As you may have read, Henry Louis Gates got jammed up trying to get into his own house. Bad biz.
Nothing really to say about what happened to Skip — who, in a manner of speaking, is my former employer — but there are questions.
When Skip was breaking into his house, what was he wearing? Was he coming back from the gym in a track suit? Because, even with racism being a clear variable in this case, I can’t imagine seeing Henry Louis Gates and thinking he was a prowler.
Have you ever met Skip? You ever seen him on TV? Any interaction with him whatsoever?
If he was a burglar, what would he call himself, The Tweedcoat Bandit? Was he breaking in because he heard they keep old slave narratives under the mattress?
Perhaps that’s the most offensive part of this. I’m not saying Skip doesn’t look like he might steal. Everyone looks like they might steal. He does not, however, look like he would break into somebody’s house. At the very least, he looks like he’d be too good of a crook to just shoot the shit with Johnny Law if he’s breaking in.
(EDIT–here’s his gear.)
Not getting mad about this. Plus, some of this falls on Skip. That’s right. Clearly, he doesn’t talk to his neighbors enough.
Unless he just moved there, everyone around should know that he is the black guy in the neighborhood. You gotta go to the mailbox every day. Pass out cookies on Christmas. Have the police come and do a “safety inspection” so you can introduce yourself (a former prof of mine did that, which was very, very wise). But man, you gotta make sure that when those folks see you, they stop and say, “oh wait, that’s him.”
You make a decision to live that Ivy League life, then you’ve gotta have more game than that, man. Kinda makes you wonder why this doesn’t happen to him more.
Oh well. I do think “The Tweedcoat Bandit” would look great on business cards.
11 Comments
by Chelle
Tweedcoat Bandit, that’s hilarious, but so true. Start to finish, you’re right, totally right. He’s been living around white folks long enough to know the rules. Further, I’m sure there are extra special rules in the Boston area.
by AF Washington
Sometimes we forget we’re still black when we “move on up”
by Cobb
Gates was busted and charged not with B&E, but Disorderly Conduct. Sounds like when keeping it real goes wrong.
All I can think of is one mitigating circumstance, which is this. Gates showed his ID and proved that he lived there. But it appears to me that he kept asking the officer for his badge number as the cop was leaving, and the cop didn’t comply. So what I want to know is whether Gates followed the officer out of his house and off of his own property to try and get in his face.
A moment of tweedy thought would tell anybody that every police call that’s dispatched has a paper trail. It only takes a phone call to the PD to find that out. But Gates got disorderly, and basically busted a power move on the cop, a la ‘do you have any idea how important I am’.. blah blah.
So it’s clear to me that all that tweedy professor stuff didn’t mean jack, and that’s not really who Gates thinks he is. He came out the N bag on the officer, and I think everybody knows it.
by Cobb
So what I mean about the mitigating circumstance is whether or not the officer in question was being told to get off the property and didn’t. So if Gates was arrested *inside* then Gates was right, if Gates was arrested *outside* then Gates was wrong.
by STRONGFORU
Where was “Skip’s” white wife and mulatto children while all this was going down? Things that make you go hmmm….
by Peyton
Man, if you only knew how many times I almost called the cops on you when you went into your house. Whew. I could have really embarrassed myself.
by Q
in reading both his account (from his lawyer) and the account from the cop’s perspective, i can only imagine that the truth is somewhere lodged in between. and i’d have to think that, given his professional expertise, there was SOME militancy mixed in with his frustration. Do you think this would have happened if he wasn’t militant?
by Kirk
Peyton, FTW.
“The police report said Gates was arrested after he yelled at the investigating officer repeatedly inside the residence then followed the officer outside, where Gates continued to upbraid him. “It was at that time that I informed Professor Gates that he was under arrest,” the officer wrote in the report.”
In other words, it sounds like the cop was leaving and Skip didn’t drop the issue, and got arrested for being angry. Showing his ID had nothing to do with it. Cops generally don’t like being harassed by white people either, so I doubt Skip’s race made it any better or worse.
We had a rule of thumb in college – if they knocked on the door to shut the party down, you had to stay inside because as soon as you set foot outside you could be arrested for drunk in public. Not quite the same thing, but close enough. If Skip had stayed in the house, I bet this would have played out a lot differently.
by Phil
Too often cops use their power just to use it. They could have walked away but then Mr. Gates only looks like a victim. His arrest gets us talking about the details of whether he was “inside” or “outside” and what he said.
Anyone who engages in that speculation is being played by the system. All of us would be pissed being harassed about entering our own homes.
The cops were wrong , he let them know how wrong , they wanted to let him know they had power over him , thus the arrest.
Its too bad there is no such thing as common wisdom and common sense aint so common. I can just hear the dispatch:
We’ve got a report of a 60 year old black male breaking into the front door of a residence in broad daylight. He’s wearing a burgundy polo with gray slacks and carrying a brief case. Possible Tweedy Bandit. Please respond with multiple squad cars as his brief case might be armed and dangerous.
by Gray
I think that there is definitely an aspect of race involved in this. However, no matter your skin color or ethnicity: when it’s you by yourself vs. the police… who’s going to win that battle? It seems like Mr. Gates wanted this to escalate as much as the police officer did. People get arrested all the time for calling the police names. I’m not surprised at all that he was arrested. Cops don’t take it very kindly when you yell at them.