EthnicMajority

(Law.com) What is it like to be arrested in your own home and taken to jail — and to feel that it is because you are black?

At a benefit for The Southern Center for Human Rights on Monday evening, Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree talked about his experience representing his colleague Henry Louis Gates last July in just such an incident.

Gates, a University Professor at Harvard and nationally known scholar on race, was on his porch when he was arrested for disorderly conduct by a Cambridge police officer who had responded to a call from a neighbor saying that someone had forced his way into the front door of Gates’ house.

The ensuing national brouhaha about racial profiling prompted Ogletree to write a book about the incident, “The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Race, Class, and Crime in America,” which was just published on June 18.

Ogletree, who has been the chairman of the Southern Center’s board since 1982, said that America has a long way to go to become a post-racial society, citing the disproportionate number of black men in prison.

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(Asian Week) Harvard education. NBA skills. Jeremy Lin has both.

Lin, a 6′3”, 200-pound point guard, is training in anticipation of the NBA draft next Thursday, June 24. Lin, a Taiwanese American, would be rare in a league dominated by white and Black players.

“Jeremy loved soccer and basketball even before the age of 5. He would go to all of his older brother’s practices and just do the drills on the sideline by himself. When he was in the fourth grade, we realized that YMCA basketball was no longer challenging for him, so we started looking for higher level basketball leagues,” said Lin’s mother, Shirley.

Lin’s parents immigrated to the United States from Taiwan. They are both computer engineers. Lin’s father, Gie-Ming, is a huge basketball fan and shared this love with his three sons. When Jeremy began playing Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) basketball, Shirley and Gie-Ming realized that Jeremy had a talent. Even with talent, Shirley doesn’t forget the hard work and effort that her son has put in since he was young in order to one day play in the NBA.

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(Boston Globe) When Henry Louis Gates Jr., a prominent Harvard professor of African-American studies, was arrested for disorderly conduct by a white Cambridge police officer last summer, President Obama led a chorus of critics denouncing the local Police Department.

Gates, who is African-American, described his arrest as a “teaching moment’’ about race relations in America.

His case drew national attention to the relationship between policing and race. Obama wound up hosting Gates and the officer who arrested him for a so-called beer summit at the White House. And the arrest, for some, raised the question of whether officers disproportionately arrest blacks for disorderly conduct, considered one of the most discretionary and most abused charges in the nation’s criminal justice system.

But a review of the Cambridge department’s handling of disorderly conduct cases from 2004 to 2009 finds no evidence of racial profiling. Instead, the analysis by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting finds that the most common factor linking people who are arrested in Cambridge for disorderly conduct is that they were allegedly screaming or cursing in front of police.

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How many 911 calls begin with: “there’s a strange black man breaking into my neighbor’s house”? I am not surprised that the 911 operator would ask for a physical description later in the call. I don’t think Lucia Whalen was deliberately casing her neighborhood and targeting African Americans for suspicious behavior. That would be a clear case of racial profiling. But I am not ready to assume Ms. Whalen acted in a color-blind fashion either.

If you review the 911 call transcript, when asked whether the perpetrators were white, black, or Hispanic, Ms. Whalen said “there were two larger men, one looked kind of Hispanic, but I’m not really sure. And the other one entered and I didn’t see what he looked like at all.” Professor Gates is multi-racial and his lighter skin could be confused with being Hispanic when viewed from behind at a distance. Ms. Whalen also acknowledges that she wasn’t sure whether this was a break-in or the owner trying to get into his own house: “I noticed two suitcases so I’m not sure if these are two individuals who actually work there, I mean who live there”.

So here’s my question. If you saw someone in broad daylight with two suitcases on the front porch trying to enter your neighbor’s house, what would you do? Since most burglaries do not occur during the daylight hours through the front door, this situation would appear to me to fit the profile (pardon the pun) of someone returning from a trip and accidentally locking himself out of his house. I would be more inclined to help him rather than call 911.

Had Ms. Whalen seen two white people trying to enter the house instead of one who looked Hispanic, might she have been inclined to help them rather than call 911?

Was Harvard professor Henry Gates the victim of racial profiling? I say yes, but not at the hands of the police. It was his neighbor, who saw a mysterious-looking black man breaking into an expensive house in an affluent neighborhood in Boston, and called the police. Would she have called 911 if the man was white? Maybe she would have figured the man locked himself out of his home (which Gates was) and brought him a crowbar. One thing is certain – Professor Gates should get to know his neighbors better.

According to the police report, Gates became belligerent and called the officer a racist. According to Gates’ account, he denies calling the officer a racist and believes he was arrested because he asked the officer for his name and badge number. As with many situations with two radically different accounts, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. But that said, how crazy would Gates have to act in order to justify being arrested?

There have been reports of complaints of police mistreatment by black students at Harvard, so it appears we do not have an aberration – we have a trend of a more serious racial profiling problem. But in Professor Gates’ case, it seems he was more of a victim of racial discrimination than racial profiling. Either way, he is owed an apology and the Cambridge Police Department has a problem that needs to be addressed.

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