The real racist....

Some truth in the Gates affair...

Lost in the outcry over Gates’s arrest is a critical detail. When Sgt. Crowley asked Gates if he wanted another officer to take his house key and to secure the front door, Gates told him the door was defective due to damage it had sustained in a previous break-in attempt by a would-be burglar. As Gates himself had good reason to suspect, the police had arrived to stop a possible crime in progress.

Those who insist on taking Gates’s allegations of police racism at face value—from President Obama to Al Sharpton, who called the incident “the highest example of racial profiling I have seen”—should also consider that the professor has long been something of a provocateur on racial issues. He has claimed that he “sees” racism everywhere, and laments that “because of white racism,” he must continually endure the indignity of knowing that “[w]hen I walk into a room, people still see my blackness more than my Gates-ness or my literary-ness.”

Central to that “Gates-ness” is the professor’s belief that racism is omnipresent in American society. He insists that “racism has become fashionable” in contemporary America, and sees evidence of it in everything from the criminal justice system to television programs and college curricula, which include a canon of Western literature that “represents the return of an order in which my people were subjugated, the voiceless, the invisible, the unrepresented.” According to Gates, moreover, white people erect innumerable barriers that virtually guarantee black failure.

Gates has long tried to popularize his views about white racism at Harvard. After joining the Harvard faculty in 1991, for example, one of Gates’ first acts was to hire filmmaker Spike Lee as a guest lecturer at the university. Lee has claimed that white “racism is woven into the very fabric of America,” and by his own admission is “convinced [that] AIDS is a government-engineered disease, and that blacks are incapable of being racists because they lack social, political, and economic power.”

In 1993 Gates lured Professor Cornel West away from Princeton University, to join him on the Harvard faculty. A Marxist who has branded the U.S. a “racist patriarchal” nation where “white supremacy” continues to define everyday life, West contends that “a profound hatred of African people … sits at the center of American civilization.”

The most egregious instance of Gates’s racial agenda is his attempt to slander a white police officer doing his job simply for the color of his skin. Thus, the most cogent summary of “Gatesgate” comes from Dennis O'Connor, president of the Cambridge Police Superior Officers Association. Reflecting on President Obama’s attempt to link Gates’s arrest to the history of racism, O’Connor suggested that the president had it backward: “The facts of the case suggested that the president used the right adjective but directed it to the wrong party.”