It took less than a day for the arrest of Henry Louis Gates to become racial lore. When one of America's most prominent black intellectuals winds up in handcuffs, it's not just another episode of profiling – it's a signpost on America's bumpy road to equality. The news was parsed and Tweeted, rued and debated. This was, after all Henry “Skip” Gates: Summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale. MacArthur “genius grant” recipient. Acclaimed historian and PBS documentarian. One of Time magazine's “25 Most Influential Americans” in 1997. Holder of 50 honorary degrees. If this man can be taken away by police officers from the porch of his own home, what does it say about the treatment that average blacks can expect in 2009? Earl Graves Jr., CEO of the company that publishes Black Enterprise magazine, was once stopped by police during his train commute to work, dressed in a suit and tie. “My case took place back in 1995, and here we are 14 years later dealing with the same madness,” he said Tuesday. “Barack Obama being the president has meant absolutely nothing to white law enforcement officers. Zero. So I have zero confidence that (Gates' case) will lead to any change whatsoever.” This much is known for sure: The 58-year-old professor had returned from a trip to China last Thursday and found the front door of his home jammed shut. Gates entered the back door, forced open the front door with help from a car service driver, and was on the phone with the Harvard leasing company when a white police sergeant arrived. Gates and the sergeant gave differing accounts of what happened next. But for many people, that doesn't matter. They don't care that Gates was charged not with breaking and entering, but with disorderly conduct after repeatedly demanding the sergeant's name and badge number. It doesn't matter whether Gates was yelling, or accused Sgt. James Crowley of being racist, or that all charges were dropped Tuesday. All they see is pure, naked racial profiling. “Under any account ... all of it is totally uncalled for,” said Graves. “It never would have happened – imagine a white professor, a distinguished white professor at Harvard, walking around with a cane, going into his own house, being harassed or stopped by the police. It would never happen.” Racial profiling became a national issue in the 1990s, when highway police on major drug delivery routes were accused of stopping drivers simply for being black. Lawsuits were filed, studies were commissioned, data was analyzed. “It is wrong, and we will end it in America,” President George W. Bush said in 2001. Yet for every study that concluded police disproportionately stop, search and arrest minorities, another academic came to a different conclusion. “That's always going to be the case,” Greg Ridgeway, who has a Ph.D in statistics and studies racial profiling for the RAND research group, said on Monday. “You're never going to be able to (statistically) prove racial profiling. ... There's always a plausible explanation.” Federal legislation to ban racial profiling has gone nowhere since being introduced in 2007 by a dozen Democratic senators, including then-Sen. Barack Obama. US Rep. Danny Davis, an Illinois Democrat, said that was partly because “when you look at statistics, and you're trying to prove the extent of profiling, the information that comes back is that there's not nearly as much evidence as we expect there to be.” But Davis has no doubt that profiling is real: He says he was stopped while driving in Chicago in 2007 for no reason other than the fact he is black.
