I deliberately waited until the furor over the Cambridge incident had died down before discussing it here, now. I figured a lot of folks would assume I was the guy with time wearing a police uniform who would automatically side with the cop.

Nope. It ain’t that.

From President Obama on down, folks saw it as a “racial incident.” I honestly don’t think it was. I don’t even see it as a cop-versus-citizen thing.

This reviewer’s two cents worth is: it looks like a “class” thing to me, in more than one sense of the word.

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, who happens to be black, comes home to the nice house he has earned the hard way, in a hired limo. The front door is stuck. He and the limo driver try to push the door open. A neighbor sees two men shouldering a door inward, looking for all the world like a break-in, and calls the police. She does not mention the skin color of the men involved: she can’t see that in the dim light. She’s just a good neighbor reporting what looks like a burglary in progress.

Police respond with alacrity. “Contact” officer James Crowley, who happens to be white, asks the professor for his ID. The Prof offers only his Harvard ID: after all, being a Harvard professor is where his ego is invested. Now, no one has ever shown us in the rest of the world a photo of that ID, but I’ve never seen a college ID that had a residential address on it. A driver’s license with his picture and his address that said “Hello, this is MY house, I LIVE here” would have been nice. Something that merely says, “I’m an important, prestigious person from an important, prestigious place” does NOT say that.

The cop, who was a designated instructor in race relations and racial sensitivity, had HIS ego invested in keeping his community, himself, and his brother officers safe. Put yourself in his place. You are the officer called to the scene of a potential burglary (or even home invasion) in progress. The obvious suspect refuses to cooperate and merely screams at you that you’re a racist cop. You KNOW that if you just take his word that he lives there and you leave, and an hour later the legitimate homeowner calls your chief and says “My neighbors told me that the cops were right there with the guy that broke into my house, but the burglar said he was me, and the cop just took his word for it and left!” your badge will grow wings and fly away.

Professor Gates made a career of studying racial hatred, and of fighting it. He can be proud of that. But if his own powers of critical thinking equal the intellectual horsepower that fueled his career, he can’t be proud of the knee-jerk reaction that made him shout “racist cop,” and “I’ll see your mama outside!”

The Cambridge cop, on the other hand, managed his end of things with professionalism and dignity. HE is not the one who automatically defaulted to racial stereotyping, as the Professor did…and as, sadly, the President did.

Race, my butt. It was about status, and societal “class.” The Harvard professor was accustomed to being the alpha in his world, and was not prepared to obey an appropriate command from a lower-class, blue-collar member of society. Yes, face it: the blue collar is at its bluest on a police uniform shirt. And if the most prestigious members of Boston/Cambridge society didn’t follow a “caste system,” they wouldn’t have become known as “Boston Brahmins,” would they?

Beers in the Rose Garden? Barack Obama’s brilliant sense of media manipulation pulled a rabbit out of the hat on that one. But let’s face reality: this was about a privileged member of the liberal elite, who not only knows the President but mentored him, overbearingly “pulling rank” on a public servant who was trying to keep the professor’s home safe. It’s about a member of the Urban Elite who lacked the “ordinary folks’ common sense” to realize he had just done a very convincing imitation of a burglar.

The deepest of my sympathy in this whole cluster-coitus goes to the black Cambridge officer who was publicly excoriated as an Uncle Tom for being honest enough to speak up for a brother cop who did the right thing. Of the players who got the most coverage, my hat is off to the Cambridge cop who made the controversial arrest. He was the same man who helped the physically handicapped professor down the stairs (see photo below) after the brewskis and the media moment were done … as President Obama strode ahead, leaving both the Cop and the Professor more than symbolically behind him.

In the end, it was the cop who showed “class,” in the best sense of the word.

Share or Bookmark