In the Wake of the Cambridge Affair

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

It has been over two weeks since the dignified university community of Cambridge, Massachusetts, became a focus of national attention in America’s continuing catharsis over race. A very tired, and very distinguished, professor, who happened to be black, returned from a long and grueling flight from China only to discover that he could not get his front door open. He and his driver went around to the back of his house and commenced to force the back door open.

A passerby in the very nice residential neighborhood called police and reported that a break-in might be occurring. When the police arrived, they confronted the professor in his home. What happened after that is in dispute, but the result was that the professor was arrested for interfering with a legal process. He was later released. The professor claimed to have been a victim of racial profiling, and the policeman felt that his authority had been questioned, and that he had been disrespected by the professor – and later by the President of the United States who remarked during a news conference that the Cambridge police had “acted stupidly.”

Right wing radio predictably went nuts over Obama’s comment and tried to ignite a national brush fire of raging racism. Surely the offended policeman would get loud and angry over being disrespected on the national stage. One Republican congressman put forth a resolution demanding that the President apologize to the Cambridge Police Department. The whole thing looked like it would be a godsend for the loony right fringe.

What happened, of course, was that President Obama, clearly the most brilliant and politically savvy individual to be President of the United States since Woodrow Wilson, and possibly since Lincoln, held a Beer Summit at the White House and gave the situation a positive thrust, one in which the professor and the police sergeant agreed to work together to improve race relations in America. Rush Limbaugh’s wet dream of increased racial strife and commotion withered and died.

Well, not completely.

One problem with people who incite others – for ratings, personal glory, to promote their personal or political agendas, for money, or whatever – is that when they are finally shut down, not everyone gets the memo.

Cambridge is a sophisticated enclave surrounded by rough-and-tumble metropolis of Boston, an urban area with a long history of racial strife. Officer Justin Barrett, a thirty-six-year-old young man who had been on the Boston Police Department a scant two years, got swept up in the noise over the incident in Cambridge. Filled with righteous indignation, the young cop sent out a mass email referring to the professor, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, as a “banana-eating jungle monkey,” and noted that if he had been the responding officer Professor Gates would have been introduced to the effects of pepper spray. Barrett has since apologized, but he has been suspended and will likely be fired over his remarks.

And that’s too bad because Rush, or Bill-o, or Sean, or Lou, or Ann, or Glenn, or whichever racist cretin pushed him into action is still employed – and making a nice salary, thank you very much.

The Cambridge affair has also stirred some antisocial behavior from the political left. Pepin Tuma, a thirty-three-year-old lawyer from Washington, D.C., took a message from the incident that police are thugs and tend to overreact, especially when they are dealing with racial minorities. He and some friends had spent a lot of time talking about the affair in Cambridge. As the group was walking down a street in D.C. they came upon a traffic stop, and Tuma began chanting “That’s why I hate police” loudly enough to ruffle the blue feathers of one of the police officers who was handling the traffic stop. Officer J. Culp didn’t take kindly to what he took as being publicly disrespected. He pushed the young lawyer up against an electric utility box while demanding, “Who do you think you are to think you can talk to a police officer like that?” Tuma was eventually cuffed and arrested for disorderly conduct.

So while Professor Henry Louis Gates and Police Sergeant James Crowley have apparently moved on, the Cambridge affair has left some angry individuals bobbing in its wake. Ending racism in America will not be easy, but the day is coming when race will no longer matter. The day is also coming when police will master the art of public relations and learn how to diffuse angry but harmless individuals without overreacting. It is all going to happen whether Rush and his hate-filled minions like it or not – and the sooner the better!