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Tuesday, July 21, 2009

On "You Have No Idea Who You're Messing With"

On the basis of the police report, news accounts, and Henry Louis Gates's own account, I think the police were clearly wrong to arrest him, particularly once they confirmed that he was who he said he was and was where he was supposed to be.  Whether it was a result of simple racism, or of taking unwarranted punitive action because the police found Gates difficult and arrogant, or abuse of authority, or some combination of all of these, I can't say.  But Gates's conduct in no way justifies the arrest.


I do want to focus for a second on the police report saying that Gates told the officer, presumably not in dulcet tones, that he had no idea who he was messing with.  I have ambivalent feelings about this.  One charitable interpretation of this is that Gates, who was well within his rights to be trying to open the door to his own property, was telling the officer in no uncertain terms that he could not get away with abusive treatment simply because he was dealing with an anonymous (and black) citizen; Gates could and would quite properly use the megaphone he enjoys to broadcast this abuse of police authority.  That is not only within his rights, but can be a salutary corrective to the many possible occasions in which police officers take liberties with people who don't have the same access to publicity.  (Another charitable interpretation, albeit of a different kind, is that whether or not Gates's statement had this meaning, he was justifiably angry and spoke in anger.  We may not admire that completely, but we can certainly understand it; and, again, police should be trained to deal with such situations with responses that fall well short of arrest.)

Another interpretation is that Gates was, in essence, turning the tables, saying, you are not powerful and I am; and I will use all the means at my disposal to make your life miserable.  (Indeed, one of the shifts in perspective that is necessary in viewing this incident is that in some cases police officers are far more powerful than well-connected Harvard profs; in other circumstances, however, they are far less powerful, and the whip hand shifts.)  Or even that he was saying, not that powerful people should enjoy impunity -- after all, he was, again, well within his rights to enter his own house -- but that, if you're going to mess with someone, you had certainly better not mess with someone who is powerful and well-connected.  This assumption of the privileges of power is not limited to Harvard professors with wide media connections (although I suspect it takes especially fertile root there).  We see -- and generally condemn -- similar statements by other powerful people in the hands of the law.  Of course, one thing that influences our condemnation is that in many of these situations, the powerful accused person is, in fact, guilty, and that was not the case with Gates.  But we also independently dislike such statements, I think, regardless of guilt or innocence, because we recognize the broader statement about the uses and prerogatives and assumptions of power that accompany the statement "do you know who I am?"  We don't like it when judges use such statements when stopped by traffic cops, when Senators use it when pulled aside at airports, or when Mel Gibson and other celebrities use it after being picked up for some wrongdoing or other; we may not like it either when Oprah uses it when denied admission to Hermes, and then uses her own megaphone to exact lengthy retribution against that store, even if we think the store was wrong to deny her admission.  We also don't like it in other circumstances, when there is no great wrong done by either side: say, when someone trades on his name to secure a key table at a restaurant at the last minute although the hoi polloi could not hope to get in without a longstanding reservation.  

So I confess to some ambivalence here, too.  I don't blame Gates for using his prominence to publicize an indignity that he should not have suffered, especially if and when less prominent people suffer similar indignities without recourse to publicity.  On the other hand, for all relevant purposes, the answer to the question "do you know who I am" should always be the same: a private citizen, possessed of greater or lesser prominence but otherwise equally situated with everyone else.  Without wanting to be too hard on him for statements made in the heat of a moment of what he reasonably viewed as police mistreatment, one can wish that Gates had used "who he was" to publicize the event afterward, without attempting to invoke "who he was" during the contretemps.

Posted by Paul Horwitz on July 21, 2009 at 10:17 AM in Paul Horwitz | Permalink

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Comments

TheRoot.com, an online magazine of which Prof. Gates is the editor in chief, has a detailed recounting of Prof. Gates' version of the event, which materially differs from the police report.

Posted by: alkali | Jul 22, 2009 11:01:15 AM

I guess I'll let readers make up their own minds as to whether my post can be read as suggesting that Professor Gates should have "kowtowed to a white police officer" or that men of color ought to bow down to anyone. But I don't think my post suggests that. If there could have been any reasonable confusion about that, I trust it is now cleared up.

Posted by: Paul Horwitz | Jul 21, 2009 10:05:38 PM

I concur with Anon's post at 6:16 pm.

As I read Paul Horwitz's commentary, I thought to myself, "Paul Horwitz thinks he's speaking for every American when he posits that Professor Gates should have kowtowed to a white police officer who, clearly, acted out of turn." I'm not surprised at all--the day white men stop insisting that men of color bow down to them is the day I walk the golden streets of the new Jerusalem!


Recalling the stories of Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell is within reason. Several months ago, in the middle of the night, I was stopped--for no reason--by 2 white cops. I was worried because (1) I had not violated any traffic laws, (2) there were no witnesses in sight, and (3) I am a well-built black male. After asking a bunch of inane questions (they discovered I was alcohol/drug free and just on my way home), they consigned me to the back seat of the cop car while they searched my trunk without my permission and against my protests. I was worried they might plant a weapon or a controlled substance in my trunk. I also feared for my life since there were no witnesses around. Fortunately, nothing terrible happened. They let me go, apologizing for conducting an illegal search. I expressed my annoyance and threatened to file a complaint. I only relented because Harvard Law admitted me the next day. Nothing was going to ruin my journey to Cambridge. Not even a bunch of racist white cops.

Posted by: KeepItReal | Jul 21, 2009 7:28:00 PM

Fair enough, Prof. Horowitz. I read Gates's statement (after posting my first comment) as an implicit denial, but I do think it's ambiguous. Another blog I read also just posted an interesting interpretation of the "Do you know who I am?" line. In relevant part:

“Do you know who I am?” is always an asshole statement, but A) if anyone’s earned the right to say it, surely it’s Professor Gates; B) as I said earlier, being an asshole is legal; and C) go back to that scenario featuring my dad in the role of the falsely accused. When we look at fiftysomething white guys in very nice houses and very nice clothes, surrounded by very nice things, we see power — or at least, potential power. We see the likelihood of friends in high places, of golfing buddies who are cutthroat lawyers, of his kid going to private school with a senator’s kid. We see entitlement. Which means we see a guy who could fuck us up — legally and financially, not physically — if we gave him reason. Gates, as it turns out, is pretty much that kind of guy — the kind of guy you wouldn’t want to arrest without a reeeeally good reason. But because he’s black, this cop didn’t think, “Hmm, I wonder if he’ll have a disproportionately good lawyer, and this will end up all over the papers, and it’ll all be a total clusterfuck that’s so not worth the satisfaction of cuffing him to show who’s boss right this second.” However dickishly, Gates was pretty much warning him of just that outcome — an outcome anyone with half a brain could have envisioned if he did, in fact, know who the professor was. Or if the professor had been white.


I buy that; it might still be jerky, but he's right and anyway, being jerky isn't a crime. And if the officer had stopped to pay attention to who he was, I bet he'd be a lot happier right now.

Posted by: anon | Jul 21, 2009 6:16:56 PM

In response to Matt and "anon," two points. I think my post would have been better served if I had more explicitly acknowledged that the statement I blogged about came from the police report and had not been confirmed. I do want to note that before posting, I looked at Gates's own statement about the incident, which neither confirmed nor denied the statement.

Posted by: Paul Horwitz | Jul 21, 2009 2:56:53 PM

Wow. There's so much wrong with that last comment, I'm not really sure to begin.
Comparing two situations involving violent death with a situation that, at worst, involves embarassment is pretty extreme. Assuming that everyone in a neighborhood should know everyone else is pretty naive. But I think the kicker is at the end. The level of elitism and snobbery in the penultimate sentence is truly impressive. Assuming that the police did act based on race--it would be ok if the victim wasn't as successful? If he was a mechanic, it wouldn't be as bad, because his level of achievement hadn't put him above such concerns? Or, alternately, if the police acted appropriately, and Gates was disorderly and belligerent, that's acceptable because he's above certain concerns?

Posted by: D | Jul 21, 2009 2:04:57 PM

In regard to this incident "Amadou Diallo" and "Sean Bell" come to mind. My mind at least. Those incidents resonate with and are a distinct possibility for every person of color even in so called, post-racial America.

I know all of my immediate neighbors on sight and they know me even if we don't socialize or visit back and forth. My concern is that the person reporting the break-in didn't appear to be familiar with the occupants of Professor Gates' residence on any level. Aren't residents of an academic community such as Cambridge normally acquainted on some level? I imagine that most academics being treated as common criminals would be similarly incensed. Many of us would like to believe that a certain level of achievement puts us above certain concerns. Unfortunately that doesn't appear to be the case.

Posted by: Tonya Johnson | Jul 21, 2009 1:49:20 PM

Agreed, Matt. Given that we haven't heard Gates' side of the story, I think it's premature to take everything in the police report as a given. We don't even have to attribute malevolence to the police officer for that; it's hard to remember things accurately in the heat of the moment and he's likely to interpret what was said according to his own mental scripts of how such encounters generally go down. (So is Gates, of course, but again, we don't yet have his version to compare it to.)

Posted by: anon | Jul 21, 2009 12:32:27 PM

I'm not 100% sure that Gates actually said this. (Perhaps he said something that could be read that way, but doesn't have the same rhetorical bad feeling, like, "Look, I'm a tenured professor at Harvard. This is my house. Why are you bothering me?" The police report also claimed that Gates said he'd talk to "yo mamma" outside, a claim I find pretty hard to take seriously, and one that leads me to think the police report is perhaps not completely accurate as to what was said. Gates's own statement, which of course might also not be 100% accurate, does not have him making this claim. Now, maybe he did say this, and maybe he was being a jerk in this way. But I think the evidence for it is pretty slim so far.

Posted by: Matt | Jul 21, 2009 12:10:34 PM

I think that the arrest of Gates was probably unwise, but not clearly wrong.

There's no evidence at all for your suggestion that Gates suffered "abusive treatment" at the hands of the police. They were called by a woman present at the scene, who had, according to Prof. Ogletree, Gates's lawyer, seen Gates and another man (Gates's cabdriver) 'force the door open'. We want--emphatically I say this--people to call the police when they see two men force a front door open, if it's not clear that the men have a right to be there, and we want the police to answer that call promptly and ascertain the facts. There is no indignity suffered in that.

Posted by: Thomas | Jul 21, 2009 11:11:54 AM

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