If journalism is the first draft of history, and blogging is the first draft of journalism, then this is way way way out of date. . . . Nonetheless, I wanted to share a couple thoughts I hadn’t heard elsewhere regarding the Henry Louis Gates arrest of a few weeks ago.
My impression is that the story was discussed mostly in terms of race (white police officer arrests black citizen) or class (middle-class police officer dissed by Harvard professor). I think there are two other factors that didn’t get so much mention.
1. The cop factor. Nobody likes being hassled by the cops. We all value police protection, but nobody wants the cops around when we’re making an illegal U-turn or scoring some weed or downloading music or [name your own crime here].
2. The left/right factor. Gates is a prominent liberal, so we heard a lot from liberals about how he was being hassled for no good reason and a lot from conservatives about how he didn’t behave well with Sgt. Crowley. I think if a prominent conservative had been arrested in similar circumstances, we would’ve heard from liberals about how rich people think they’re above the law and a lot from conservatives about how a man’s home is his castle and how this all represented a dangerous expansion of government power in the Obama era.
This is not any attempt by me to resolve Gates-gate but just to suggest that people’s reactions weren’t all about race or class.