Henry Louis Gates must have learned a lot about playing the race card and accusing “whitey” of all manner of things only imagined while he was living in Durham. That’s been Durham’s stock in trade for the past 25 years, after all.
When he was living in the house that Michael Peterson later bought, Gates was the African American Studies guru at Duke. That was also a time of tense black-white relations here, especially regarding the separate city and county school systems. As often happens when someone makes a name at Duke, though, Harvard comes calling. But Gates had been here long enough to learn that going on a racial attack for no actual reason sometimes pays dividends. He watches some masters of the game in the Bull City.
One wonders at his motives. Was he just embarrassed to be caught breaking into his own house? Was this a planned event to make national news, scaring police departments into lax law enforcement where blacks are concerned? And why did President Obama, ignorant of all the facts in the case, make a judgment so quickly on it.
Officer Crowley, the man Gates has accused of racism, and who, Jon Sanders points out below, is an expert on avoiding racial profiling, had this to say later:
“Mister Gates was given plenty of opportunities to stop what he was doing. He didn’t. He acted very irrational he controlled the outcome of that event.”
“There was a lot of yelling, there was references to my mother, something you wouldn’t expect from anybody that should be grateful that you were there investigating a report of a crime in progress, let alone a Harvard University professor.”
We live in interesting times.
