Does any sensible person really believe that Gates was arrested for any reason other than that Crowley wanted to teach this uppity guy a lesson? It's pretty clear that the issue was Gates's verbal abuse of Crowley, and human nature being what it is, and given that Crowley had the means, he pushed back.
Race may have been an aggravating factor, but given Crowley's expert profiling background it's unlikely it was primary--he could not have seriously believed that this man was a prowler. So I wouldn't be surprised if it was more about the resentment of a working-class guy being verbally undressed by a fancy-pants Harvard guy. It would be ironic if that was really at the heart of the misunderstanding, and I wonder if that would be discussed if that beer date with Obama ever happens: For Gates it was all about the racial narrative, and for Crowley it was the town/gown narrative. For both it was about resentments about being looked upon by the other as an inferior.
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UPDATE: On a related note, Stanley Fish's NYT column today talks about Gates's reception at Duke when he was hired to teach there. As I said above, I think that class resentment was probably a bigger factor than race in Crowley's decision to arrest Gates, but Fish points to the reason why race was a likely aggravating factor.
TV commentators, laboring to explain the unusual candor and vigor of Obama’s initial comments on the Gates incident, speculated that he had probably been the victim of racial profiling himself. Speculation was unnecessary, for they didn’t have to look any further than the story they were reporting in another segment, the story of the “birthers” — the “wing-nuts,” in Chris Matthews’s phrase — who insist that Obama was born in Kenya and cite as “proof” his failure to come up with an authenticated birth certificate. For several nights running, Matthews displayed a copy of the birth certificate and asked, What do you guys want? How can you keep saying these things in the face of all evidence?
He missed the point. No evidence would be sufficient, just as no evidence would have convinced some of my Duke colleagues that Gates was anything but a charlatan and a fraud. It isn’t the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate that’s the problem for the birthers. The problem is again the legitimacy of a black man living in a big house, especially when it’s the White House. Just as some in Durham and Cambridge couldn’t believe that Gates belonged in the neighborhood, so does a vocal minority find it hard to believe that an African-American could possibly be the real president of the United States.
Gates and Obama are not only friends; they are in the same position, suspected of occupying a majestic residence under false pretenses. And Obama is a double offender. Not only is he guilty of being Housed While Black; he is the first in American history guilty of being P.W.B., President While Black.
Even if Crowley was not motivated consciously or unconsciously by this racial narrative, there's good reason for Gates to think that he was. And so while we can scold Henry Gates for not living up to the Jackie Robinson gold standard of refusing to lash out at white people behaving badly toward black people, and while we can understand Crowley's sense of being wrongly accused of being a racist when he has worked hard to overcome racial stereotyping, in the end it boils down to the same thing: a white man with power abusing it to teach a black man a lesson about his place. So