The way I piece together the story of the Louis Gates, Jr. brouhaha goes something like this: Gates arrives home from the airport after a flight from China, has a bronchial infection, and finds his door is jammed. All he wants is a shower and a night's sleep. He finally forces the door open and is calling the management company because the house is owned by Harvard. A policeman arrives and Gates has to prove he is in his own house. He loses it and cusses the cop who tries to calm him down. Then the cop invites him outside. Gates says "I'll go outside to see your mamma" or words to that effect. Stupidly, he follows the cop outside, where some people have gathered. That permits the police officer to arrest him for disorderly conduct which, I understand, can happen only if there is a crowd around that his remarks or behavior might incite. The cop acted, as Obama said, stupidly. He should have simply left Gates standing in the hallway and left the house and closed the door.

Cops, in general, have difficulty leaving well enough alone. They feel they have to act decisively to show that they are in charge, that they control the streets. That is what happened in New York City a dozen or more years ago when cops were called to the scene to help evict a crazy old lady who was black and was found her in her kitchen brandishing a kitchen knife. She did not want to be pushed out of her home. The police should have just closed the door behind them and waited for people who know how to talk down crazy people. Instead, they kept inching forward, telling her to drop the knife, until they were close enough so that she was a danger, and then they shot her dead. The police commissioner at the time, and who was himself black, said that the police might have reacted differently if the old lady had looked like one of their grandmothers.

The cop in Cambridge could have disengaged, but he didn't. The reason he didn't wasn't even primarily racial, even if Gates thought it was. It was because Cambridge cops hate Harvard professors and Harvard students and always have, just as New York City cops hate Columbia professors and Columbia students and always have, certainly at least as far back as 1968 when, during the student disturbances, I heard some cops discussing the students who were protesting as ungrateful for the fancy educations they were getting. They should just shut up and do their work. That working class view of the role of education in providing the basis for life achievement was what made them feel the students got what they deserved when they had their heads beaten in a week or two later. In a similar vein, it might be asked who these professors at Harvard are who think they can sass policemen?

As Brent Staples put it so well a few days ago in the Times, Obama is not the post partisan person people like to make out he is. He still feels strongly about race relations. I am sure the question was planted. He wanted to come to the defense of his friend. I think the word "stupidly" was well chosen because there was no reason to turn the incident into an arrest. Everybody wants to be proud of Obama being a black president without wanting him to be black. We didn't criticize Kennedy for taking an interest in Ireland or surrounding himself with an Irish mafia in just the same way Carter surrounded himself with a Georgia Mafia. Let Obama represent his own people as well as the nation. I remember some diplomat who was having trouble with Menacham Begin saying that at least he was out there trying to defend the Jews, which is more than you could say about a lot of leaders with regard to their most emotionally close constituency. Obama could not have let the incident pass without comment for then he would have lost credibility with whites noticing him backing off a racial issue as well as with Blacks. He was not going to do that, become an obsequious President. If he wouldn’t stand up for Black people experiencing a very usual kind of harassment, then who would?