Disturbia.

Words. For Your Consideration.

"The clash in Cambridge about ID and racial profiling, about identity and expectation and respect was just a snippet of our culture’s ongoing meta-narrative about race. Its major themes played through the confirmation hearings of Sonia Sotomayor, and showed up , last week, when Barack Obama, speaking for once not as the apotheosis of “post-racial” America but instead as a man who’s spent nearly 48 years Living While Black, was labeled “unpresidential.” Each chapter in this larger story shows us, time and again, what Sotomayor’s critics refused to concede: that how we all think, what we see, how we reason and react are directly determined by who we are. And some of who we are is conditioned by our race.

Had Gates been a white man, approached in his home and abruptly told to step outside, he might well have bristled at the cold officiousness of the officer’s tone, but he probably wouldn’t have thought, or known, that to leave the haven of his house would expose him to the possibility of sudden arrest.

Had he been white, a request for ID would probably not have sounded like an insult, or worse, a potential danger. It would probably not have stirred up memories of black men like Amadou Diallo, the Guinean immigrant who in 1999 was killed by police in the Bronx as he reached for his wallet. He very likely would not have seen what Gates was sure he saw in Crowley’s face, as the cop scanned the professor’s Harvard ID, trying to take in the fact that the man before him was not an intruder. “He’s trying to unpack a narrative … He was so sure that he had a catch,” Gates recalled to King. “That is when everything turned.”

We don’t know precisely what was going through Crowley’s mind. But his report and later statements seem to attest to a greatly outsized sense of vulnerability and victimization.

...Obama warned that for America to move forward, both blacks and whites need to listen to each other’s narratives, and stop reflexively dismissing them either as paranoia or simple prejudice.

The “He said/He said” of Ware Street in Cambridge might be just the place to start."

THE NEW YORK TIMES: A Lot Said, and Unsaid, About Race