Ann Dailey
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2009-07-27
It’s this simple:
Sometimes a black American faces conflict
because he’s standing up to racism.
Sometimes a black American faces conflict
because he’s acting like a jerk.
...
A rueful Mr. Obama
hoped that this episode would become a “teachable moment.”
It can, if everyone -- especially a professor -- is willing to learn.
2009-07-27-Gates-Crowley-NYT-2-Cambridge-Worlds-Collide
2 Cambridge Worlds Collide in Unlikely Meeting
By DON VAN NATTA Jr. and ABBY GOODNOUGH
New York Times, 2009-07-27
Sgt. James M. Crowley’s initial response was to
a bare-bones report of a crime in process
in a neighborhood that had seen
23 cases of breaking and entering so far this year,
many during daylight hours.
...
When Professor Gates first saw Sergeant Crowley at his door,
he said in an interview, he expected him to say,
“How can I help you, sir?”
Instead the officer told him to step onto the porch.
Sergeant Crowley expected the professor to do what he had asked.
Instead Professor Gates told him, “No, I will not.”
...
In interviews last week,
Sergeant Crowley said he remained calm
throughout his time with Professor Gates,
never raising his voice.
He was surprised, he said,
that the professor refused his initial request to step outside.
“I didn’t know who he was,” the sergeant told a local radio station.
“I was by myself.
I was the only police officer standing there,
and I got a report that there were people breaking into a house.
That was for my safety first and foremost.
I have to go home at night to
three beautiful children and a wife who depend on me.”
...
After a week of filming a documentary in China and a stop in New York,
Professor Gates returned July 16 to a city that has been his home for 18 years
and a neighborhood, Harvard Square,
that he calls “one of the most tolerant places on earth.”
Still weary from the 14-hour flight and nursing a bronchial infection,
Professor Gates was bewildered, he said, to find his front door jammed,
as if someone had tried to jimmy the lock.
He enlisted the driver who had picked him up at Logan Airport —
whom he described as burly and dark-skinned but Moroccan, not black —
to help wedge it open.
When the sergeant asked Professor Gates to step outside
instead of greeting him cordially,
and proceeded to demand identification
even after Dr. Gates said he was a Harvard professor who lived in the house,
Professor Gates said he had felt not only confused but also indignant.
His resentment grew, he said,
when he asked Sergeant Crowley to identify himself and received no response.
(The sergeant has said that he provided his name several times
but that Professor Gates very likely could not hear over his own shouting.)
...
2009-07-30-Harbaugh-Washington-Post-Gates-Lashley
Does the
Washington Post report
the relevant and significant news relative to the key issues of the day?
Well,
certainly not in the highly charged case
of whether Henry Gates was a victim of racism.
Recall the
CNN interview
where Cambridge Police Sergeant Lashley,
who is African-American
and actually heard part of the interaction between Gates and Crowley,
said:
“This is definitely not a case where it was involved in racism.”.
Recall the
AP story
which contained the following:
Asked if Gates should have been arrested,
Lashley said supported Crowley “100 percent.”
Recall the
NYT story
which reported on the AP story, and contained the following:
Sgt. Leon Lashley,
an African-American officer at the Gates house that day,
separately told The Associated Press that
he supported Sergeant Crowley’s actions “100 percent.”
Yet from 07-24, when those stories about Sergeant Leon Lashley began,
to today, Thursday, 07-30,
the only mentions of Leon Lashley,
according to
the search engine as www.washingtonpost.com
were contained in two photo captions (
07-28,
07-29),
which showed him as part of a larger scene.
In other words,
the
Washington Post from 07-24 to 07-30 in their main text
has not printed a single word of reporting
concerning Lashley’s statements cited above.
The
Washington Post has given great coverage to the Gates/Crowley story,
with tsunamis of words branding the Cambridge police’s actions as “racist.”
What words are strong enough
to condemn the responsible parties at the Post
for not publishing the countervailing view
by an African-American sworn officer
who was on site for the confrontation?
How much more proof is needed to prove that
the editors of the
Post are craven stooges of, not only Zionist interests,
but also of
those parts of black America which demand censorship
of all views and speech incompatible with their goals?
2009-07-30-Gates-Examiner-Kane
Four 'teachable moments' from Cambridge Cops Caper
By Gregory Kane
Washington Examiner, 2009-07-30
2009-07-30-WP-AP-Lashley
Black cop at Gates home regrets ‘Uncle Tom’ label
The Associated Press
Thursday, July 30, 2009 7:34 PM
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. --
A black sergeant
who was at the home of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. when he was arrested
says
he’s been maligned as an “Uncle Tom”
for supporting the actions of the white arresting officer.
Cambridge Sgt. Leon Lashley
gave a letter to Sgt. James Crowley
to give to President Barack Obama
during their so-called beer summit with Gates
on Thursday night at the White House.
In the letter, which was also sent to CNN,
Lashley says
Gates “may have caused grave and potentially irreparable harm
to the struggle for racial harmony.”
Lashley says
he has become known as a traitor to his heritage by some
because he “spoke the truth” about the arrest.
Gates was charged with disorderly conduct by police investigating a burglary.
The charge was later dropped.
Black Children, White Police
2009-07-30-WP-Brown-Lessons-for-Black-Children
In New Times, Old Lessons for Black Children
[the as-printed title:
“The Time To Impart Lessons on Authority”]
Parents Teach Truths To ‘Post-Racial’ Youth
By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post, 2009-07-30 (
Style Section, page C-1)
[1]
These are not new lessons taught to black children sitting at the dinner table.
[2]
They are old lessons, repeated in an oral tradition for survival.
Told by
grandmothers with wrinkled hands,
grandfathers who saw something way back when,
worried mothers talking in hypotheticals.
[3]
They are lessons you don’t want to teach a child because it could
make him feel vulnerable,
crack her innocence,
pop this generation’s colorblind bubble.
[4]
So you wait until it’s absolutely necessary and relevant,
and explain it like this:
[5]
If you are ever stopped by the police, be polite.
Say: “Yes, sir. No, sir.”
Make no sudden movements.
Do not try to run.
[6]
Why? they ask.
[7]
And that’s when you tell them:
You are a black child in America.
There is a history here.
So, baby, just be careful.
[8]
“I tell them if a police officer comes up to you, all you have to say is,
‘Okay, officer. Yes, sir. Thank you.’
Then move on. Don’t say nothing smart,”
says James Thompson, whose son is 15 and tall for his age.
He goes to school in Bethesda, has white friends,
spends his time skateboarding through the streets.
He’s a baby, really, living in a “post-racial” world.
[9]
“That is one thing I’m scared of,” says Thompson,
a proud man who does not like to feel scared.
“They don’t know the danger that is out there.
They don’t know this happens all the time,
but it just happened to happen to a prominent man.”
[10]
The arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.
served as a lesson update for Dana Green, 40,
whose sons are 13 and 18.
“If they could take a prominent, highly respected black man out in cuffs,
then surely, my recent high school graduate,
who has yet to master an articulate vocabulary
and sometimes fails to wear a belt,
he would certainly be carried out in a body bag,”
says Green, an educator who lives in Bowie.
“I am telling them to comply first, appeal later.
That’s my motto in our house.”
[11]
For a lot of people -- black and white --
the incident in which
Gates was arrested on his front porch after talking back to police
prompted a “teachable moment” to examine the intersection of race and justice,
or perhaps misunderstandings between
two men from different backgrounds in Cambridge, Mass.
President Obama has invited both Gates and Sgt. James Crowley
to the White House for a beer Thursday evening.
Because talking things over
just might be the best way to resolve incidents like these.
Once a heated situation is defused and titles are pulled back,
we find two individuals with stories to tell.
[12]
Outside the White House, away from the peace beer,
people are carrying on their own conversations.
[13]
For some parents, the incident boiled down to four words: “I told you so.”
[14]
“Black parents are using this as a case in point of
what they have been saying all along,”
says Ronald Walters,
professor emeritus of politics at the University of Maryland.
“We live in a different era where kids are less racially conscious.
A lot don’t believe that stuff their parents talk about.
They say, ‘That is your era. Things are different now.’
But parents have been trying to make the case racism hasn’t gone away
and they are likely to confront it,
especially black males.”
[15]
Just two weeks ago,
Walters had the same conversation with his 17-year-old nephew,
who had stayed out too late.
“I picked him up at a Metro station,” Walters recalls.
“I was telling him,
‘If you don’t get hit in the head by a mugger,
you are going to be stopped by the cops.’
He said, ‘Yeah, Daddy told me that.’ ”
[16]
Why that conversation?
[17]
“Because they are stopped by the police all the time,” Walters says.
“That is part of the rite of passage for a black male.”
Parents teach their children that police are good, too. Heroes sometimes.
White parents, too,
teach their children that they should be respectful around police --
because police deserve respect.
...
2009-07-31-Harbaugh-Black-Children-White-Police
I want to offer some commentary on
the above Washington Post article by DeNeen Brown.
I am a white Anglo-Saxon protestant male, born in the 1940s,
with a thoroughly middle-class upbringing.
Here are the rules I, as a child,
was taught for how to deal with the police:
- Treat them with respect, deference, and courtesy.
- If they tell you what to do, do exactly what they tell you.
My family taught me those, also the schools and general culture reinforced them.
The reason given for those rules was quite simply that
the police are there to enforce the general rules of a civilized society.
If they ask you to do something,
it is in the interest of the broader society,
or required for an investigation they are doing.
In any case, why on earth would anyone
not want to cooperate with the police?
If you were a law-abiding child or adult,
the police were on your side.
Compare
the rules stated by DeNeen Brown in paragraph 5:
- If you are ever stopped by the police, be polite.
- Say: “Yes, sir. No, sir.”
- Make no sudden movements.
- Do not try to run.
Well, politeness was surely called for by the white rules.
(By the way, are black children not instructed to be polite as a matter of course?
Are black children only told to be polite to avoid police harassment?)
The “Yes, sir. No, sir.” comes under respect
(actually, we were told to call them “Officer”).
“Make no sudden movements.”?
Just common sense.
Why do anything which an officer might construe as a threat?
“Do not try to run.”?
That comes under cooperation.
Running (from the police) is the opposite of cooperation.
So, all those rules that blacks claim are called for as a response to racism
in fact are applied to white children just as being part of civilized society.
So, the question for the black community is:
If the rules are the same for both white and black children,
how on earth do you claim that
when the rules are given to your children,
the reason is racism?
One might also ask:
Suppose there was none of this “racism” and toxic history
that you, the black community, are always discerning.
In a racism-free world,
what rules would you give your children for dealing with the police?
Since the rules Brown cites are, she claims,
only called for due to racism and fear ,
just what are the rules for dealing with the police
you would favor in the ideal world
as the black community defined it?
By the way, my opinion, for which there is considerable evidence,
but no positive proof,
is that Jews have deliberately fanned your perceptions of racism,
so they will have an ally in their attempt to obtain hegemony over America
(and, of course, maintain perpetual support for Israel).
While this may have its attractions for the black community
(Hey, we’re victims! They owe us.)
it has the downside of preventing you
from dealing yourself with problems that you could easily deal with
(the obesity problem is an obvious example--talk about self-inflicted!).
To me, as a white man, it seems quite obvious that
many, if not most, of the problems blacks in America face
(e.g., obesity, drugs, violence, children born out of wedlock, unemployment)
are strictly self-inflicted.
But the argument that you face overwhelming racism at every turn
keeps you from seeing that and dealing with it accordingly.
Harvard men rating women
2016-11-14-NYT-Silber-harvards-rank-and-file
Harvard’s Rank and File
Maia Silber (a Harvard senior woman)
New York Times Opinion, 2016-11-14
Labels: victimology
