It’s still July, so this doesn’t mean a whole lot…but still….the Yanks are alone in first, and no matter how temporary it may prove to be, how sweet it is.
Now they just have to answer the question: Can they win a game against Boston?
In today’s Globe, Skip Gates goes into full “teaching moment” mode.
Gates, still angry five days after his arrest, broke his silence yesterday to chastise Cambridge police for his treatment….
“I believe the police officer should apologize to me for what he knows he did that was wrong,’’ Gates said in a phone interview from Martha’s Vineyard. “If he apologizes sincerely, I am willing to forgive him. And if he admits his error, I am willing to educate him about the history of racism in America and the issue of racial profiling.
“That’s what I do for a living,’’ he added.
Is there a problem here? I think so. If there was a racial element to this incident, it was that someone called the police on Gates. (And we haven’t heard that person’s side of the story yet, it’s worth remembering.)
You can’t call the cop racist for responding to the call-that’s his job—and I don’t think you can call him racist for arresting Gates. Over-aggressive, maybe. Reacting inappropriately. Mishandling the situation.
But there’s no evidence that Gates was arrested (as opposed to suspected) because he is black.
So if anyone needs race education, it should be the person who first saw Gates as a possible crook. Right?
(And again, that person has a story to tell as well. Frankly, as Gates describes the incident in The Root—”my driver hit the door with his shoulder and the door popped open“—I wonder if the charge of racial profiling is really so clear-cut.)
(On a linguistic note, isn’t the use of the possessive—”my driver”—rather than the definite article fascinating? Oh, the places we go if we unpack that verbal signifier.)
Yet Gates is going all professorial on Officer Crowley, offering to enlighten the police officer. I understand Gates is angry, but there’s a deeply unpleasant arrogance here.
Wouldn’t it be a more interesting trade if the cop sat in on a Gates course—assuming he teaches one—and Gates rode with Crowley every time he goes to a potential crime scene?
Wouldn’t that be a truer exchange of knowledge, and a more honest admission that both parties could benefit from a greater appreciation of the perspective of (forgive me) “the other”?
Gates said he is concerned about the “unconscious attitudes’’ that police can hold.
“Because of the capricious whim of one disturbed person . . . I am now a black man with a prison record,’’ Gates said. “You can look at my mug shot on the Internet.’’
The capricious whim of one disturbed person?
In the previously linked-to Root article, Gates adds this accusation:
…. the man who arrested me did it out of spite, because he knew I was going to file a report because of his behavior.
Gates also says that Crowley arrested him because he believed that Gates was a criminal and needed a “trumped-up charge.”
….I would hope that the police wouldn’t arrest the first black man that they saw—especially after that person gives them an ID—and not rely on some trumped-up charge, which is what this man was doing.
This is a serious charge, twice-made: that Crowley made not just a bad arrest, but a deliberately false one. Can Gates back it up? Or is he concocting evidence?
And in escalating the situation thusly, is he not rhetorically doing through the media—the fora open to Gates, but certainly not to Crowley, who must have a gag on him the size of a quilt—exactly what the cop did to him? Which is to say, abusing his power? Ramping up the volatility of the situation rather than using his skills and training to defuse it?
You don’t know who you’re messing with, Gates allegedly said—actually, the now-unavailable police report made it sound like Gates said who you’re fucking with—and it strikes me that that sounds more like something you’d hear from a cop than a professor—the lines are blurred here—and also that Gates is doing his best to make good on the threat. Gates is hurt. His identity (racial, social, professional, the whole complicated make-up) has been pricked, and he doesn’t want simply justice, he wants revenge; he wants to humilate Crowley as Crowley humiliated him.
If he apologizes to me, I will forgive him. If he admits his error, I will educate him.
It’s a clear, if perhaps subconscious, stratagem on Gates’ part to remind the world of his social status relative to Crowley’s, to reestablish his authority over the policeman. There is both arrogance and insecurity in this very human act.
Let’s dismantle some earlier rhetoric that shouldn’t go uncorrected: Gates’ assertion that he is “a black man with a prison record.”
Simply not true. For one thing, he obviously he didn’t go to prison.
More: I’m not a lawyer, but since Gates isn’t being charged with a crime, I would guess there’s nothing on his record, and if there is anything on his record it will surely be expunged.
Unless….unless Gates doesn’t want it to be.
Might his “prison record” help the inevitable PBS documentary? The grant applications? The lecture fees? Traffic for the Root, which has probably been visited more in the past few days than the past few months?
“This is really about justice for the least amongst us,” Gates says.
Is it?
It’s from…well…me.
Yes, I’m quoting myself, for which I apologize in advance. I promise not to make a habit of it.
But this passage from Harvard Rules, page 88, adds some interesting context to the Skip Gates situation.
…no matter how much Gates had become accepted by whites, he never forgot where he came from or that, to some whites, it didn’t matter how light his skin color was. When Gates first came to Harvard, he and [his wife] Sharon lived in the suburb of Lexington, a few miles northwest of Cambridge. Shortly after moving in, Gates paid a visit to the local police department. I travel a lot, he told an officer, and my wife will be alone. Are there any special security measures I should take?
Truth was, Gates wasn’t particularly worried about his wife’s safety in the tranquil suburb. He just wanted to introduce himself to the local police—because otherwise, he suspected, a black man driving a Mercedes in Lexington, Massachusetts, was going to see a lot of flashing blue-and-white in his rearview mirror….
Every time I write this, the Yankees promptly lose, so I know I’m playing with fire, but….the Yanks are in first again!
Okay, it’s a tie, but still. New York has won four straight, Boston has lost three straight.
This will clearly go back and forth till the end of the season, but one encouraging sign for the Yankees is that they’ve won three consecutive games by a 2-1 score.
It’s all about pitching…..
A toadfish, endemic to Cozumel (and shy)
Sheesh. I go away for a few days and all heck breaks loose. Apparently the world does not stop while while I am underwater after all.
Here is Skip Gates’ statement about his arrest, delivered by his lawyer, Charles Ogletree.
The police report has more details.
Gates then turned to me and told me that I had no idea who I was “messing” with and that I had not heard the last of it.…
The name of the person who called the cops, a female passerby with a cellphone who apparently didn’t like the sight of two black men on Ware Street, is (there you are) blacked-out….
My apologies. As a blogger at the moment, I make a great slacker. It all has to do with the diving schedule. Early to the boat, then in the water for a deep dive, then a surface interval of a couple of hours, then the shallow dive (80 minutes for me two days in a row, and yes, I’m pretty darn pleased about that), and afterward the boat returns to Caleta, the nearby harbor.
One of the effects of all this time underwater (about five hours in two days) is that it leaves you quite tired.
But I will be posting more soon—I’ve been saving up!
Meantime, I have a question for the commenter who doesn’t see the value of this blog for sharing and discussing Harvard issues: Do you work for the administration? Because it kind of sounds like it.
That post is having a lively discussion, so I thought I’d move it up before heading to JFK.
Here it is…..
I’m headed to Mexico for a few days, so blogging will be blog-as-blog-can. And when it happens, I expect, it will have a certain I’m-on-vacation, blogging-from-a-coffee-shop, post-dive sort of vibe. So bear with me.
The Times Mag had a terrific piece of journalism yesterday that I encourage everyone to read. Written by Charles Siebert, it’s called “Watching Whales Watching Us,” and it details how whale’s deliberate interaction with human beings is forcing scientists to consider the somewhat mind-blowing possibility that whales are trying to communicate with human beings.
Siebert visits Baja California, where Pacific gray whales regularly interact with humans in ways that seem to reflect intelligence—calculation, choice, caution, reciprocity, deliberation. In one powerful anecdote, he describes how one gray whale, a mother, circles the 18-foot boat in which he and others are riding, sizing it up—then departs and returns momentarily with her calf. An introduction of sorts, with mutual benefits for both.
And Siebert details other forms of whale intelligence: how sperm whales have learned to feed by delicately sliding fish off the long-line hooks of Alaskan fishermen, and are teaching this behavior to whales around the world; remarkable subtleties in whale language—dialects, even; communal tool use by humpbacks in their feeding strategies; interspecies cooperation.
Siebert ends on a hopeful note.
I thought of another bit of interspecies cooperation involving humpbacks that I recently read about. A female humpback was spotted in December 2005 east of the Farallon Islands, just off the coast of San Francisco. She was entangled in a web of crab-trap lines, hundreds of yards of nylon rope that had become wrapped around her mouth, torso and tail, the weight of the traps causing her to struggle to stay afloat. A rescue team arrived within a few hours and decided that the only way to save her was to dive in and cut her loose.
For an hour they cut at the lines and rope with curved knives, all the while trying to steer clear of a tail they knew could kill them with one swipe. When the whale was finally freed, the divers said, she swam around them for a time in what appeared to be joyous circles. She then came back and visited with each one of them, nudging them all gently, as if in thanks. The divers said it was the most beautiful experience they ever had. As for the diver who cut free the rope that was entangled in the whale’s mouth, her huge eye was following him the entire time, and he said that he will never be the same.
Here is my own feeling: The most profound change in the human experience in the 21st century will be the gradual realization that we share the planet with other deeply intelligent creatures with whom we can interact, communicate, negotiate, develop relationships, and learn from; animals to whom human beings are not superior or smarter.
This knowledge will undermine our deepest understanding of human identity (which is primarily why we resist it so much) and change the way we consider the past and the future. The change won’t be easy—which is why it will come slowly, because the human brain can only accept such fundamental change over time—but for those who can accept it, it will enrich our lives immensely.
We will come, I believe, to look at the mass slaughter of whales as a holocaust on par with slavery, the Holocaust, Stalin’s purges, or any other destruction of humans by other humans—as one of history’s greatest shames and a permanent stain on humanity. (How will we make it up to them?)
Those of us who believe in God will have to confront the idea that human beings are not His prime creation. That will cause either a great loss of faith in God or a newfound appreciation for His works and a reconceptualization of the idea of heaven.
And in the meantime, we will have to come to terms with the fact that our destruction of the planet has terrible consequences not just for us, but for other creatures who are in many ways our match and in some ways our betters. This will encourage, I hope, a great sense of humility upon us and a spiritual commitment to environmentalism. Moreover, the ability to interact intelligently with other species will add a new level of joy and wonder and learning to our everyday experience. We love communicating with other people; imagine how cool it will be to be able to communicate with other species.
It’s going to get interesting around here.