I know the real reason why Henry Louis Gates Jr. went to jail the other day. I have no inside knowledge of this, but if he and I were speaking of it over a beer, I am fairly certain he would finally agree.
The first thing out of my mouth to him would have gone something like this: Were you out of your Harvard University-addled mind?
It is, in so many ways, a very sad thing to say to any black man who has been carted off in handcuffs from his own front porch, his only crime — truly — being his temerity to shout at a white police officer that he wouldn’t be there at all if everyone involved were white.
Most folks who’ve lived long enough in black skin learned long ago how to swallow their anger and a good bit of their pride when the cops arrive.
You “yes, sir” them and “no, sir” them. They leave. You stew and, by the day, grow a little bit angrier.
“We never get a chance to be normal” is how William M. King, Ph.D., a professor of Afroamerican studies for 37 years at the University of Colorado, put it.
King, in his 60s, is an outspoken observer and longtime critic of race relations in this country.
I called him.
“Did professor Gates fail to remember that he is a black man in white America?” he asked. “What did he — what did you — expect? All of this is about ignorance.”
Every black man in America has a Henry Louis Gates Jr. story. This is simply, as the president said Wednesday night, a fact.
My stories, as I have written about numerous times, go as far back as my childhood — the first one being when I, an innocent 9-year-old boy, was held at gunpoint by a Los Angeles police officer.
King has such stories, like the time he was pulled over in Boulder near CU, three days after he arrived on campus.
He had simply made a turn.
“They walked up, guns drawn, took my information and soon walked back,” he said. ” ‘Excuse me, Dr. King, you are not the one we want,’ they told me. They were looking for black guys. What did it tell me? It told me, ‘Welcome to America.’ ”
It is what I would tell Gates. He lives on the Harvard campus in a yellow clapboard house. It amazes me that his neighbors still do not know him.
It amazes me that the police officers and their sergeant did not. We read and view different things, I guess.
“Professor Gates has to be, what, in his late 50s? He has to understand,” King said. “If nothing else, this incident has certainly cost him his innocence.
“I am not saying he did not know intellectually that this could happen. He is a noted African-American studies professor at Harvard. But there is a world of difference between intellect and knowing in your gut your own experiences.”
Maybe living in the world of rarefied academia, professor Gates simply forgot. King and I, after some discussion, agree this cannot be possible.
“There are very few black men in this country who haven’t had the very same thing happen to them,” King says.
“It does not excuse,” he points out, “the behavior of the police officers. What I’m saying is what the president said the other day is correct. It was all stupidity.”
Yet how does that bring comfort, I ask, for Gates, who had the disorderly conduct charge against him dropped, or any man in black skin who witnessed or reads of what happened to such a distinguished man?
“It is just another day in the life of . . .,” King said. “Tell me, how does it benefit you to be angry at something you can do nothing about?
“You study it but keep moving on because, as the elders used to tell us, it is about believing things aren’t always going to be this way.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
