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White folks, on the case of Dr. Henry Gates versus the Boston police officer (and sorry, I don’t care what what the police officer’s name was because he isn’t someone I should know like Dr. Gates) some points are in order:
About the stupid beginning to this case:
1) If you had a neighbor with a cane who was black on a white street, uhh…he would be pretty distinctive right? You could recognize him easily just by his walk, from afar, and even in the evening with the street lights on. Say he comes home one evening from a taxi with luggage and strolls up to his house. You would probably recognize him right?
2) Say you are too STUPID to recognize him and you think its weird that a black man just got out of a taxi and is approaching a house. Since you are of that stupid variety who associate black people with criminals, and you apparently think burglars take taxis to rob houses (probably because you are stupid) you become alarmed. Then you think you see another black man who isn’t there because you are uhh stupid, and you think that black men come in pairs or something. So you call the police and report a burglary of 2 black men leaving a taxi and breaking and entering your elderly black neighbor’s house (hmm, odd coincidence on a white street that never occurs in your stupid brain).
3) Whatever else happened after this, the incident should have concluded with the police officer and Dr. Gates walking over to the neighbor’s house who reported the incident and introducing Dr. Gates with a smug condescending tone, then looking at each other, shaking their head and walking away.
4) Oh yeah one more comment on the stupid beginning to this case, as Bill Maher reportedly pointed out on his last show, “who breaks into a house with luggage”?
About who deserves respect:
1) Why are Americans so quick to respect police officers but have so little respect for professors, berating Dr. Gates as an elitist. It shows how little we value education. Almost anybody can become a cop, sorry, but its true, but hardly anybody becomes a Harvard professor. Harvard professors deserve more respect than cops. In some countries professors are treated like we treat Tiger Woods or Lance Armstrong. Besides we should aspire to build a country where police officers are irrelevant or boring at best because we don’t need them, there is so little crime.
2) An older black man who becomes a Harvard professor deserves double respect because of what he had to overcome in his day. ( I didn’t know who Dr. Gates was before this incident and I am ashamed.)
3) Elderly people deserve more respect period, especially in their own homes.
About reverse-racism:
1) Black people should be able to talk about white people as much as they want for a long, long time, say 150 years or more. Why? Because it’s just talk, which amounts to nothing compared to what we DID to them, such as keeping them as slaves, lynching them, and denying them basic human rights up until about 50 years ago or less.
2) Every time a white person starts nitpicking about “reverse racism” in cases like this all I hear is the modern day “shut-up boy”, i.e. white people trying to control black people and tell them what they can and can’t talk about. White people use talk about reverse racism to let out a whole lot of pent up racism. In Maureen Dowd’s latest op-ed on the Dr. Gates case, over 50% of the comments in this liberal newspaper defend the police officer, many using variants of reverse racism arguments. It makes me sick to my stomach and is the reason I wrote this post.
3) Our first black president, graduate of Harvard as well, should be allowed to defend black people as much as he wants, and we don’t get to decide if he went overboard. Why? Because we are the stupid motherfuckers who elected over 40 white men before him including George W., because most of use haven’t done jack shit for this country compared to him, and because he has a right to defend black people with his words, (just words, not the laws, pitchforks, and guns we used against people of his color) while we shut up. Sorry, end of story.
