This post by R.R. Reno is a bizarre read. I’m entirely willing to entertain the view that race may have had much less to do with the arrest of Henry Louis Gates than many have claimed, or indeed that race may have had nothing to do with his arrest at all. Hence when one of Conor’s readers rhetorically asks, “Who can believe that [Gates] would have been hauled to jail if his skin were a different color?”, my immediate answer is that I can believe it – or at least, I can believe that he might have been hauled to jail if he were white or tan or yellow, and so that the question is whether this is a clear case of racial bias is one about which there can be reasonable disagreement. But the idea that we can know that Gates’s arrest “had nothing to do with race” is similarly preposterous, as is Reno’s claim that the arrest was simply “the result of the boorish and arrogant behavior of a very privileged and rich man who is used to getting his way”: for policemen can also act inappropriately from time to time, and sometimes their actions, like those of tenured Harvard professors, are implicitly or explicitly motivated by their mistaken convictions about race.
But suppose Reno is right in his diagnosis of the situation. Suppose that Gates did “mount an all out verbal assault based on his own presumptions about race”, and that the reason he did this is that he is “the coddled product of elite American society”, and so was outraged at the thought of a “policeman with a working class Boston accent and no advanced degrees telling him to show identification”. (Racism may be dead, but apparently elitism in America is alive and well.) Even if all of this is true, it still doesn’t follow that the policeman was without fault and that Gates owes him an apology, as Jacob Sullum rightly notes:
Notably, Crowley invited Gates to follow him, thereby setting him up for a disorderly conduct charge. “I told Gates that I was leaving his residence and that if he had any other questions regarding the matter I would speak with him outside the residence,” Crowley writes. He claims “my reason for wanting to leave the residence was that Gates was yelling very loud and the acoustics of the kitchen and foyer were making it difficult for me to transmit pertinent information to ECC or other responding units.” But instead of simply leaving, Crowley lured Gates outside, the better to create a public spectacle and “alarm” passers-by. The subtext of Crowley’s report is that he was angered and embarrassed by Gates’ “outburst” and therefore sought to create a pretext for arresting him.
The charge against Gates was dropped. But what are the odds that it would have been if Gates had not been a nationally famous scholar with many friends in high places, including the president of the United States? Instead of showing what happens to “a black man in America,” the case illustrates what can happen to anyone who makes the mistake of annoying a cop.
The crucial point here is that coddled Harvard professors are not the only ones who “pull rank”, act in ways that are “boorish and arrogant”, and use their “position[s] of superiority” to strike out at those who refuse to show them the appropriate “deference and adulation” (all those phrases are Reno’s). “The officer did what officers do”, Reno writes, “in order to assert themselves and show that they are in charge”. But perhaps he should have stuck with doing the thing that would best keep the public peace.
P.S. Will at Ordinary Gentlemen has written a couple of excellent posts on the Gates affair.
