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Harvard Professor To Gates: You’re The Racial Profiler
Harvard Professor Ruth Wisse isn’t buying the Gates narrative that he was racially profiled by the Cambridge Police. She rips into him beautifully in the Harvard Crimson.
Here’s a little taste:
…But thereafter your case becomes disturbing, and while the president’s unwise comments turned a local episode into a national referendum, it’s the local issue that troubles me. Like you, I live in Cambridge, commonly known as the "People’s Republic of Cambridge" for its left-leaning political correctness. Our congressional district has not sent a Republican to Washington since 1955. Not surprisingly, the officers who came to your door—a rainbow of black, Hispanic, and white—were led by a man hand-picked to provide training on the avoidance of bias in policing. To accuse the Cambridge police of racial profiling, as you did, is about as credible as charging Barack Obama with favoring Republicans.
What puzzles me most in the report of your actions—or reactions—on July 16 is why you would have chosen, as I’ve heard you put it elsewhere, to "talk Black" to Officer Crowley instead of "talking White" as you so eloquently and regularly do? These are distinctions I’ve heard you expound—how educated African Americans switch their register of speech depending on what part of themselves they want to get across. Many of us do something similar inside and outside our particular communities, but you make it sound like a sport that is also for African Americans a tool of survival. So why didn’t you address the policemen as fellow Cantabrigians? What was that "yo’ mama" talk instead of saying simply, in the same register your interlocutor was using, "Look, officer, I’m sorry for your trouble. Thanks for checking on my house when you thought I was being burgled, but this is my home, and if you give me a minute, I’ll find the piece of mail or license that proves it to you." It seems it wasn’t the policeman doing the profiling, it was you. You played him for a racist cop and treated him disrespectfully. Had you truly feared bias, you would surely have behaved in a more controlled, rather than a less controlled, way.
It only gets better from there and I highly recommend everyone read the entire piece — it’s fantastic.
Ruth R. Wisse is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature, and Professor of Comparative Literature, at Harvard.
(hat tip Hot Air)
