July 22, 2009
COMMENTARY: 'Amos & Andrew' in Liberal Cambridge, Mass.?
By David M. Kinchen
Huntingtonnews.net Editor
When I read of the arrest of Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. in his own home in Cambridge, MA late last week (more than 1,600 stories on Google, link: http://news.google.com/news/more?pz=1&num=30&cf=all&ncl=dyEbtznKBk-DEaMIKUDGmXxh2rBpM), my thoughts turned to a movie called "Amos & Andrew," a 1993 flick directed by E. Max Frye and starring Samuel L. Jackson and Nicolas Cage.
Skip Gates, 58, a native of Piedmont, WV and a distinguished professor at Harvard University, was arrested -- handcuffed, even (no 8X10 color glossy photos a la "Alice's Restaurant"?) for gaining access to his own leased house -- but the mug shots are all over the Internet like a rash.
In the movie, wealthy African-American playwright Andrew Sterling (Jackson) has his house surrounded by an armed squad of cops led by a dim-witted chief of police played by Dabney Coleman. A neighbor has reported Sterling and suspects that he's a burglar. In an attempt to cover his tracks, the chief sets prisoner Amos Odell (Cage) on Sterling.
Of course, the alleged racial profiling didn't go that far in mostly white Cambridge, MA, which dropped the disorderly conduct charges against Gates and issued an apology of sorts. One blog I read, on Huffington Post, said that the white arresting officer, a chap named Crowley, is notorious for racial profiling in oh-so-liberal Cambridge.
To use a phrase I remember from the movie "The Right Stuff," the cops in Cambridge really "screwed the pooch." Skip Gates, West Virginian of the year in 1995, is now going to do a documentary on racial profiling. It reminds me of my time in Los Angeles, when a well-to-do black man was arrested for DWB (Driving While Black) in equally liberal Beverly Hills.
Blogger Brandon M. Terry summed this incident up very nicely, in my opinion, on Huffington Post:
"It is the way that his white neighbor, Lucia Whalen, looked at him as he stood on his porch with his luggage, attempting to nudge his jammed front door open. That look that somehow confuses a nearly sixty year old bespectacled professor with a blue blazer who cannot walk without the aid of a cane, as a crafty black burglar practicing his illicit deeds at 12:30 PM in the afternoon. Likely imagining herself as some courageous vigilante protecting the sanctity of her exclusive neighborhood to the unending praise of her grateful neighbors, she instead must bear the ignominious title of "the white lady who called the cops on 'Skip' Gates'" from dinner party to dinner party like a Scarlet K-K-K.
"It is the way that Officer James Crowley, who responded to Ms. Whalen's misguided vigilance, looked at the MacArthur fellowship winner standing in his own foyer, as if to make humiliatingly literal the W.E.B. Du Bois lament from The Souls of Black Folk, "Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?" Gates, understandably exhausted from the return flight from China he had just taken, responded to the officer's insistent questioning of his identity with frustration -- but did indeed prove his ownership of the residence and right to be there."
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COMMENTARY: 'Amos & Andrew' in Liberal Cambridge, Mass.?
By David M. Kinchen
Huntingtonnews.net Editor
When I read of the arrest of Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. in his own home in Cambridge, MA late last week (more than 1,600 stories on Google, link: http://news.google.com/news/more?pz=1&num=30&cf=all&ncl=dyEbtznKBk-DEaMIKUDGmXxh2rBpM), my thoughts turned to a movie called "Amos & Andrew," a 1993 flick directed by E. Max Frye and starring Samuel L. Jackson and Nicolas Cage.
Skip Gates, 58, a native of Piedmont, WV and a distinguished professor at Harvard University, was arrested -- handcuffed, even (no 8X10 color glossy photos a la "Alice's Restaurant"?) for gaining access to his own leased house -- but the mug shots are all over the Internet like a rash.
In the movie, wealthy African-American playwright Andrew Sterling (Jackson) has his house surrounded by an armed squad of cops led by a dim-witted chief of police played by Dabney Coleman. A neighbor has reported Sterling and suspects that he's a burglar. In an attempt to cover his tracks, the chief sets prisoner Amos Odell (Cage) on Sterling.
Of course, the alleged racial profiling didn't go that far in mostly white Cambridge, MA, which dropped the disorderly conduct charges against Gates and issued an apology of sorts. One blog I read, on Huffington Post, said that the white arresting officer, a chap named Crowley, is notorious for racial profiling in oh-so-liberal Cambridge.
To use a phrase I remember from the movie "The Right Stuff," the cops in Cambridge really "screwed the pooch." Skip Gates, West Virginian of the year in 1995, is now going to do a documentary on racial profiling. It reminds me of my time in Los Angeles, when a well-to-do black man was arrested for DWB (Driving While Black) in equally liberal Beverly Hills.
Blogger Brandon M. Terry summed this incident up very nicely, in my opinion, on Huffington Post:
"It is the way that his white neighbor, Lucia Whalen, looked at him as he stood on his porch with his luggage, attempting to nudge his jammed front door open. That look that somehow confuses a nearly sixty year old bespectacled professor with a blue blazer who cannot walk without the aid of a cane, as a crafty black burglar practicing his illicit deeds at 12:30 PM in the afternoon. Likely imagining herself as some courageous vigilante protecting the sanctity of her exclusive neighborhood to the unending praise of her grateful neighbors, she instead must bear the ignominious title of "the white lady who called the cops on 'Skip' Gates'" from dinner party to dinner party like a Scarlet K-K-K.
"It is the way that Officer James Crowley, who responded to Ms. Whalen's misguided vigilance, looked at the MacArthur fellowship winner standing in his own foyer, as if to make humiliatingly literal the W.E.B. Du Bois lament from The Souls of Black Folk, "Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?" Gates, understandably exhausted from the return flight from China he had just taken, responded to the officer's insistent questioning of his identity with frustration -- but did indeed prove his ownership of the residence and right to be there."
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