SEE WHAT AFFIRMATIVE ACTION HAS DONE TO IVY LEAGUERS:

Henry Louis Gates should skip the racial histrionics: Instead, teach kids to cooperate with cops (Michael Meyers, 7/21/09, NYDailyNews.com)

The most famous black professor at Harvard lives in a very safe neighborhood because, in part, residents look out for and report suspicious activities, and because cops respond quickly to reports of possible break-ins. Yet that's not how Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, took it when cops showed up at his door after a neighbor reported two black men (Gates and his driver) seemingly pushing into a vacant residence, which turned out to be Gates' home.

He was arrested for disorderly conduct, and the rest is now histrionic history. (The charges have since been dropped, but the incident is not going away.)

Gates was returning from a trip to China, and he couldn't get in through a jammed front door, so he apparently went around the back, shut off an alarm and worked with his driver to get the door open.

In any neighborhood - especially one of the safest in America - that kind of behavior would be cause for suspicion and a call to the cops, no matter the color of the guys "breaking" in.

But when police showed up, the "he said, he said" has Gates indignant and, according to the cop, refusing to present himself and his ID, then complying and at some point getting loud - with Gates saying, according to the police report, "Why, because I'm a black man in America?"

He assumes the normal rules don't apply to him, just because he's black. And the droppinbg of the disorderly conduct charges would suggest that he's right. He did get beneficial treatment because of his race.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 22, 2009 9:18 AM