Was Sgt. Crowley Stereotyped, Profiled?

David Wright is a Black American, just like Henry Gates. And like Professor Gates, Dr. Wright is a scholar and author. He is an associate professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. And in 1999, while a faculty fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard (directed by Professor Henry Gates), he had a real black profiling experience one evening walking with a friend.

As a black scholar similarly situated to Henry Gates, he has some unique insights on status, privilege and playing the race card. In his recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (7.30.09), "The Profiling of Sgt. Crowley," Wright's subheading asserts: "The reason for Gates's arrest? His own hubris." It is worth the read. Excerpts from that article:

...The officer who stopped us unlocks the cuffs. He explains that a house has been broken into in the adjoining neighborhood. "And you're stopping all black men on the street!?" Arnold or I or both of us said.

He doesn't reply. He doesn't apologize.

In that instance, and in others before and since, I used, or attempted to use, my class privilege to extricate myself from, or at least lessen the potential threat of, an encounter with the police. That night, Arnold and I had been joking and laughing (maybe even shucking and jiving) before being stopped. Yet though we'd done nothing wrong, I immediately switched to a mainstream style of speaking when addressing the officer, and called attention to my professional status. It was reflexive. I'd been in situations like that since I was a kid, and had responded at times in an accommodating manner; at others, belligerently, and had come to understand that the best way, however demeaning, is accommodation.

So when I read the details of the confrontation between Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James M. Crowley of the Cambridge police, I recognized the situation.

Gates acknowledges having brought up race. Gates, in an interview with his daughter for the online magazine The Root, recalled asking Crowley, "Is this how you treat a black man in America?" (The official police report says that Gates stated it as accusation, pugnaciously, repeatedly, and loudly.) The subtext of Gates's words, even calmly articulated, is clear. Gates was accusing Crowley of behaving in a racist manner; by extension, Gates was calling Crowley a racist, to his face, in front of other officers, at least one of whom is black.

Those are fighting words. And Gates knows it....

The brouhaha surrounding the July 16 arrest strikes me most for the reasonable voices that have lost all sense of reason in response. From President Obama to the countless others who have weighed in, all focus has been, in one way or another, on the victimization of Gates. Professor Gates has become a stand-in for the "average black man," subjected to humiliation and abuse at the hands of a racist police force. But Gates, while obviously black, is not a stand-in for the many African-Americans, men and women, who daily are victims of profiling and worse.

Was Gates profiled? Richard Thompson Ford makes a compelling argument on Slate that Gates was not. Sgt. Crowley was responding to a potential crime in progress; he was performing his duty, by all indications, in a professional manner.

The more interesting question, it seems to me, is, was Crowley himself profiled—as a racist police officer? The answer is, unequivocally, yes—not only by Gates but by the rest of us, in newspapers and magazines, online and on TV, even by the White House....

If you are interested in reading my earlier essay/post on this topic, you can find it by clicking here on the title "Henry Gates, Obama: Mistakes, Misjudgments."

http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Profiling-of-Sgt-Crowley/47508/?utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en