Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates and the police.

An East Indian calls 911 for medical help and identifies himself as to his brown color and tells the operator, " I am the good guy ." The police come with the ambulance to the house with the foreknowledge that this brown is benign.

We undergo indignities on the streets and highways, in supermarkets, workplace, on vacation, and while driving. All people of all colors undergo these indignities. In the supermarket, When I picked up a bunch of bananas, the stock boy tells the nearby white women, "if the bananas are good for monkeys, they should be good for us."  Of course I dished out my immediate foolish revenge; I handed over a clean tissue from my pocket, and told him, "Please get rid of this trash."

One stock boy tells a  Jewish customer, " Iceberg lettuce is down the aisle."

On vacation, a family of blue eyes and blond hair was walking towards the brown us; the pre-teenage boy tells his sisters, " See the jungle bunnies."

When I called an outfit for help with my car, the white, red-faced attendant kept on using the word 'boy' in every which way he can, while he was talking to me. 

I go to cast my vote in a local school in a  white republican neighborhood we live; the cop near the voting booth casts his aspersion in words at us being democrats. Why did he assume I was a democrat?  I usually split my vote.

I was followed studiously at least twice in an upscale retail outlet in NY City. I was actually glad that somebody was following me to prove my innocence.  Once police were alerted; they showed up, walked past by me in full glare a few times. luckily for me I kept my cool and kept a watch on them passing up and down the aisle by the cash counter and by me. The police left as they came because they did not have any reason to talk to me either.  My wife and I paid for her shoes with the store card. Still my wife shops in this major retail outlet very famous in NYC and suburbs. In one outfit, the manager goes on the public address system and tells the attendant in a particular aisle to remove the garbage from the aisle. And yet I saw no garbage in the aisle. Could it be that I was it?

It is well documented that the former mayor of New York City David Dinkins was never able to hail a taxi in NY City streets for being black. And yet, the same taxi stopped to pick up a white passenger. Take our President Obama, the best among the best. If he ventures out incognito without secret service and a cavalcade of cars, flashing lights and wailing sirens, he will suffer the same undeserved indignities in all major and minor cities in the USA. That is a fact of life. I just recently saw a white young adult with a two inch wide round button clipped on his backpack with a logo, " Barack Obama, My Home boy" I could not resist taking a picture of the button.  A shameless scruffy-looking fellow with a week-old beard, obviously not a boss or a master but a twit, goes out (or lounges around) on public transportation daily and has the audacity to exhibit such insolent message about the president who travels in full regalia.

Being a doctor with MD plates on my car saved me quite a few times both from aggressive drivers and cops. The sneer and contempt mellowed into a neutral and benign stance upon knowing that I was a doctor. White people mellow down and engage in conversation upon reading the license plates. Some don't care; my color is offensive to their sensibilities. One corpulent macho guy - microcephalic, macrosomic moron- in oversize gas-guzzling SUV sticks his rubber neck out the window and told us to 'go back where you came from.'  We swallowed the indignity because he was fat, ugly, boorish and threatening with his beer-swilling hogs at his side in his gargantuan gas-guzzler.  At one instance a freckle-faced redhead nurse from one of the British Isles in her native working class accent told me to go back to India for no apparent reason. A spontaneous retort welled up from me, 'let us all go back where we came from and leave the country to the Indians.' One elderly gentleman who claimed to  be the progeny of Daughters American Revolution condescended to tell me," You must be a buck from a good stock."

A white cop on patrol in Garden State Parkway, pulls us to the break-down lane from the raging murderous traffic after we had a fill of gas at dusk. He stops us because I did not turn on the lights at the gas station soon after I started the engine and turned the lights on soon thereafter on the parkway; he let us go on our merry way without writing a ticket.

 Full cooperation with the law enforcement officer is essential. He or she has the authority and offensive weapon to back him up to his eyeballs; he walks around all day and night on duty with his phallic symbol [gun] at the ready for discharge at appropriate instances. God forbid he runs into bad dudes without his gun. He or she has the upper hand on the supine you; it is better to swallow perceived indignity than to fight in the heat of the moment; it saves a lot of heartache later.

The ego factor comes between the cop and his immediate captive client at every encounter. He is the law on the spot. You have to prove your innocence. You are guilty until proven innocent in his eyes and view. That is why you were stopped. You are a suspect. You may be the highly educated, highly literate person in the universe; he may be a gangly uncouth former High School graduate coming out of the Police Academy. Your intellect and ego are no match to his Super-size ego and the compulsive and sometimes necessary show of power over you. Being a cop runs in families. It takes certain personality, dedication and a genotype to make a cop. He has the law under his belt and the phallic symbol in his holster to back up his power projection. If you are a highbrow  with super-size ego,  frowning eyes, wrinkling nose, pouting lips and peevish looks, you got a problem on your hand.  The cop expects full cooperation, polite talk and sometimes a servile submission depending on your color and your total personality projection irrespective of your color.  Many times color doesn't matter at all.  He knows your name,  race, ethnicity, address, national origin, and the rest even before he stops you. If your profile matches his own personal profile, you are in or out of luck depending upon his adherence to the law.  Even among whites, the ethnicity matters in some cases and does not matter in some cases. There are gradations of color and a hierarchy among whites. No one can read the mind of man. The most prejudicial looking cop may be the most benevolent good soul.

Here is a conversation giving me an unwanted familiarity and backhanded compliment: "How are you mate?  I was once in India. I had a case of Delhi belly ripping my guts." If I were an Egyptian, it would have been "Pharaoh's Revenge."  If I were a Mexican, it would have been, "Montezuma's revenge."  I had to play along when it comes to scatological jokes, "Yah, that is true; I never sat on a toilet seat until I came to America." The fact  is it is true. We never sit; we always squat.

Here is another from a child: "Doc, is it true that children ride elephants to school."

"Hey dude, is it true your sari-clad wife walks two feet behind you."

In the 1950s and 60s, it is not uncommon for the people esp. the women stop our spouses and feel the silk Sari and appreciate its fineness and the red dot on the forehead.

It is common knowledge among geneticists that certain personality types share common traits with the cops and criminals.  A cop should know the mind of the robber to apprehend him. The robber should know the mind of the cop and the owner to outwit them. The higher incidence of XYY genotype is not uncommon among the jailbirds and the cops. They are sometimes called Super-males because of the extra Y chromosome in their genetic makeup. There is nothing super about them; it is a misnomer. That genotype goes with certain amount of lawful and unlawful aggression (and proneness to physical violence). The former is possessed by the cops and the latter by the criminals. These traits though common among the cops and criminals, the sense of obedience to law separates the cop from a criminal. But that is a fine line separating the two.

I had police officers stop me while driving and immediately let me go upon recognizing me as their children's doctor. I paid traffic violation fines for no fault of mine while on vacation and for driving while brown.  I was stopped once because I was told  I was driving a car similar to the car involved in robbery and assault (obviously a lie); the real offence was I was brown while driving. And the police officer though he  was well aware of his own intent, gave me a ticket for speeding, advising me to send the money by mail because he had to justify his action. In the kaleidoscope of colors and events, the blacks, the Latinos, the colored races of South Asia, South America... are the unfortunate fish that easily fall in to the net.

Professor Gates, in my opinion, should have kept his words to soft, mellow and polite minimum, cooperated with the police (as he did) and then take up the matter with the police authorities later. Cool heads, scant words, and politeness are the rules of the game. His preeminence and  influence in the academic world are invisible and unknown to the cop and should not be a factor in the evaluation and disposition of a case on hand.  Lesser you talk, better is the outcome. That is forethought. Read  the face, take note of the twitches & frowns and learn to read the body language....  These are clues as to how you should respond to the other person. He was not in danger of losing his life or limb.  I learnt from personal experience that more we talk under the circumstances, deeper in ordure we find ourselves. That is when we should not insist on immediate satisfaction of our rights. We can claim our rights later. We have to assume that he is a genuine player trying to understand the prevailing situation. Professor Gates should have shown the officer some of the photos around the house and even offered him a soft drink  or some such thing to mitigate and cool the situation.  Now President Obama is playing the mediator between the two inviting them to the White House for a beer to patch things up.

Allen Counter, who has taught neuroscience at Harvard for 25 years, said he was stopped on campus by two Harvard police officers in 2004 after being mistaken for a robbery suspect. They threatened to arrest him when he could not produce identification. "We do not believe that this arrest would have happened if professor Gates was white," Counter said. "It really has been very unsettling for African-Americans throughout Harvard and throughout Cambridge that this happened." I was stopped in the hospital once by a new security guard appointed at a time when a lady doctor was raped in another hospital  in a different borough by an intruder.  I did not have my ID and she took me around the hospital looking for some one to identify me as the real doctor visiting to see a patient. At last one good soul with an ID badge was walking by and upon her prompting, he identified me as the real doctor on rounds.

We have to give the police the benefit of doubt that he or she may be performing the duty in full faith and honor. We very often miscalculate other people's intentions and prejudices. It is felt by many people that a man should not be arrested in his own home for breaking and entering his own home. All white cops are not engaged in racial profiling; some are. 

When you go to other countries, some people and cops dish out their prejudices to you on a platter. 

Racial profiling is defined by the UN as "the practice of police and other law enforcement officers relying, to any degree, on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin as the basis for subjecting persons to investigatory activities or for determining whether an individual is engaged in criminal activity". --Google.com

Gates carrying a cane is less likely a burglar than one carrying the tools of the trade.  Mr.Gates has since gone on to claim that “this isn’t about me; this is about the vulnerability of black men in America.”

This episode is an anachronism with a black president, a black mayor, a black governor, a black professor and a white officer charged with teaching recruits against racial profiling  and appointed by a former black  police commissioner.  "President Barack Obama said Friday (07/24/209) he spoke with the police officer who arrested a Harvard professor and told the officer that he did not mean to malign the Cambridge Police Department."--CNN. Now Professor and the police officer are invited to the White House for a beer to build camaraderie among the threesome.

A hypothetical situation: Every pungent word exchanged leads to escalation;  every unpleasant irate word pumps up adrenaline; one becomes heightened in nervousness, heart rate, respirations... impairing  judgment and good sense; the egos clash; it comes to  fight or flight;  the weak turns tail and runs in a metaphorical sense; the strong face each other;  the man with the gun wins, whether it is right or wrong. He keeps feeling or looking at the gun from the corner of his eyes; he gets a mixed mental urge, uneasiness and unwillingness to use it, all at the same time;  he wonders when this will all end. Both the cop and the client should  realize this inexorable escalation and find ways to deescalate the soaring passion. That demands situational intelligence on the part of the participants.

A Hindu story is illustrative of how to defuse a sticky situation.  A cagey sage went to Brahma, Siva and Vishnu to find out who would have right stuff to run the universe. Brahma and Siva threw him out outright for his impudence. The irate sage went to Vishnu who was nestling on the lap of His divine spouse and mistook God for ignoring him on purpose. The sage kicked the God of the Universe on His chest to wake Him up. Vishnu immediately recognized the sage (a man), got on His knees and offered to massage his feet which might have been hurt from walking and kicking.  Immediately the cagey sage left and reported to other conniving sages that Vishnu had the right stuff and temperament to be their God and the God of the universe.  Vishnu had the forethought that this was a test. Every encounter in life is  a test- unintended and unrehearsed. Vishnu had the power to slice the sage's head with his discus. He didn't. He was a benign God.  Take for instance our president Barack Obama. He became the president in spite of his color, for his intelligence, care and concern, and cool head.  With all this progress, the colors still don't mix well.

Some thoughts:

1) Gates could have called the police, fire dept, or maintenance to tell them before he forced the door open. There is that overhanging question, Why should he?

2) The Police department should have checked the ownership, tenant's name, address, and the phone number and owner of the phone number in the house in question before responding to the call and confronting Professor Gates. That way police is prepared with all information.

3) Two alleged black burglars: Police should send black police officers to investigate alleged crimes by blacks. This would have prevented this unfortunate incident.

4) The house should have the owner and or tenant's name at the door or lawn in all Harvard houses.

5) The police should have all information as to ownership, tenant's name etc before responding to the call. They know everything about cars; why not houses?