I have read and reread the stories concerning the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard University. By now surely everyone in the United States who gives a tinker’s damn about civil rights is aware that Professor Gates was arrested by a Boston police officer after being interrogated inside his own home, and solely because a neighbor saw Professor Gates struggling to get into his house. The neighbor reported a potential break in. What’s clear about the matter is that Dr. Gates answered the cop’s basic questions: he had identification and could prove that he lived in the house. The police officer arrested Dr. Gates because frankly Gates was angry and because he accused the cop of engaging in racist tactics.
I’ve grown to feel that the story suggests something about the state of civil rights in contemporary America that is seldom overtly described but which I think is clearly at the root of this matter. You may call my perspective a “disability studies” view if you like. My sense is that this is not a 1960’s classic African-American civil rights matter–a bald and dreadful story of racial intolerance and bigotry–instead this incident is essentially “post-racial” and by turns it has everything to do with a new kind of American hostility to erratic public emotion. You see I think its a mistake to call this a story that’s solely about race. Dr. Gates lost his temper because he was being accosted in his own house and that was indeed a form of racial profiling. He was justified in losing his cool. But what got him arrested was his evident emotional state–that fight or flee condition that Daniel Goleman has called “a neurological highjacking”. In short, Dr. Gates was arrested because he was demonstrating human emotion.
I said above that this is a disability studies perspective. We read nowadays over and over again of teens with developmental disabilities being tasered by police; of elementary school children being restrained by teachers; of orderlies in group homes watching and even abetting fights between developmentally disabled men. The tales are legion and they speak to a broad and ungoverned intolerance and disdain for the excited and turbulent emotions of human beings who have been treated poorly by authority figures.
I think the same cop who wrongly arrested Henry Gates would also wrongly arrest a developmentally disabled kid who was having trouble processing too much information at the local 7-11.
The problem is with our police forces which have very limited training in how to employ emotional intelligence. This matters because a diverse society is a more complex and surprising society than your average American cop is willing or able to suppose.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
A commenter on Bitch PhD’s blog says she is a white woman who shouted at the Cambridge police when they allowed her landlord to lock her out of her apartment. And they did not arrest her.
Gates is disabled–the police report puts Gates’ word in quotation marks. He had to use his cane. He was not believed about a hip fracture when he was a kid and was told it was psychosomatic. Now he’s still not really believed. Having one’s elderly disbled neighbor who is trying to get in his front door arrested for it is awful.
I’m with you on this–people can’t handle protest or emotion these days. But even Christ got angry. I was born too late–it’s not the 60s anymore.
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