I Wonder Who Made the Call

About 30 years ago, I was a high school student in Long Beach, CA. My suburban neighborhood, called Lakewood Village, sat right across Lakewood Blvd. from the tony Lakewood Country Club subdivision, where custom homes, manicured lawns and winding streets contrasted with the homogenous, grid-like layout where I lived. Yet, some of my best friends lived in that neighborhood and I and my friends from the other side of the boulevard used to visit there, often leaving our friends' houses late at night.

One night, my best friend was walking home through the Country Club after leaving a mutual friend. It was probably after midnight. He was about 17 or 18 at the time. A Lakewood Police patrol car pulled up alongside him. The officer in the car stopped him, asked him his name, where he lived, and what he was doing walking around in that neighborhood. He said he was going home after visiting a friend. They asked him a lot of questions. I remember him telling me that he was pretty upset about being stopped and questioned like that.

Now, he wasn't arrested or anything, but the point is this: my best friend was black, and he was walking after midnight in a rich, white neighborhood. In the late 1970s, less than 15 years after the Civil Rights Act, it was somehow understandable, though not excusable, that black/white relations could be a little strained.

But in 2009? The 100th anniversary of the founding of the NAACP? With a scholarly, successful black lawyer serving as our president? Well, yes. Last Thursday, Harvard educator and prominent black scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested, in broad daylight, at his home in Cambridge, MA, for "disorderly conduct."

It seems Gates had just returned to his home from a trip to China. The bespectacled man, who walks with a cane, was in the foyer of his home when a police officer showed up at his door and asked him to step outside. It seems someone had called the police about a possible break-in at Gates' home that was phoned in by a white woman.

After some tense exchanges, Gates produced an ID that confirmed his address, but he was still arrested after demanding three times to know the white officer's name and badge number. Gates confronted the officer, saying, "You're not responding because I'm a black man, and you're a white officer."

The arrest sent shock waves through the black community. He was eventually let go with a public apology by the city, calling the incident "regrettable and unfortunate."

It's pretty sickening that, in this day and age, black people get harrassed in their own homes because some white people can't fathom that a black person lives among them. I can't begin to understand that, not now, not today. And yet, racism and fear of the other still exists in America, and will probably exist long after I am gone. Pitiful.