Bobo's boo-boo on Gates

My second response to the Gates saga...

This one in response to an op-ed by Dr. Lawrence Bobo, a colleague of Dr. Gates at Harvard, in the WP and reprinted in the C-J...

...my best friend, an affluent, middle-aged black man, was arrested at his home after showing identification to a white police officer who was responding to a burglary call. Though the officer determined that my friend was the resident of the house and that no burglary was in progress, he placed my friend in handcuffs, put him in a police cruiser and had him “processed” at our local police station.

This outrage did not happen at night. It did not happen to an unknown urban black man. It happened, midday, to internationally known scholar Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr.

Of course, this is a slanted description of the events in question. But I'm more interested in his last statement and what he thinks it implies (vs. what it, in fact, implies).

Bobo says that Gates is internationally known. But for the purposes of police activity, the relevant question is whether he was locally known. And the answer seems to be no. Bobo is confused on this point, conflating the two categories of "known-ness"-- or assumes some form of elitism that such things shouldn't happen to internationally known scholars.

I believe the police officer was motivated by anger that my friend had not immediately complied with the officer's initial command to step out of the house.

This is statistical discrimination-- and probably a poor version of it-- on the part of Bobo. He has no way to know this.

In hindsight, I think Skip did the right thing; he could have been injured (if not worse) had he stepped out of his home before showing his ID. Black Americans recall all too well that Amadou Diallo reached for his identification in a public space when confronted by police and, 41 gunshots later, became the textbook case of deadly race-infected police bias.

Apples and rocks...

Skip, 58, is one of the most readily recognized black men in America...

Uhh, no...Talk about ivory tower; this guy is clueless about what is recognized in the public eye!

Even before the charges were dropped Tuesday, I knew in my bones that this situation was about the level of deference that a white cop expects from a black man. According to his own written report, this officer understood that he was dealing with a lawful resident of the house when he made the arrest and was no longer concerned about the report of a “burglary in progress” involving “two black males.” No, by this point we're talking about something else entirely.

Exactly (except it probably had little or nothing to do with race): it seems to be primarily about the level of deference that a cop expects from citizens. It wasn't about burglary; it was about Gates being an idiot on his front porch after the incident should have been over.