Eugene Robinson’s take on the Henry Louis Gates arrest — a media firestorm that deserved far less coverage than it got — is race-based, but not in the usual way. Most of the focus has been on the notion of profiling, which never seemed right to me.
Robinson, however, makes it clear how race functioned in this absurd little morality play:
Apparently, there was something about the power relationship involved — uppity, jet-setting black professor vs. regular-guy, working-class white cop — that Crowley couldn’t abide. Judging by the overheated commentary that followed, that same something, whatever it might be, also makes conservatives forget that they believe in individual rights and oppose intrusive state power.
He says the confirmation hearings for Judge Sonia Sotomayor shared some of the same characteristics — a white male judge with a sharp tongue would never had his temperment questioned, while “the idea of a sharp-tongued ‘wise Latina’ making nervous attorneys, some of them white male attorneys, fumble and squirm,” sent up a red flag for the GOP.
Robinson cuts to the chase, asking the operative question and then answering it:
Is a man of Gates’s station entitled to puff himself up and remind a police officer that he’s dealing with someone who has juice? Is a woman of Sotomayor’s accomplishment entitled to humiliate a lawyer who came to court unprepared? No more and no less entitled, surely, than all the Big Cheeses who came before them.
Yet Gates’s fit of pique somehow became cause for arrest. I can’t prove that if the Big Cheese in question had been a famous, brilliant Harvard professor who happened to be white — say, presidential adviser Larry Summers, who’s on leave from the university — the outcome would have been different. I’d put money on it, though. Anybody wanna bet?
Hank Kalet 