I thought the whole idea that America was post-racial and post-black was laughable from the beginning. There is no more important event in the history of black people in America than the election of Barack Obama. I cried when he was elected, and I cried at his inauguration, but that does not change the percentage of black men in prison, the percentage of black men harassed by racial profiling. It does not change the number of black children living near the poverty line. Which is almost a similar percentage as were under poverty when Martin Luther King was assassinated.

Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The Sonia Sotomayor confirmation circus and now this. In an interview over at The Root, Prof. Gates talks about being arrested on his front porch by the Cambridge Police. The incident generated the predictable reactions of “Oh, stop over-reacting and crying racism! Really, this is no Rodney King. It’s not like the cop called him a N-#$#. And he was asking for it when he antagonized the police officer when he asked for his name and badge number. I mean, professor-man wasn’t even tazered or anything.” Reading the comments section on most sites raises my blood pressure by 50 and drops my my IQ by the same.

The productive inquiry is not “was Prof. Gates or another person of color subject to explicit and outrageous racist name calling or the victim of an ‘officer involved shooting’?” Rather, we should ponder how and why race is deemed a non-issue for similarly credentialed and privileged white men because this silent assumption of white neutrality precludes all meaningful dialogue about how race functions in our public and private institutions, professional and most personal interactions. Just how many white tenured Harvard faculty have been subject to arrest on their front porch?

The fascinating thing about this interview is how Prof. Gates comes across (intentional or not) as exceptionally privileged, yet singularly black vis-a-vis interactions with law enforcement. Gates has a “regular” car service/driverfrom Newark, NJ to Cambridge. That’s at least a 5 hr drive and this is no regular car service, but one where the drivers wears blazers and slacks. The professor was returning from a PBS shoot in Beijing where he and his daughter spent a “glorious” time being tourists. It’s a stretch to envision an a similarly privileged white man and a white police officer escalating to the point where the suspected perpetrator demands the officer’s badge number.

Gates also sounds genuinely taken aback by the fingerprinting, mug shots, search of personal possessions–the daily indignities inflicted upon anyone arrested in the U.S. (the disproportionate number are of course, African American men.).

The system attempts to humiliate you. They took my belt; they took my wallet, they took my keys, some change; they counted my money. And I knew that because they said, ‘We’re going to release you upon your own recognizance, and the fine is $40, and we know you can pay it because we went through your wallet.’

It’s meant to be terrifying and humiliating. And I couldn’t believe that this was happening to me. And I said I can’t wait to get out, I am eager to talk to my lawyer, and they said they had to book me first. Then I was told that Charles Ogletree was in the building, and that he was there with three other Harvard professors—my friends Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Larry Bobo and Marcelina Lee Morgan.

If only all wrongly arrested individuals could have Charles Ogletree as counsel! Although, I have to say without a doubt my jailhouse phone call would be to Al-b. Anyhow, Gates then likens sitting in his cell with the company of his Harvard law professors to a “a Senate filibuster; we had to tell stories in the prison cell.” Really? My point of reference would be more mundane, but I’m not a globe-trotting, Martha’s Vineyard vacationing, eminent Harvard professor.

Would a white man occupying the same station in life be arrested for the same behavior? Methinks not. As Prof. Gates said,

There haven’t been fundamental structural changes in America. There’s been a very important symbolic change and that is the election of Barack Obama. But the only black people who truly live in a post-racial world in America all live in a very nice house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

And as Elie Mystal writes:

I’m thrilled to live in an America where we can have a black president. I just hope he never gets locked out of the White House.

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