Wow, a more or less balanced article from the Wall St Journal - (I posted the whole article since some WSJ articles are for subscribers only - wasn't sure if everyone could access the link) especially from James Taranto who usually just blasts "liberals" and dems -

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Pride and Prejudice

The more we think about last week’s confrontation between Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge, Mass., policeman James Crowley, the more we think that Crowley was more in the wrong than Gates. We argued Tuesday that both men should have backed down, and we’ve heard nothing since to change that view. But Crowley was on duty as an officer of the law and thus had a professional obligation not to let his pride get the better of him.

Crowley had no business remaining on the scene once he had ascertained that Gates belonged in the house. Even by the Crowley’s account in the police report, Gates had done nothing at that point to justify arresting him. He had disrespected a policeman’s authority, which may be rude and foolish but is not a crime.

So we were pleased to hear that President Obama, in his press conference last night, said more or less the same thing we had been thinking:

I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it’s fair to say, No. 1, any of us would be pretty angry; No. 2, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they [sic] were in their own home; and, No. 3, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.

Let’s dispense with one common criticism of the president: that he should have refrained from commenting on the subject at all. “It’s the kind of question to which a president would normally reply with something like: ‘That’s a local police matter, I don’t know the details and I know it will be worked out responsibly,’ and move along,” says National Review’s Yuval Levin. “Very odd behavior for a president.”

True, this started as a local police matter, but by the time Obama was asked about it, it had become a contentious national debate. As he is the first president who is black, Obama’s views on a subject involving race relations were bound to be of interest and to carry considerable weight. And Obama evidently did have a strong interest in the matter. According to Politico, his answer to this question was the only point in the press conference when he “came alive.” (The rest of the conference was devoted to some policy issue or other.)

On the merits, we’d say Obama got it right. He expressed sympathy with Gates’s position while expressly declining to endorse the charge that the arresting officer had racially invidious motives. When the president made a general statement about racial profiling--a statement that is certainly debatable, but he, like everyone else, is entitled to argue for his side in a debate--he was careful to note that he was speaking “separate and apart from this incident.”

Gates has now spoken out on the episode, talking at length to two exceptionally friendly interviewers: Dayo Olopade of The Root, an online magazine of which Gates is editor in chief, and Elizabeth Gates of The Daily Beast, who is Prof. Gates’s daughter. We said at the outset that we think Crowley was more wrong than Gates. It is important, however, to distinguish between the initial altercation and the subsequent public debate. In the former, Crowley was in a position of authority and thus bore a greater responsibility than Gates, who was merely a private citizen. But in pressing the matter now, it is Gates who is exercising considerable authority: the intellectual authority of a pre-eminent scholar of race in America, and the moral authority of a black man demanding equal treatment in a country with an acknowledged history of atrocious racism.

With that authority comes a responsibility to be truthful and fair, and by this standard some of Gates’s comments have fallen short--particularly his accusation that Crowley’s motives were racial. Here is how Gates described a portion of the confrontation in The Root:

[Crowley] says “Can you prove that you’re a Harvard professor?” I said yes, I turned and closed the front door to the kitchen where I’d left my wallet, and I got out my Harvard ID and my Massachusetts driver’s license which includes my address and I handed them to him. And he’s sitting there looking at them.

Now it’s clear that he had a narrative in his head: A black man was inside someone’s house, probably a white person’s house, and this black man had broken and entered, and this black man was me.

In truth, Gates had no way of knowing what “narrative” was “in [Crowley’s] head.” What we can ascertain from this account is that there was a narrative in Gates’s head. Crowley might have stereotyped Gates, but Gates definitely stereotyped Crowley.

The racist-cop stereotype certainly has a basis in reality, especially the reality of decades past. Wil Haygood of the Washington Post, who is himself black and formerly lived in Cambridge, has an evocative description of how he imagines Gates experienced the episode:

So here’s Gates the other day, just back from China, in his house. . . . The squad car rolls right up. . . . Gates wonders why the police are there; they explain why, a call about a possible break-in.

And then it probably starts to whoosh in Gates’s own mind, like a desert wind that must peak before leveling off. Here we go again. Heated words because Gates, in these flashing moments, is not a scholar who studied at the University of Cambridge (in England) but a suspect. Forget the Harvard and personal ID’s, he’s in that touchy nexus and zone of black skin and law enforcement. And that peculiar zone can be exposed day or night. And when it beams on, it can show that the black man is carrying a lot of historical weight--weight that Gates himself has put into scholarship and documentaries--surrounding the heaviness of race in America. It’s suddenly pent-up anger and jet-lag words flying on that wind that can’t be taken back and skin color and real estate and cold eyes and I’m not breaking any law so just leave me alone please, dammit, please. Please.

It would be unfair to judge Gates’s actions without taking account of that “historical weight.” But it would be equally unfair to assume that because Gates, conditioned by this history, experienced Crowley’s behavior as a racial humiliation, that is how Crowley intended it.

In the Beast interview, posted a day after the Root interview, Gates seems a good deal less angry, and he gives a more nuanced interpretation of Crowley’s actions and motives:

I clearly was arrested as a vindictive act, an act of spite. I think Sgt. Crowley was angry that I didn’t follow his initial order--his demand--his order--to step outside my house because I was protected as long as I was in the house because he didn’t have a warrant. I think what he really wanted to do was throw me down and put handcuffs on me because he was terrified that I could be dangerous to him and that I was causing violence in my own home--though obviously he didn’t know it was my home.

If I had been white this incident never would have happened. He would have asked at the door, “Excuse me, are you okay? Because there are two black men around here try’na rob you” [laughter] and I think he also violated the rules by not giving his name and badge number, and I think he would have given that to one of my white colleagues or one of my white neighbors. So race definitely played a role. Whether he’s an individual racist? I don’t know--I don’t know him. But I think he stereotyped me.

And that’s what racial profiling is all about. I was cast by him in a narrative and he didn’t know how to get out of it, and then when I demanded--which I did--his name and badge number, I think he just got really angry.

There is a logical difficulty with Gates’s assertion that this wouldn’t have happened if he were white. The passerby who called the police reported, accurately, that she saw two black men (Gates and his limousine driver, as it turned out) trying to force their way into the house. If Gates had been white, Crowley would not have said “there are two black men,” because there would not have been two black men. The cop would have been looking for a white suspect, and Gates would still fit the bill.

On Tuesday Gates told the Boston Globe: “If [Crowley] 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.” Gates is trying to be magnanimous. He doesn’t quite succeed, does he? Still, it’s not an unattractive offer. Lots of people pay big bucks for a Harvard education.

But a true scholar devotes his life to acquiring knowledge, not just imparting it. Crowley may have something to learn from Gates, but Gates may have something to learn from Crowley, too--about the challenges of police work and the vulnerabilities, both physical and psychological, that sometimes lead cops to act overzealously--even stupidly--when citizens challenge their authority.