As I write these words it is still several hours before President Obama, Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley sit down for beers on the grounds of the White House.
Rarely has a gathering of three guys for brewskies at a backyard picnic table attracted so much attention. (Did I really need to know that the president prefers Bud Light?)
But the widely but not all that deeply reported arrest of Gates by Crowley at Gates’ home in Cambridge has touched a nerve and even stolen headlines from a historic debate on the nation’s troubled health care system.
Most curious are the wildly disparate public perceptions of the incident. In a Wall Street Journal poll, only 4 percent of African Americans blamed Gates for the fracas while 30 percent blamed Crowley. Among white respondents, 7 percent blamed Crowley, but 32 percent blamed Gates.
Maybe the context of our own experiences colors our viewpoints. Personally, I admire police officers. We expect so much of them — as protectors, social workers, mediators — and pay them so relatively little in return.
My encounters with police have been, by and large, positive. But I understand Gates’ frustration at being arrested by Crowley at his own house for “disorderly conduct.”
In the mid-1980s, as a newspaper editor in Winston-Salem, I was stopped three times by police for no apparent reason.
Once, while driving on Interstate 40, I was pulled by an officer, even though I was not speeding. He asked for my license and registration, which I produced immediately and respectfully.
The officer, who was white, peered into the car — a still fairly new sports car — and commented that it was a nice vehicle. He then asked me what I did for a living. “What does that have to do with anything?” I thought to myself.
But I didn’t say that to him. I told him my occupation. He let me go, but never explained why he had stopped me in the first place.
The second time, a few months later, I was on foot, near my apartment in northwest Winston-Salem. I like to take a walk before bed, so I’d typically stroll along Reynolda Road, near Wake Forest University.
An officer, who happened to be white, pulled up in his cruiser and asked me where I lived. I told him.
He seemed satisfied and told me good night.
Two weeks later another officer stopped me during a walk.
He asked me where I lived.
“Over there,” I told him, thinking, this was getting ridiculous. “I have my license if you want to see it.”
Several months later an officer stopped me again.
Maybe I should be holding a sign, I thought, that says: “I Am Not a Criminal. I Am Taking a Walk. I Live Across the Street and Am Gainfully Employed. Thank You for Your Interest.”
Again, those were not representative of all of my encounters with police. Nor are they indicative of many, more serious incidents that have occurred to others.
They are, in fact, insignificant by comparison: Men shot while reaching for their wallets or arrested for imaginary crimes or tortured while in custody.
That said, the incidents I recounted happened more than 20 years ago. Things have changed since then, right?
Well, yes. Greensboro has had three black police chiefs in that time span. The mayor is a black woman. Winston-Salem has seen its first black female police chief.
The chief of police in Cambridge, for whom Crowley works, is black. The president is black.
And no. Statistically, African Americans still are more likely to be stopped by police. That’s a hard fact. A state-sponsored study in Illinois reveals that black and Hispanic motorists are more than twice as likely as white motorists to be subjected to searches by the police, even though white motorists are twice as likely to be found with contraband during searches.
The baggage those disparities and previous experiences may bring with them feed anger and can breed tension. I don’t know if that fueled Gates’ reaction. And I won’t take sides on the incident. I was not there and the men’s accounts differ significantly.
I suspect this was mostly a case of two men who are much smarter than they behaved falling victim to bad decisions on a bad day. But the discussion the episode sparked ought to go beyond the silliness of, say, Glenn Beck calling the president “a racist.”
I, for one, am not interested in winning an argument.
I’m not interested in who can scream the loudest or shout the longest.
I am interested in a rational, earnest and constructive conversation about a difficult topic.
Beers, anyone?
