There's much to rue in the story of how Henry Louis Gates Jr. (editor-in-chief of our sister site, The Root) was arrested at his house last week. Was it supposedly disorderly conduct when Gates asked to see a Cambridge cop's badge and ID? Or when he said the cop was making a mistake based on racial profiling? The charge was dropped this afternoon, lucky for the cop.

Maybe something good can come of this, though. The incident is a reminder that we don't live in a post-racial society, no matter how often the Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee said so last week in grilling Judge Sonia Sotomayor. We live in a society in which race and inequality are still threaded together. Yes, often class matters as much as or more than skin color. But not always. Look at the arrest photo of Gates in his spectacles and red striped polo.

And a silver lining from Gates himself: a renewed focus for his' prodigious energies: He told the Washington Post that he "will now apply the scholarship that has been his life's work to the issue of race in the criminal justice system."

Photograph of Henry Louis Gates Jr. by HBO/Getty Images.

Tags: henry louis gates, police, racial profiling

Just as upsetting to me as the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest, Emily, is the way that so many people have been responding, including in our own comments section. There’s this reflexive defense mechanism that so often kicks in with white people (of which I am one) in situations like these; an urge to stand up for the white person accused of discrimination because hey, I’m white, and I’m not racist. I’ll admit, I feel that pull too at times—I cringe at people who fling around groundless accusations of racism (or, in some of my family members’ cases, anti-Semitism), just as I do at knee-jerk liberals, or anyone else whose overly-simplified attacks risk trivializing complex issues.

But this is not a case where people should get all smug about being “brave” and “honest” enough to question whether race was a factor; to suggest that maybe it was Gates who was out of line, not the cop. In all the steps of this story—the neighbor who called the cops, the way the officer spoke to Gates, the fact that the kerfuffle between them, no matter how much it was instigated by Gates, led to an actual arrest—it is just so hard to imagine that not one of them was influenced by Gates (and his driver) being black.

Blogger Kate Harding has a thorough explanation of why declarations that race isn’t a part of this arrest are coming from a position of white privilege. And to “people are trying to be all devil’s advocatey about it and suggest that Gates bears responsibility for making matters worse,” she offers this: “I’m sorry, who wouldn’t be a belligerent prick after getting off a long flight, coming home to a jammed door, then finding a cop in your living room accusing you of trying to steal your own shit? I sure would.” Ditto that.

P Starling, one of our favorite Double X commenters, takes the argument further, explaining from her experience on the police force that even if Gates were being a belligerent prick, that’s still not enough reason to arrest him:

[T]here is something here that no one has pointed out, probably since civilians usually don't realize it: the cops are soooooo used to that crap. If they arrested and processed everyone who gives them a hard time in a standard day, the streets would empty. In most states, in fact, disorderly conduct (which is indeed a crime) is not actually punishable by time in jail. It's a citation-level offense, along the same general line as letting your dog run around off leash.

In the seven years I worked for the police, there were many times when my coworkers would have loved to arrest someone on the "being a general asshole" clause. They never did. Not once. Because it would have been an abuse of power.

Photograph of Henry Louis Gates by William Thomas Cain/Getty Images.

Tags: henry louis gates, Race

Thanks, Samantha, for pointing out a tendency by some white people to show, as you say, a “reflexive defense mechanism” whenever another white person, usually one in a position of power, is accused of showing racism. Coming from me, a black person, similiar sentiments are often dismissed as biased. But aren't the white people defending Officer Crowley and criticizing Skip Gates also showing bias?

The difference in perception is predicated on a simple fact: Most white people have never experienced, and could never imagine, such a thing happening to them or their loved ones. But if you’re black, you’ve probably experienced an unpleasant, potentially dangerous, encounter with white police, or know some other black person who has. In my case there have been several such encounters.

I was once stopped on a Brooklyn street by two white officers while I was on my way to catch a train to my college campus on Long Island. They accused me of having robbed a clothing store owner. Even after they snatched my duffle bag from my shoulder and emptied its contents on the sidewalk—a pair of jeans and some other clothing, two textbooks, and my college ID—they forced me into the cruiser and took me to the store in question to ask the owner if I was the stick-up kid who’d robbed him. My brother was once severely beaten by white police officers in upstate New York who mistook him for bank robber. Never mind that he was withdrawing money from his own bank account at the time. My sister’s former stepson was accosted by several police officers after inquiring about CD rates at several South Florida banks. They mistook him for a potential bank robber. I could go on, but you get my drift. (And don’t get me started on the number of times I’ve been pulled over for Driving While Black.)

I was a girl when my brother was beaten and unable to do anything about it. But when the stepson was racially profiled, I was a reporter, and I certainly fought back. His story ran in the Miami Herald, where I worked at the time, and later on the front page of the New York Times. He went to court and sued the cops, and he won. It was sweet revenge. I can’t wait to see how Skip Gates gets his with Cambridge’s finest.

Photograph of police near a memorial for a black New York teen who was shot and killed by police by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

Tags: henry louis gates, Race, racial profiling

That's a really upsetting litany of stories, Marjorie, about the cops accosting you and your relatives. The confluence of Skip Gates' arrest and the Obama presidency are making white people, at least some of us, take in these stories differently. We've heard them before, but now maybe we're absorbing them. Obama's election has both raised expectations of a post-racial America and given us a lens through which to see clearly how we still fall short. I chewed over some of this with the writer Farai Chideya on bloggingheads earlier this week. And Richard Thompson Ford has a piece in Slate that really made me think anew when I was editing it on Thursday. Rich urges us to get past the stock phrases "racial profiling" and "playing the race card" in analyzing what happened and why. His clear-eyed takeaway:

We need to ask why so many police officers of all races suspect the worst of racial minorities. (I wonder what the black Cambridge police officer pictured in the photo along with Gates after his arrest would say about all of this if he could speak candidly.) Decades of blatant and pervasive racial discrimination, poor urban planning, and failed labor policy have left blacks disproportionately jobless and trapped in poor ghettos across the United States. Faced with few opportunities and few positive role models, a disturbing number of people in those neighborhoods turn to gangs and crime for money, protection, and esteem.

Rather than improve those neighborhoods and help the people who live in them join the prosperous mainstream, we as a society have given police the dirty job of quarantining them. Frankly, we should expect that a disproportionate number of power-hungry bigots would find such a mandate attractive. And an otherwise decent and fair-minded officer, faced with the day-to-day task of controlling society's most isolated, desperate, and angry population, might develop some ugly racial generalizations and carry them even to plush and leafy neighborhoods such as those surrounding Harvard Yard. Yet when the inevitable racial scandal surfaces we, like Capt. Renault in Casablanca, are shocked, shocked to find racial bias in law enforcement and quick to blame individual police officers, rather than ourselves.

Photograph of Skip Gates by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images.

Tags: henry louis gates jr., race card, racial profiling, richard thompson ford, skip gates

"Were they white, black or hispanic?" It turns out the first mention of race during the 911 call that led to the arrest of Henry Gates came from the operator, not the caller, who's always said that she never mentioned the race of the men she'd seen. It seemed like a legitimate question to me, but not to Delores Jones Brown, Director of the Center on Race, Crime and Justice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who told NPR's "Morning Edition" that the question itself "alerts me to the possiblity that the Cambridge police have an issue with racial ethnic identity."

My first reaction to that—as a white former Manhattan criminal prosecutor—was outrage. If this operator doesn't get enough information to allow the police to locate and question a possible criminal, she's not doing her job. You might not think it from stories like Marjorie's about her family's encounters with racist police officers, but the cops aren't actually supposed to stop anyone without some sort of probable cause—and a description of what a suspect looks like is a pretty basic part of that. You call 911 to tell them you see someone suspicious, you want them to find the guy, right?

It sounds reasonable enough when you put it like that. But as I stewed—and as I read the transcript of the call—it became clear that race meant nothing in the context of describing these "suspects." What they were wearing, what they were doing, what they were driving—any of those might have been more helpful. "Can you describe the men?" might elicit whatever information the caller had to offer. But that's not what was asked. That's not, I suspect, what's in the script. So maybe it's true that this particular question says more about the questioning authority than about the suspect it seeks. Maybe it's time for the Cambridge police department—and a few others, I suspect—to think about what it is they're really asking.

Tags: henry louis gates jr., race card, racial profiling

Skip Gates' daughter, Elizabeth Gates, wrote for the Daily Beast about attending the so-called Beer Summit at the White House. Rather than furthering a discussion about race relations, the only responses have been about gender relations: specifically, calling Elizabeth catty for remarking on Sgt. Crowley’s daughter's green eyeliner. Elizabeth wrote:

our family rounded the corner to the White House library and I first caught sight of Sgt. Crowley’s lovely daughter; she was wearing an appropriately heavy and charmingly untrained amount of green eyeliner on her lower lashes, and I saw my former self in her.

Ann Althouse says of Elizabeth's remarks, "Let's begin a great national conversation about how women judge and maybe even hate other women. In the fourth chair—the Biden seat—Hillary! Instead of beer, various girlie drinks—maybe Focus Vitamin Water or something. Cosmos for the older ladies." I agree with Althouse that Elizabeth's tone was unnecessarily condescending. However, I didn't really get "maybe even hate" from Elizabeth's extraneous makeup commentary.

But furthermore, it makes me wonder: Is it ever okay to write about the sartorial choices of women outside the fashion industry? Washington Post fashion writer Robin Givhan was recently criticized across the internet for discussing Sotomayor's  confirmation hearing wardrobe. While Givhan's commentary was negative, it is possible to remark on what someone is wearing without judgment. Wouldn't we be losing a great deal of color from descriptive writing if we no longer even mentioned the attire of the people involved in any event worth talking about?

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: arrest, elizabeth gates, fashion, henry louis gates, Robin Givhan, Sonia Sotomayor