Why Henry Louis Gates Should Sue

yes he needs to sue, and that cop should lose his job. As should so many others who make assumptions based on color. Did you SEE the cops license plate on his SUV??
http://gawker.com/5322447/cambridge-cops-unfortunate-vanity-plate-why+tee

This thing has gotten away from Obama. It’s not white vs. black, but it’s definitely liberal vs. conservative and Harvard University vs. the gang at Kelly’s Pub. Obama would rather resolve this before Republicans proclaim solidarity with the proletariat, fergoshsakes.
But it’s not Obama’s call. A fair number of Sgt. Crowley’s supporters believe that anything a cop tells you to do is a lawful order. (After all, he was only doing his job!) This is indeed a teaching moment. Citizens do have the right to mouth off to a cop, and they don’t have to back down when the cop threatens to arrest them. Crowley’s police report emphasizes, I showed him the cuffs but that has no relevance at all.

Nice job with the image.
and he has a case.

What does the image have to do with Gates?
What does the image have to do with the cop who arrested Gates?
What does the license plate or the illegal parking job have to do with anything other than the guy whose picture we see, who is neither Gates nor the cop?
I am an elected official, and my personal behavior does not reflect on the people who elected me or with the people I sit with at meetings. Do your business colleague’s personal choices have anything to do with you?
Yesterday’s NY Times and several networks have releases the 911 tapes and their text and lo — and they don’t say what they were alleged to say. The woman making the call had several opportunities to say that the people on the porch were black and she refused to. She was not anonymous — she waited outside the house while the police came.
The gist of the text and the comments here appears to be that Gates, so cultivated with his nicely decorated New York City apartment (on top of his Cambridge house and his place at the Vineyard), deserves special treatment. If the language here represents what Democrats are thinking, you can write off winning in 2012 — remember that it was exactly this kind of elitism that created Reagan Democrats.

If, by “special treatment,” you mean “shouldn’t be arrested when it’s clear that he didn’t commit a crime,” then yes, Dr. Gates deserves special treatment. So do I, and so even do you.

That dog won’t hunt. The Republicans have no chance of positioning themselves as the party of the working class. It’s thinly veiled racism at a time when Republicans have little else going for them.
Conservatives seem to believe that they can get away with anything so long as they give a warning before they do it. Crowley’s police report emphasizes that Gates kept talking even after Crowley warned him to shut up. It sounds like the excuses Bush gave for invading Iraq: “They were warned!”
But we know better now. Bush and Crowley rely on white man’s attitudes. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bush feels just as victimized today as Sgt. Crowley. Well, Geez. I was just doing my job . . .

what a friggin waste of time this entire episode is. Man, what I would give to see society spend a 1/10 of the time it spends on this bull…on the frontrunning actions of Goldman Saks.

Of course Professor Gates should sue. I’d say that if he thinks that injustice has been done, he’s obligated to.
And, thankfully, his case would be judged fairly and out in the open, which I suspect might not happen in all cases when a person of color has perhaps been mistreated by the police.

I think the other officer’s license plate is reflective of that department. Even if he’s off-duty and on his lunch break, he still has authority. For another example, there have been fatal accidents caused by off-duty police driving while drunk here in Chicago. They, too, are protected by their buddies.

“If the language here represents what Democrats are thinking, you can write off winning in 2012 — remember that it was exactly this kind of elitism that created Reagan Democrats.”
Oh goody. I can’t wait for a the new breed of reactionary ignoramuses who will invoke ficticious welfare-mamas driving gold Cadillacs or wanton proxy wars against brown commies with the help of some illicit missile sales.

The media is stretching the case enabling the readers to go on and on, working on great discussions…soap is great.
That is until new case will be reported.
Then, what should Oscar Grant do? Sue?
How many cases like Oscar Grant will we read about and why don’t you even know about him?
No tears here, just absence of feeling and rage.

notice how the media doesn’t go around the city to ask members of the working class minorities what they think of cambridge police and if their experience with them has been positive or not.

there have been fatal accidents caused by off-duty police driving while drunk here in Chicago
oh, there is another story just surfaced about cops who crashed into a lady’s car and were caught on their dashboard cam plotting to blame the incident on the woman driver. granted, she’d been drinking but she’s not the one who caused the crash. cops even moved evidence around to support their argument!

I am an elected official, and my personal behavior does not reflect on the people who elected me
get caught having an affair or something else illicit and see how voters think it reflects poorly on the district. what you are arguing is that it’s okay to tolerate “bad apples” within an organization.
Yesterday’s NY Times and several networks have releases the 911 tapes and their text and lo — and they don’t say what they were alleged to say.
lo and behold, her story doesn’t match what the police alleged.

that was tragic. it does seem like the more blatant abuses are quickly sweeped off the page. for instance, i noticed after cnn run a segment on the gates story, they ran another segment about an rogue cop who poked a woman in the eye and body slammed her into the holding cell wall, really roughing her up. i thought the segue from the gates story to this one interesting. cnn then announced the cop had been cleared of wrong doing! when it so obvious from the videotape that the cop was out of control. but when i later tried to google the story, i couldn’t find it.
re oscar grand, respectfully, you should start a blog if you want to give this story more attention. if you had a link, i would have clicked on it.

I try to include links when I comment, but on Goggle I found under Oscar Grant
Results 1 – 10 of about 9,970,000 for Oscar Grant. (0.56 seconds)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmJukcFzEX4 3:27 seconds
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVsncZ7K584 :47 seconds
http ://en.wikipedia.org/…/BART_Police_shooting_of_Oscar_Grant

yes, i goggled. that’s what refreshed me to the event. i didn’t remember it from the name alone. i meant a link to your blog.

er..a link to lytom’s blog, rather.

gotcha,

“Professor Gates earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge, and his B.A. summa cum laude in History from Yale University, where he was a Scholar of the House, in 1973. He became a member of Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year at Yale. Before joining the faculty of Harvard in 1991, he taught at Yale, Cornell, and Duke. His honors and grants include a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” (1981), the George Polk Award for Social Commentary (1993), Time magazine’s “25 Most Influential Americans” list (1997), a National Humanities Medal (1998), election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1999), the Jefferson Lecture (2002), a Visiting Fellowship at the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (2003-2004), and the 2008 Ralph Lowell Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the highest honor awarded for accomplishments in public television (2009). He has received 50 honorary degrees, from institutions including the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, New York University, University of Massachusetts-Boston, Williams College, Emory University, University of Toronto, Morehouse, and the University of Benin”
http://aaas.fas.harvard.edu/faculty/henry_louis_gates_jr/index.html
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-july-28-2009/henry-louis-gate—race-card
This is why I am a fan of the show.

Perhaps his Manhattan apartment is “tony” by the “size of it” but you wouldn’t know that by this photo. As I’m sure you know, from the distortion apparent in the angles at either side, this was taken with a pretty wide lens–perhaps as wide as 24mm (on a 35mm camera). So this could easily be a relatively small (but neat and tastefully furnished) apartment.

There are so many flaws in your argument that I hardly know where to begin.
The picture of the illegally parked cop and his license plate reveals not only his contempt for the laws he’s supposed to enforce, but his racist attitude. That’s a response to the police who “deeply resent the implication” that any of them might be racists.
Your job performance not only reflects on you as an individual, it reflects on the judgment of those who hired/appointed/elected you. This is not about “personal choices”, it’s about on-the-job behavior.
The caller didn’t specify the race of the two men she saw trying to enter the house, although she did say, when prompted by the CPD communications officer, that at least one might have been Hispanic. The dispatcher said “possibly Hispanic”. The caller denied having told Officer Crowley, as he wrote in his report, that she’d seen “two black men with backpacks”. In fact, she says she didn’t have any conversation at all with him other than to identify herself as the caller. Officer Figueroa, the back-up officer at the scene, apparently did speak with Lucia Whalen, the caller, briefly, but he doesn’t mention the race of the alleged intruders in his report, either. Why did Crowley feel it was necessary to falsify his report? That caused the caller and her famly much emotional pain and humiliation, since she was branded as a racist, ignorant neigbor (she doesn’t live in the neighborhood)who was guilty of racial profiling. I wish she’d sue the pants off Crowley, too.
Professor Gates doesn’t own the house in Cambridge; Harvard University does. He was born in Piedmont, WV, and his dad worked two jobs to put his two sons through school. Gates was an exemplary student, and received scholarships (although he was also among the first beneficiaries of Affirmative Action programs, as he’s acknowledged). He’s written or co-authored at least 10 books and many articles, and is widely-respected and acclaimed. He’s earned respect, but even the lowliest among us is entitled to the respect of our civil liberties. Officer Crowley didn’t accord Gates that due respect.
BTW, it wasn’t Democratic “eltism” that created Reagan Democrats, but that’s beside the point of this topic.

I don’t get it. There is Google, why should I blog…jtfromBC did a good job
Otherwise there was a reason why I put it that way.

In the photo Mr. Gates looks dignified, handcuffed and ready to go down to the station.