Now that President Obama has weighed in on the Gates affair, I guess I can, too. 

While I think it was probably ill-advised of the President to say the Cambridge police behaved "stupidly," there's no question, in a city like Cambridge, that race played a role in both Sergeant Crowley's and Professor Gates' actions, right along with dueling perceptions of privilege and class, deference and notions of authority. 

Hopes on the part of the Cambridge Police Department that the incident could be forgiven or forgotten turned out to be in vain.  If you believe Crowley's report, then Gates is making good on his promise that Crowley had "not heard the last of it."  The professor has been on a whirlwind charm offensive that makes you wonder when a call for racial justice becomes a personal vendetta. 


Don't get me wrong: Gates is understandably angry.  But when do you cross the line into vengeful?  As the offended party how much offense can you give before becoming a bully yourself?  Gates seems prepared to find out, and eager to share his findings with the rest of us. 

In one of his many interviews on the topic of his humiliation at the hands of a white policemen, Gates spoke eloquently about narratives:  "I was cast by [Crowley] in a narrative and he didn’t know how to get out of it," he said.  Now, in the next chapter, the table's have been turned.

Gates is indeed well-known, as Crowley claims he was sure to inform the officer prior to his arrest, but Crowley himself is only now coming into focus as a person, too, and not the convenient villain of Gates' narrative, in which both he and its author are now trapped, along with the rest of us for the foreseeable future. 

The Globe reports Crowley "attended racially diverse Cambridge public schools, and graduated from Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, where [his mother] worked for 26 years."  He has had a distinguished record on the Cambridge force (no small feat, I'm sure), and "was hand-picked by a black police commissioner to teach recruits about avoiding racial profiling."  (Oh, the irony, right?)  His comments have been on the whole calm and measured, except for the fact that he has unequivocally refused to apologize for Gates' arrest.  Ever. 

Some may call him "the post-racial face of racism" and insist that his brand of insidious prejudice is actually the most dangerous of all.  But however you look at it, Sergeant Crowley's background and record argue for a much more nuanced approach than Gates & Co. seem to be taking.  While Gates insists he could not have been belligerent in the moments leading up to his arrest, as the officer claims, due to "a bronchial infection," he seems to have since found his voice. His wholesale condemnation of the arresting officer has become positively strident. Disrespected in his own home and humiliated in public, he will have his pound of flesh.

His status has given him the advantage in round two, as he allegedly predicted. He has ready access to media and authorities at the highest levels of government.  Crowley has said that he proceeded by the book, and that Gates "controlled the outcome of that event".  Whether or not that's true, Gates certainly seems in a position to control the outcome now, for better or worse.

Which is why it's disturbing that as the story gains legs, the lines are more and more starkly drawn.  While Gates first said “The police report is full of this man’s broad imagination,’’ in a fauning piece by his daughter in the Daily Beast he upped the ante: "Well, the police report was an act of pure fiction. One designed to protect him, Sgt. Crowley, from unethical behavior. I was astonished at the audacity of the lies in the police report, and almost the whole thing from start to finish was just pure fabrication."

He has called Crowley "a disturbed person" and "a rogue policeman" and told Soledad O'Brien that Crowley "couldn’t stand a black man standing up for his rights right in his face. And that’s what I did. And I would do the same thing exactly again."

He has even suggested what to his mind would have been a just resolution to the incident: "[Sergeant Crowley] should have gotten out of there and said, 'I’m sorry, sir, good luck. Loved your PBS series—check with you later!'"  No doubt:  apologies and praise — always a nice note to end on.   

It's clear that what we're seeing now — in both parties' intransigence — is the slow-motion replay of what went down that day. 

Most of us will be able, on reflection, to sympathize with both the professor and the policeman, once we back up and humanize them — the jetlagged professor outraged at an intrusion into his home, the cop annoyed at the snappy reaction of the professor he's sworn to protect and serve.  But humanizing them defuses the tension, and while showing the way towards a more fruitful dialogue on race, also weakens our ability to plug them into our own ready-made narratives. 

In fact, by his own admission, mere hours after the incident Gates was already making plans for a documentary based on his experience as a victim of racial profiling.  On the one hand, his intentions are admirable — using his experience to publicize the difficulties even successful blacks face in a supposedly post-racial America.  But if the pursuit of this worthy agenda leads him to distort what actually took place that day, or to engage in wholesale character assassination, it will take us two steps back.

So powerful is Gates' life narrative, and his appreciation of the perfect irony of this incident in light of it, that he fails time and again in comments on it to demonstrate any interest in the personal narrative of Crowley.  For Gates race seems entirely a one-way street.  "If he apologizes sincerely," Gates told the Globe, "I am willing to forgive him. And if he admits his error, I am willing to educate him about the history of racism in America and the issue of racial profiling." Not exactly an invitation to dialogue.

As unknowledgeable and unsympathetic as Sergeant Crowley may have been to the private world of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Gates has demonstrated a corresponding lack of interest and sympathy in the complex reality of an individual whose reputation and livelihood he seems all too ready to destroy in vengeance, wrapped up as it may be in what to him and to many who have faced perceived racism seems a heroic cause.

And he's getting a lot of help from his friends.  But you have to wonder if it really advances the national dialogue on race to target Crowley much like Crowley allegedly targeted Gates himself.  Just as Gates should not be made to represent the abstraction of "a black man in America", Crowley should not be made to shoulder Governor Deval Patrick's feelings of powerlessness as a black teen at the predominantly white Milton Academy, or made to stand in for troopers who stop blacks and Latinos in greater numbers than whites.  

None of this is promising if we're looking to get to a new place with race.  What Gates, as a pedigreed pedagogue should understand better than the rest of us is that your experiences and achievements only matter to others if they can be communicated in a meaningful way to them — which means involving them in them.  And that takes authentic interest in and empathy for others, first and foremost. 

If Gates is sincere, as we should assume he is, in his desire to use his extraordinary connections in politics and the media to transform this unfortunate incident into a national teachable moment — his life's cause, really, and something entirely within his power — then he should first of all refrain from slandering Sergeant Crowley.  To do so is beneath Gates' dignity regardless of whatever insult he may have suffered at Crowley's hands.

“Because of the capricious whim of one disturbed person," Gates declared shortly after his arrest , "I am now a black man with a prison record." Significantly, Gates left it up to us to determine exactly who this "disturbed person" with the "capricious whim" might be.  And unfortunately that, and not the complexities of race relations in America today, has become the focus of debate.