AAARRRRRGGGHHHH, you, beksbks, are saying that a black man should feel threatened because a white police officer is investigating the report of a break in in his own home? Or that are policeman(of any race) should not use reasonable precautions when investigating a break in crime? Should a white police officer take crap from ANYONE because it is their own home when they are doing a dangerous job and are being abused for it?Little of what the two experienced (other than the harvard id/DL bit) conflict. It is Gates 'perception' as a black man "who knows every incident of racism in America . . . up to Jim Crow" that tells us of the danger he KNEW(perceived) he was in and who also gives us a narrative of what he assumed was going on in Crowleys mind. His own thoughts are telling enough, but his admitted assumptions are the clincher.
FYI, we don't live in Jim Crow America. It is 2009 and a man named Barack Obama is our president. An innocent black man has no more to fear than an innocent white man. As this professor is solearned, he should have seen that things have changed a lot in the last 40+ years or so since Jim Crow. Maybe he ought to keep up his education-extend his expertise to the current times. He might like the world he lives in a little better if he was current on black oppression and didn't just live in the past. Jim Crow=44 years ago. He was a teenager back then, and probably very impressionable and probably saw a lot of ugly, racist things. But it isn't 1965 anymore. Good stuff has happened since then. Crap still happens, in both directions, but any of us looking at those of another race and assuming the worst in them is going to find the worst. Even when it isn't there or intended.