From the Associated Press [1]:
BOSTON – Police responding to a call about “two black males” breaking into a home near Harvard University ended up arresting the man who lives there — Henry Louis Gates Jr., the nation’s pre-eminent black scholar.
Gates had forced his way through the front door because it was jammed, his lawyer said. Colleagues call the arrest last Thursday afternoon a clear case of racial profiling.
Adolf Hitler was purposed to have dismissed Albert Eintien’s Jewish Theory of Relativity, as if atoms recognized ethnic bounds. Like atoms do not recognize ethnicity, neither does scholorship. If a person is indeed a scholar there no need to preface ths distincton. It is not like truth is the least biet dependant on race.
So when the Associated Press describeS Henry Louis Gates Jr as a black scholar, you have wonder about Gates scholarship. Further this supposed scholar completely mangles the concept of racial profiling, which is the idea that police stop a person based on his race.
Gatess and his driver were seen tryng to break into his front door. Gates neighbor called the police to report a ssupect burgalry. That is what good neighbors do. Gates should count himelf lucky. When the police officer arrived the officer asked Gates for identification. That what good police officers do. So rather than congradulating his good neighbor and the good police work, Gates tried to make this into somekind of racial incident. That is what race mongers do.
William A. Jacobson, Legal Insurrection: [2]
But none of those analogies fit. The police did not profile anyone. They received a call of someone trying to force open the door to a home. They asked the person attempting to force the door open who he was. Had Gates answered, that would have been the end of it.
I got stopped te other day. Gave the officer my driver license and the entire affair went down much like Jacobson said it would have for Gates, had he but cooperated.
Addendum: (Update and Bump)
Steve Gilbert, Sweetness & Light [3], comes up with thi2 gem. In 1994, Professor Gates told Brian Lamb, C-SPAN:
I’m the chairman of Afro-American Studies at Harvard and a professor of English.
Gates claimed to be both the chair of Afro-American Studies and a professor of English. Yet when asked by Lamb why he used the word “Nigger” so often in his book “Colored People”, Professor Gates, the self-avowed chair of Afro-American Studies and professor of Eng lish, got the orgins to the n-word wrong.