Harvard’s Gates in Handcuffs Sounds Familiar Note to Black Men By John Lauerman and Tom Moroney
July 22 (
Bloomberg) -- The arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University’s top expert on African-American history and culture, sounded a familiar note to professors and social scientists, who said black men at all levels of U.S. society are vulnerable to similar treatment.
The Cambridge Police Department in Massachusetts dropped a disorderly conduct charge against Gates, calling his arrest “regrettable and unfortunate” in a statement yesterday. Police arrested Gates at his home July 16 after a verbal confrontation with him. They said they were called to the house after a passerby mistook Gates’ effort to open his jammed front door for a break-in.
E-mails and telephone calls flew among black academics around the U.S. after Gates, 58, a leading scholar who has written about race and justice, was handcuffed on the front porch of his home, and only three blocks from the Harvard campus where he teaches. Kerry Haynie, a political scientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, said he received more than a dozen calls and e-mails from friends about Gates’s trouble.
“It’s shocking,” Haynie said yesterday in a telephone interview. “Even before this incident came up, I spoke with a reporter about whether we’re in a post-race society. My immediate thought was, hell no.”
Haynie, who is black, said such encounters aren’t unique to Cambridge. Whenever stopped by police for traffic infractions, he said he deliberately keeps his hands on top of the steering wheel to avoid misunderstandings. He said he consciously changes out of old clothes before shopping to minimize suspicion that he may be shoplifting. ............(more)
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