The Gates Controversy

Not amused . . .

On July 16, 2009, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested by officer James Crowley of the Cambridge, Mass. Police department. A woman saw two men breaking into Gates’ house and asked another woman to call 911. Apparently Gates had come home and found the front door of his house jammed, so he and his driver forced it open. When officer Crowley arrived, Gates was in his house. But as far as the officer knew, Gates could have been a burglar.

Gates should have been grateful that his neighbors and the police were looking out for his property. He should have cooperated readily with the police to clear up the misunderstanding. But instead, he was uncooperative and verbally abusive, accusing the officer of racism. Officer Crowley arrested Gates for disorderly conduct and let his superiors sort it out. Once they did, they dropped the charges and released Gates. Gates then threatened to sue the Cambridge police for racism.

Racism is obviously not a factor. The police were not called because a black man was “just minding his own business,” but because a man whose race was not identified by the caller was breaking into Gates’ house. Gates was not arrested because he was a black man “just minding his own business,” but because he was at the scene of a break-in and was uncooperative with the police. The same thing would have happened if he were white.

The fact is that a black gang-banger can be arrested standing over a corpse, machete in hand, blood up to his elbows, and he will still whine that he is being arrested “just because he is black.” But this is just stupid. If the police wanted to arrest someone “just because he is black,” there is no shortage of young black men loitering around “minding their own business” that they could nab. You don’t exactly need a dragnet to find them.

"Street cred" at last.

In a country the size of America, it is inevitable that there will be some cases of mistaken arrest, arbitrary arrest, police prejudice, and police brutality. But the fact remains, that the overwhelming reason why black males are so often arrested for crimes is that black males so often commit crimes. And law enforcement statistics show that black men are not arrested for crimes more often than they are reported by victims and witnesses to commit them.

Because of black criminality, it is rational for whites to fear and avoid blacks. Because of black criminality, it is right for police to be suspicious of blacks. And if blacks who really are “just minding their own business” are offended by this fact, they need to direct their complaints to their fellow blacks. How about trying to persuade blacks to stop committing crimes, rather than trying to bully the police into looking the other way?

But none of this even applies in the Gates case, because there is no question that the man was present at the scene of a break-in and refused to cooperate with the police.

It gives one pause that blacks from the dumbest street thug up to the Harvard faculty will latch onto the same transparently stupid ploy to evade responsibility and change the subject.

Did Gates think the “just because he is black” argument clever? If so, then he is clearly not smart enough to be a Harvard professor.

Or was Gates more calculating? Perhaps he knew he was talking nonsense but was hoping the officer Crowley was a sufficiently “sensitive,” guilty, and spineless to be intimidated. Gates might also have laying the foundations for a lawsuit, grandstanding to the countless O. J. jurors out there in the black populace. If so, then he is clearly a cynic.

Another possibility is that Gates knew better but simply could not help himself. If so, perhaps we are dealing with a compulsive inability to take personal responsibility. Clearly this phenomenon is independent of IQ differences and seems to point to a deep psychological difference between blacks and whites.

There is also something morally obscene about Gates’ behavior. After all, Gates is a tenured professor at insanely liberal Harvard, a resident of suicidally liberal Cambridge, a darling of the eastern liberal-Jewish establishment, and a friend of President Obama. In short, Gates is a member of the power elite who could count on its backing. That makes him a powerful man.

Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley

James Crowley, by contrast, is an ordinary cop. As a white male, he is automatically classified by the establishment as an oppressor who shares the blame for all of society’s ills. As a white cop, he is blamed for arresting America’s plentiful black criminals, as if arresting them were somehow the greater crime.

Since Gates is the more powerful of the two, did he treat officer Crowley magnanimously, as powerful men are supposed to do with weaker men? Of course not. Magnanimity is an Aryan virtue. Instead, Gates played the victim, counting on being able to cast Crowley as another Mark Fuhrman. Gates has been lavishly rewarded for a lifetime of simpering about racism, so why would one expect anything else?

Gates is a bully playing the victim. The moral obscenity of his behavior is perfectly captured by an old Polish proverb: “The Jew cries out as he strikes you.”

Chapter two of the Gates controversy began when President Barack Obama departed from his script at a press briefing on health care reform, siding with Gates and condemning the Cambridge police for acting “stupidly.” Obama too was counting on lockstep agreement of the whole liberal-Jewish establishment and spinelessness from whites in general and the Cambridge police in particular.

Like Gates, however, Obama overestimated his hand. The Cambridge police stood solidly behind officer Crowley. So too did a broad swath of the white public. The brains at the White House apparently looked at some polling data and decreed that Obama eat his words. Evidently they also judged the matter urgent enough that it could not wait until the next official appearance, so Obama popped into the White House Press Room for an unscheduled statement.

Unfortunately, Obama merely confounded the problem by issuing a studied non-apology, praising officer Crowley in tepid words, and offering a condescending invitation to Crowley to “have a beer” with Obama and Gates at the White House. (What, no donuts?) I wish that Crowley had told Obama to take his beer and stick it, but eventually he accepted the invitation.

The end of the story remains to be seen, but already this much is apparent.

First, like Gates and countless other blacks, Obama apparently finds the “just because he’s black” fallacy irresistible. Indeed, he claims in his autobiography that he had been stopped by the police “just because he is black.” (Yeah. Prove it.)

Second, never has Obama seemed more of an empty suit. The man seems slick and sophisticated when sticking to a script, but as soon as he departs from it, it is just the same tired old black nonsense.

Being a black man in a suit who can read from a teleprompter might qualify Obama to be a television news reader, but not the president of a serious country. It has never been clearer: Barack Obama is nothing but the mulatto press spokesman for the Rahm Emmanuel/Goldman-Sachs administration.

Obama had the face to insist that we use the Gates incident as “a teachable moment” (what a pompous, ugly phrase). Presumably this means yet another opportunity to lecture white Americans on how their wicked racism, rather than black criminality, is why police keep arresting black men.

The real lesson, of course, is that no matter how high we elevate blacks in white society–to the Harvard faculty, even to the White House–they still have chips on their shoulders. A chip on one’s shoulder is a deep-seated, pre-existing grievance that shows up in inappropriate circumstances.

What sustains this black chip? The clash between ideology and reality. The ideology is racial equality. The reality is genetic racial inequality. White liberals keep telling blacks that they are equal to whites. To create the appearance of racial equality, white liberals have debased our standards and debauched our culture. They promote blacks to jobs they can’t handle and give blacks money they can’t earn. And they take the opportunities, and the money, from white men like James Crowley.

But in spite of it all, blacks still find that they are “over-represented” at the bottom of white society and “under-represented” at the top. If blacks really are equal, then the only explanation for lingering inequality is white ill will. This is the source of the simmering rage that sustains the “just because he is black” myth. It is also, no doubt, a major motive of the countless rapes, murders, and robberies perpetrated by blacks on white victims.

It is time to knock the chip off black America’s shoulder by telling the truth: that racial inequality is based on genetic differences, that blacks will never flourish in a society created by white people and governed by white standards, and that it is time for Americans of all races to go our separate ways.