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This is sickening news, indeed!
Dr.Peter Wuteh Vakunta
Department of French and Italian
University of Wisconsin-Madison
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----- Original Message -----
From: Aggo Akyea <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tuesday, July 21, 2009 10:57 pm
Subject: Analysis: Gates arrest a signpost on racial road
To: [log in to unmask]
> ********************************************************
>
> VISIT AFRICAN ASSOCIATION OF MADISON WEBSITE
>
> http://www.africanassociation.org
>
> FOR LATEST INFORMATION ON AFRICA FEST 2009,
>
> MEMBERSHIP, COMMUNITY CALENDAR AND MUCH MORE....
>
> ********************************************************
>
> Analysis: Gates arrest a signpost on racial road
>
> By JESSE WASHINGTON
> AP National Writer
> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090722/ap_on_re_us/us_harvard_scholar_analysis
>
>
> It took less than a day for the arrest of Henry Louis Gates to become
> racial lore. When one of America's most prominent black intellectuals
> winds up in handcuffs, it's not just another episode of profiling —
> it's a signpost on the nation's bumpy road to equality.
>
> The news was parsed and Tweeted, rued and debated. This was, after all
> Henry "Skip" Gates: Summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of
> Yale. MacArthur "genius grant" recipient. Acclaimed historian, Harvard
> professor and PBS documentarian. One of Time magazine's "25 Most
> Influential Americans" in 1997. Holder of 50 honorary degrees.
>
> If this man can be taken away by police officers from the porch of his
> own home, what does it say about the treatment that average blacks can
> expect in 2009?
>
> Earl Graves Jr., CEO of the company that publishes Black Enterprise
> magazine, was once stopped by police during his train commute to work,
> dressed in a suit and tie.
>
> "My case took place back in 1995, and here we are 14 years later
> dealing with the same madness," he said Tuesday. "Barack Obama being
> the president has meant absolutely nothing to white law enforcement
> officers. Zero. So I have zero confidence that (Gates' case) will lead
> to any change whatsoever."
>
> The 58-year-old professor had returned from a trip to Chinalast
> Thursday afternoon and found the front door of his Cambridge, Mass.,
> home stuck shut. Gates entered the back door, forced open the front
> door with help from a car service driver, and was on the phone with
> the Harvard leasing company when a white police sergeant arrived.
>
> Gates and the sergeant gave differing accounts of what happened next.
> But for many people, that doesn't matter.
>
> They don't care that Gates was charged not with breaking and entering,
> but with disorderly conduct after repeatedly demanding the sergeant's
> name and badge number. It doesn't matter whether Gates was yelling, or
> accused Sgt. James Crowley of being racist, or that all charges were
> dropped Tuesday.
>
> All they see is pure, naked racial profiling.
>
> "Under any account ... all of it is totally uncalled for," said Graves.
>
> "It never would have happened — imagine a white professor, a
> distinguished white professor at Harvard, walking around with a cane,
> going into his own house, being harassed or stopped by the police. It
> would never happen."
>
> Racial profiling became a national issue in the 1990s, when highway
> police on major drug delivery routes were accused of stopping drivers
> simply for being black. Lawsuits were filed, studies were
> commissioned, data was analyzed. "It is wrong, and we will end it in
> America," President George W. Bush said in 2001.
>
> Yet for every study that concluded police disproportionately stop,
> search and arrest minorities, another expert came to a different
> conclusion. "That's always going to be the case," Greg Ridgeway, who
> has a Ph.D in statistics and studies racial profiling for the
> RANDresearch group, said on Monday. "You're never going to be able to
> (statistically) prove racial profiling. ... There's always a plausible
> explanation."
>
> Federal legislation to ban racial profiling has languished since being
> introduced in 2007 by a dozen Democratic senators, including then-Sen.
> Barack Obama.
>
> U.S. Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., said that was partly because "when you
> look at statistics, and you're trying to prove the extent, the
> information comes back that there's not nearly as much (profiling) as
> we continue to experience."
>
> But Davishas no doubt that profiling is real: He says he was stopped
> while driving in Chicagoin 2007 for no reason other than the fact he
> is black. Police gave him a ticket for swerving over the center line;
> a judge said the ticket didn't make sense and dismissed it.
>
> "Trying to reach this balance of equity, equal treatment, equal
> protection under the law, equal understanding, equal opportunity, is
> something that we will always be confronted with. We may as well be
> prepared for it," he said.
>
> Amid the indignation over Gates' case, a few people pointed out that
> he may have violated the cardinal rule of avoiding arrest: Do not
> antagonize the cops.
>
> The police report said that Gates yelled at the officer, refused to
> calm down and behaved in a "tumultuous" manner. Gates said he simply
> asked for the officer's identification, followed him into his porch
> when the information was not forthcoming, and was arrested for no
> reason. But something about being asked to prove that you live in your
> own home clearly struck a nerve — both for Gates and his defenders.
>
> "You feel violated, embarrassed, not sure what is taking place,
> especially when you haven't done anything," said Graves of his own
> experience, when police made him face the wall and frisked him in
> Grand Central Station in New York City. "You feel shocked, then you
> realize what's happening, and then you feel it's a violation of
> everything you stand for."
>
> And that this should happen to "Skip" Gates — the unblemished
> embodiment of President Obama's recent admonition to black America not
> to search for handouts or favors, but to "seize our own future, each
> and every day" — shook many people to the core.
>
> Wrote Lawrence Bobo, Gates' Harvard colleague, who picked his friend
> up from jail: "Ain't nothing post-racial about the United States of
> America."
>
> ___
>
> Jesse Washington covers race and ethnicity for The Associated Press.
>
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