I NEVER SAID HE WAS BLACK!
Lucia Whalen, the 911 Caller in the Prof Henry Louis Gates arrest case, said she thought one of the men might be Hispanic.
The woman whose 911 call set in motion the events that led to the arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates did not tell police during the call that the two men she saw forcing their way into a house were Black.
Her account of the incident, provided by her attorney, differs from a report written by the Police officer Crowley who arrested Gates. Officer Crowley's report said the witness told him at the scene the men were Black. The woman's lawyer denies that.

In a recording of the 911 call released Monday 28 July by police in Cambridge, Mass., Lucia Whalen said she could not see the men clearly. She said one man might be Hispanic.


According to the 911 call, Whalen wasn't sure a crime was taking place. She told a dispatcher she saw suitcases and didn't know whether the men lived in the house.

"I don't know what's happening," Whalen said. Several times during the 21/2-minute call, she said she made the call for an older woman who lives in the neighborhood and was worried when she saw two men trying to barge into the house.

Whalen, who works near Gates' home and was on her way to lunch when the incident occurred, spoke about it Monday through her lawyer, Wendy Murphy. According to Murphy, Whalen said officers did not interview her at the scene, she never said the men at the house were Black, and the only thing she told Crowley was that she was the 911 caller.

The release of the tape and a recording of subsequent police radio transmissions provided more details about the incident that has ignited a debate about race and racial profiling by police. The tapes do not explain how a routine call about a possible burglary led to Gates' arrest at home on a charge of disorderly conduct.

Is America a color-blind society after the election of Barack Obama?
My first reaction to watching the unfolding Saga of Skip Gates's Cambridge Arrest was that America's postracial bubble, like its recent economic troubles, was about to pop. The fact that some observers had never bought into the story of a race-free America purged of its past sins by a watershed presidential election had done little to diminish either that narrative's moral resonance or political weight.

Since America's racial disparities remain as deep-rooted after Barack Obama's election as they were before, it was only a matter of time until the myth of post-racism exploded in our collective national face. That they would rear their ugly head in the form of an intellectual and racial cause célèbre is fitting, since Black scholars and activists have been engaged in a robust debate over the meaning of race in the Age of Obama.

Suddenly Obama's recent declaration before the NAACP—that American Blacks have come farther than at any other time in our country's history—seems suspect, our national progress undone by the fact that Gates's predicament has become a metaphor for the nation's legacy of racial discrimination.

Our euphoria over Obama's historic election as the nation's first Black president hit an unexpected speed bump in Cambridge, Mass., home to the bastion of academic decorum, of all places. The arrest on July 16 of Doctor Henry Louis Gates,the prominent Harvard professor of African-American studies, in his own home has sparked a media firestorm that has interrupted the growing national consensus that America has been writing a new chapter in its tortured racial history.



Fresh from filming his latest PBS documentary in China, the 58-year-old Professor Gates found himself locked out of his well-appointed Harvard home. With the help of his African-American taxi driver, Gates successfully entered his house—but not before arousing a suspicious neighbor, who phoned the police. What happened next is the subject of competing accounts.


The police report characterizes Professor Gates as an academic turned thug: loud, rude, uncooperative, and menacingly dangerous after being asked to produce identification. Gates has countered with an entirely different scenario, one wherein he obligingly showed his Harvard identification only to be met with rude behavior. After asking for and being refused the officer's badge number, Gates was arrested. Why several police officers were needed to secure a nearly 60-year-old man who relies on a cane to get around is one of many questions asked in ensuing days.

Like a bright, streaking comet, Gates's arrest has made its way around blogs, newspaper columns, Web sites, TV shows, Twitter, and via good old-fashioned word of mouth. Not long after the 20th anniversary of the release of Spike Lee's controversial and racially charged film, Do the Right Thing, the urbane, Ivy League educated Gates, perhaps the most important and distinguished black academic of his generation, suddenly found himself a graybearded stand-in for Lee's doomed character Radio Raheem, whose assault by New York City police officers leads to the film's still powerful denouement.


Part of this story's momentum rests with Gates's public persona. Known as a bridge-builder between Black scholars and white liberals, Professor Gates is the pre-eminent scholar-entrepreneur of his generation; one of the architects of a revitalized African-American-studies discipline, who has successfully built networks between academe and business, politics, culture, and the media. If this can happen to Skip Gates, whose investment in the American Dream has carried him to the highest levels of the nation, then what chance does an ordinary Black person stand?

A shaken Gates has publicly expressed outrage and shock about his arrest but found newfound empathy and solidarity with the plight of ordinary Black people, whose encounters with the criminal-justice system rarely end with all charges dropped, as in Gates's case. Nor do they become national and international news stories. Television coverage coincided with Gates's sharing his story on July 22 on CNN's "Black in America 2." Later that evening—at a news conference on health care, where he received a question about the professor's recent arrest—President Obama chimed in to let Gates know he had his back.

The Gates incident illustrates the complex overlap between race and class (a working-class white policeman and one of the country's most celebrated scholars who is Black and now is forced to confront his blackness squarely in the mirror; blog and radio comments that sometimes carry an undercurrent of resentment at the privileged life of this particular Black man). The silver lining to the entire sordid affair is the long-delayed opportunity to draw sustained attention to the interwoven problems of race, structural poverty, and the criminal-justice system—a project that Gates himself has publicly committed to pursue.

The story's race and class dynamics are complicated. Gates is well-connected enough to have the President of the United States refer to him as a friend, yet Black enough to be racially profiled in his own home. The plight of tens of thousands of ordinary Black men and women, sometimes educated, more often not, remains invisible and thus far more vulnerable.

The Gates controversy pulled Obama into his first major racial storm since the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. wrangle. At his news conference, Obama responded that anyone would be angry, the Cambridge police acted "stupidly," and that America had a long history of racial profiling. Police unions expressed disappointment, while civil-rights activists loudly applauded his words. (Obama later said that he "could have calibrated" the wording of his intial reaction differently, and that both Gates and the Cambridge police may have overreacted.)

The arrest may very well be remembered as an unexpected turning point in our national conversation about race. That dialogue, of course, progresses only in fits and starts, occasioned as often by racial turmoil as by racial triumph. President Obama's rise to power elicited genuine excitement and emotion among Americans and citizens of the world about the thrilling possibilities of democracy. It also gave credence to a larger narrative, one supported by the symbolic evidence of Obama's election, that racism was dead. The story was all the more compelling since the vestiges of Jim Crow and lynching are, for many people, something only to be read about in history books or viewed in documentaries.

The story also proved to be dangerous.

An overwhelming number of Black people continue to reside on the margins of society, a permanent underclass seemingly fated to violent and early death, incarceration, poverty, and disease. Inadvertently, the public images of President Obama and, until recently at least, Professor Gates, supported the narrative of a postracial America. After all, how could a country where a Black man can become president and another be one of Harvard's most powerful professors be racist?

Perhaps the final lesson to be learned from all of this, one that Gates himself seemed to acknowledge, is that for all of America's racial progress, and in spite of the very real class divisions within the Black community, race retains stubborn political and social bonds among Black people that require shared affinity, identification, and sacrifice. Even in the Age of Obama (or perhaps especially in the Age of Obama), the struggle for racial and economic justice remains fraught. The Gates incident has become a new metaphor for America's still-tormented racial politics. More than a century ago, the black scholar and civil-rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois explained that African-Americans were too often seen as "problems" to be studied, discarded, lynched, or ignored, but never as full-blooded human beings whose progress remained vital to the success of the nation's democratic experiment. If this controversy helps to spur a national conversation about race and democracy, one that unblinkingly examines the persistence of Black poverty and incarceration even as it exults in Obama's election, then we will at least inch forward on the long road toward racial maturity, where the idea of a postracial American future remains an unrealizable but worthy goal rather than a political fait accompli.

(By Peniel E. Joseph) He is an associate professor of African and Afro-American studies at Brandeis University. He is the author of Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (Henry Holt and Company, 2006). His new book, Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama, will be published in January by Basic Books.

(Dr. L. Kelly sees this incident from a slightly different perspective.)
There is more than race at work here. There is the identification of much of America (and especially white America) with the police, the military, and any and all symbols of institutionalized authority. I find it most fitting that an African-American male should be in the media limelight for doing nothing more than challenging a cop. We as a country and as a culture are far too deferential to the police. We should routinely ask them to identify themselves and to explain themselves. The nexus between something like a "ruling class" and the police/military establishment is nothing new, nor unique to this culture. It was obviously pervasive in, for example, El Salvador when Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot in 1980--but that is only one more high-visibility incident, while many, many more cases go unnoticed or unaddrressed in many cultures. This nexus between police power and economic power is the real problem, and institutionalized racism is only one way that it plays out--although arguably the most insidious and offensive. I say, congratulations to both Gates and Obama for telling it like it is. Obama has no reason to apologize for his comments (and he has not actually retracted them or apologized for them). Gates is to be lauded for his willingness to challenge arbitrary authority, in the same way that he has made a life-long challenge to arbitrary economic and social disparities. It is a shame that only the challenge of a well-known and relatively wealthy African-American male is the one that gets media attention and the interest of an entire culture. This sort of thing happens every day to less advantaged persons of all racial and cultural backgrounds. I have yet to hear the policeman apologize. Perhaps he did. Apologies from authority figures are, in any case, extraordinarily rare. We should all challenge authority and not merely racism. Challenge authority because there is a moral imperative to do so, but do remember the list of martyrs who died because they did precisely that. Institutionalized authority by its nature does not like to be challenged, which is all the more reason that it must be. (Landrum Kelly, Jr., Ph.D. Chair, Department of History and Political Science Livingstone College) (Yes, I am seen as a "white" guy at a "Black" institution, but my forebears were Cherokee and Irish who also knew the force of institutionalized reation against those who were different.)

Was That Black Enough For Ya?



For a performer who smashed the race barrier on MTV and did as much as
anyone to make black music mainstream — not to mention was accused of
trying to turn himself white through skin treatments and plastic
surgery — the ceremony had a remarkably black cast. John Mayer and
Brooke Shields were the only white celebs with major roles.

Kobe Bryant, Spike Lee, Wesley Snipes, Lou Ferrigno, Don King, the
Kardashian sisters, Brooke Shields, Larry King. While Jackson was
among the most famous faces in the world, today's megastars were
largely absent. Those present mostly reflected some connection to
Jackson's life or work.









Among those conspicuously elsewhere were Elizabeth Taylor, Ross and
Debbie Rowe, Jackson's ex-wife and the mother of Jackson's two oldest
children.

The line spoken by Rev Al Sharpton actually went far beyond the audience assembled at the service and touched a cord -- that America still has not had the conversation on "Race" that it needs, and that statement is true today regardless of who is in the White House. Sharpton said directly to Jackson's children that "Your Daddy wasn't strange -- what was strange was what he had to deal with around him." And that statement brought the house down and the people up almost as a defiant gesture of angry response to all the Michael critics and to members of the general mainstream society that many African-Americans felt just don't understand.

And later that day, CNN's contributor Jeffrey Toobin replied to Sharpton's statement by saying, "Give me a break." And it struck me that the Sharpton statement with the audience response (the most boisterous and prolonged of any response at the service), juxtaposed with the Toobin response serving almost as a "reach out" to mainstream white America to let them know that someone was prepared to go after this saintly image of Michael Jackson being constructed, clearly demonstrated the racial divide that still exists in this country and that President Obama had better find some time to try to address while he still has such high personal approval ratings and political capital in the bank, or we are all in for some big political and social shocks next time around.


As the world paused to remember Jackson, authorities released his death certificate, which did not list a cause of death. The official determination will likely wait until toxicology results are completed, which could be weeks away.

FIRST BLACK CADETS AT WEST POINT.
In 1870, James Webster Smith became the first African-American admitted to the United States Military Academy. Ironically, the academy's first African American cadet came from South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union and the state with the highest percentage of slaves before the Civil War.

Smith was spared the hazing that was so common among his classmates. He was, rather, completely ostracized by the Corps and, after being turned back (forced to repeat a year) once for academic deficiencies, was dismissed for academic failure after four years at West Point. Smith had broken a critical barrier, however, and in 1873, a Georgian by the name of Henry O. Flipper would benefit.


Henry O. Flipper Flipper was no more popular than Smith, but, in the words of a classmate, “never pushed” the bounds of social equality and so was more easily tolerated. Flipper survived his years at the academy by being as determined as his classmates were prejudiced. In 1877 he became the academy’s first African-American graduate, ranking 50th in a class of 76.
Cadet Smith. James Webster Smith's cadetship was marred by discrimination from his very first day at West Point, When Smith presented his appointment papers to the commandant, he was waved away and several white cadets threatened to resign.

During his four years at West Point he was the center of oontroversy, being tried by court-martial on two occasions, Smith was a pioneer in a hostile environment and suffered dearly as a result.

Cadet O;Flipper, on the other hand, was of a more accommodating nature. Flipper, whose interest in West Point extended back several years before his admission, was aware of' Smith's difficulties through newspaper articles of the day. He went to West Point expecting to be mistreated.

He was mentally prepared for the worst, and when the worst did not occur, felt relieved. He took particular care not to repeat conduct which had caused Smith trouble. The greater majority of this avoided conduct dealt with social equality. Flipper was ostracized socially and, in contrast to Smith, did not complain

For this, he was spared the brutality that Smith had suffered. In modern terminology, Cadet Flipper may have been called an Uncle Tom. Yet, if he had not acquiecsed, he probably would have been forced out as was Smith.