Clarity of meaning emerges in the Gates case

So often communications is about the means of solving a problem, a method of analysis that helps you decide what you think about a knotty issue – the preferable perquisite to asserting your opinion on it.

The reactions to arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., have posed a particularly knotty thought problem. First came Gates' public outrage, followed by evidence offered up by the Cambridge police that seemed to mitigate the basis of Gates' indignation over his being arrested in his own home for no clearcut crime. Was Gates a victim of law enforcement's infamous unfair treatment of blacks in America? Or was he an uncooperative a**hole who crossed over some (albeit vague) line of conduct and brought his arrest on himself?

Is Gates, a black man, a firebrand on the race issue? Yes. That's the core of his fame in the academy. Is the white arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, a drooling racist Neanderthal? No. In fact, he instructed police recruits on racial sensitivity for several years. So here you have ambiguity. What to think?

In big stories like this, the media market – providers and consumers – have a mutual expectation of a timely decision. Up or down. Right or wrong. Predictably, the quickie opinions offered (especially from on high) are fatuous, pablum, or, in President Obama's case, "regrettable." This often gets in the way of a nuanced understanding of issues, but so be it. By and large, that's the way we are.

Encouragingly, clarity can emerge on these difficult confrontations. Two columns published today offer such clarity – an unambiguous moral stance – while treating the nuances with intelligence.

In the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson writes:

I lived in Cambridge for a year, and I can attest that meeting a famous Harvard professor who happens to be arrogant is like meeting a famous basketball player who happens to be tall. It's not exactly a surprise. Crowley wouldn't have lasted a week on the force, much less made sergeant, if he had tried to arrest every member of the Harvard community who treated him as if he belonged to an inferior species. Yet instead of walking away, Crowley arrested Gates as he stepped onto the front porch of his own house.

Apparently, there was something about the power relationship involved -- uppity, jet-setting black professor vs. regular-guy, working-class white cop -- that Crowley couldn't abide. Judging by the overheated commentary that followed, that same something, whatever it might be, also makes conservatives forget that they believe in individual rights and oppose intrusive state power.

Robinson then connects this story to this summer's other big story on race and public opinion, the Sotomayor confirmation hearings:

Is a man of Gates's station entitled to puff himself up and remind a police officer that he's dealing with someone who has juice? Is a woman of Sotomayor's accomplishment entitled to humiliate a lawyer who came to court unprepared? No more and no less entitled, surely, than all the Big Cheeses who came before them.

Yet Gates's fit of pique somehow became cause for arrest. I can't prove that if the Big Cheese in question had been a famous, brilliant Harvard professor who happened to be white -- say, presidential adviser Larry Summers, who's on leave from the university -- the outcome would have been different. I'd put money on it, though. Anybody wanna bet?

Checkmate No. 2 on the Gates controversy comes from Christopher Hitchens, who writes in Slate that "Race or color are second-order considerations in this, if they are considerations at all . . . Professor Gates should have taken his stand on the Bill of Rights and not on his epidermis or that of the arresting officer."

Hitchens relates two run-ins he has had with police officers. In the first, he writes, he was shouted down by a cop in Washington, D.C. after he asked her why she had stopped traffic at a crowded intersection. So intimidated was he – "I saw at once that this damaged creature was aching for trouble and that it would cost me days rather than hours if I supplied her with any back chat. (I think it was the mad way she yelled, "Because I can!" and "Because I say so!")" – that he demurred with "ignoble passivity."

In a second instance, he fares better. Walking alone on a dark street near his summer house in California, he is stopped by a patrol car but refuses to answer the cop's questions about who he was and what he was doing there. The cop persists, but when challenged to offer probable cause for the interrogation, he pulls away with no further confrontation, leaving Hitchens "almost intoxicated by my mere possession of constitutional rights."

To which Hitchens concludes:

In the first instance, I found again what everyone knows, which is that there are a lot of warped misfits and inadequates who are somehow allowed to join the police force. In the second instance, I found that a good cop even at dead of night can and will use his judgment, even if the "suspect" is being a slight pain in the ass. But seriously, do you think I could have pulled the second act, or would even have tried it, or been given the chance to try it, if I had been black?

And there is the crux of it. On a Constitutional level – no matter Gates' rudeness – the officer overstepped his authority by arresting Gates in his own home. And on a social level it remains true – despite an informed understanding of the need for racial sensitivity – that in today's America you're worse off in a confrontation with the police if you're black than if you're white. That was the original story, and, as it turns out, it's the real story here. The answer to the thought problem, the thing for society to deal with.