Back from my little vacation and I see lots of new info pertaining to the Gates incident. The latest and greatest being Dan Riehl and Joseph Culligan of Web of Deception digging into the charity Gates started and runs. Apparently the guy has taken in over 200 grand in donations and has banked the majority of it. The money he has given out has been to his buddies at Harvard. The Boston Globe wrote this about the charity:
Public records indicate that the charity, domiciled in Gates’s Cambridge home, has been dormant since its inception. Jill Butterworth, a spokeswoman for the state Attorney General’s Office, says Inkwell has never filed the required, annual form PC, for public charities. “They are currently not in compliance,” Butterworth said. “It’s possible they are inactive or have dissolved. We are checking into it.” Gates declined to comment.
Kinda sad for a charity started (PDF) to “promote programs that educate the general public and encourage academic interest regarding African and African-American literature, art, history, and culture” eh?
Dan ponders whether this is the reason for Gates acting liking an ass to the arresting officer and refusing entry into the house. I doubt it myself….it appears to be as Patterico says in this post. Reverse racism:
Racism is simply a form of stereotyping. Stereotyping occurs when one says: because of my past experiences with people from your group, as well as things I have heard about people from your group, I am forming a firm opinion about you.
Racism is simply one form of that attitude, in which “people from your group” means “black people.”
Oddly, however, many black people feel perfectly comfortable engaging in a similar form of stereotyping, in which “people from your group” means “police officers” or “white people” — or, best of all, “white police officers.” Apparently, stereotyping those groups is a laudable pursuit.
The Henry Louis Gates arrest is yet another reminder of how quick some black people are to leap to unflattering conclusions about others based on scant evidence. Mickey Kaus reads Gates’s account of his arrest, and makes this observation:
Just reading this passage–Gates’ own words–it seems to me he pops into litigious mode a little quickly. He says he wanted to file a complaint “because of the way he treated me at the front door.” How had he mistreated him at the front door? He asked him ‘Would you step outside onto the porch?’ (where, as Gates notes, the cop would have more rights). When Gates refuses and instead gives the cop an ID, the cop looks at the ID. And at that point Gates has already determined he’s been treated unfairly. He’s already refusing to answer questions and planning to file a complaint. Again, from his own words it looks like he rushes a bit to the conclusion that a white man in a similar situation would have been treated differently. Is that really true?
Is it really true? Gates has no basis to say. All he has is a collection of prejudices about the group to which the officer belonged: white police officers. And based on that collection of prejudices, Gates leapt to a conclusion — this police officer is a racist. The evidence is strong that the conclusion was wrong: the officer teaches classes in avoiding racial profiling and was responding to a legitimate report from a citizen. Gates should have realized that his own actions in forcing entry to the house had aroused legitimate suspicions. But Gates didn’t employ common sense, or make an effort to learn something about the man in front of him. He simply stereotyped him.
And in apologizing for Gates, black firebrands and white liberals patronizingly excuse techniques of stereotyping that they would condemn in a racist.
Roger Simon views the defense of Gates by the black racists and the other bleeding heart liberals as nostalgia for the good times of the past when they could whine and cry about the injustice of it all:
We all grew up with the received wisdom, with the donnée, if you will, that the U.S. was a racist country. And it was:
So were most countries. In fact, you might say all were racist. Despite the cliché wallowed in by our self-critics, racism is a global human phenomenon, not even remotely exclusively American.
In fact the United States, of all places I have visited, has done the most to obliterate its racism in a concerted manner. Perhaps it is because we are such a melting pot and have little choice that we have made a great effort. And of course there is the more than justifiable guilt over slavery. So we tried hard. And we’ve done a remarkably good job, considering that deep in the human psyche is distrust of the other. Most of us prefer to live in a comfort zone of our own people, our own ethnic, religious and racial groups. But we know that’s not cool and have, in our culture, worked very hard to combat that. Most of us have, anyway. And we have reached a point, I would say as long as twenty years ago or maybe more, when to be a racist or to exhibit racist tendencies was despised. To put it succinctly, to be a racist was to be a jerk.
But when the rules change, when values change, not everyone can adjust with it — not only the racist, but also those who depended on being victims of racism. For all his brilliance, Henry Lewis Gates is evidently such a man. Otherwise, why cry out about being victimized as a “black man in America” before there is any evidence that that is the case?
This is nostalgia for racism and our president probably suffers from it as well, although perhaps to a lesser degree, considering he clearly plunged into the fray without thinking. The problem is that this nostalgia not only blames people unfairly, it also increases the very thing it pretends to oppose — racism itself. The unfair or inaccurate imputation of racism promotes racism.
The funny thing is that this crowd of racists and liberals, including our President, have hung their hat on an incident they will lose. Crowley had every right to be at that house investigating a break-in. A call comes in saying some black guys are breaking into a house next door and when he arrives Crowley saw a black man in the house. I mean, come on….that was more then enough reasonable suspicion to detain the man. He didn’t even need to ask for permission to enter the property, a warrantless entry was fully justified.
And any reasonable person, after forcing their way into a house, wouldn’t be surprised that neighbors may have called in a burglary call. Any reasonable person would of cooperated with the police knowing the possibility existed. Hell, any reasonable person would of appreciated the fact that someone was looking out for their house.
But not Gates. He saw eeeeeeviiiiilllll from the git-go. And now he’s talking to lawyers about a lawsuit.
Shocking.
Oh, and I love Tom Maguire’s question here:
So – do feminists and domestic violence experts agree that if the man of the house shouts at the cops that everything is cool so get out, the cops should simply leave?
More here.
UPDATE
Yes, I know there is no such thing as reverse racism….but in making a point about the fact that blacks who have a long history of yelling racism about whites I think its a valid way to describe the reverse, at least to make a point. Maybe not the best descriptor but oh well.
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