“What do [white people] call a Negro PhD? … A Nigger” … Malcolm X, circa 1961
So, Professor Henry Louis Gates, you want to address racial profiling? Welcome back to the black community. Where have you been? You rarely step off the manicured Harvard campus to experience what it is like to be an African American. Your coveted home address is in Cambridge, Massachusetts and President Obama calls you “Skip”. Nice life, one that’s relatively free of lower-rung blacks. You most certainly displayed no public interest in racial profiling until it visited your pristine Harvard home when you were accused of burglarizing your own home. Historically, have you spoken on issues of racial concern? Not until you were stuffed into the back of a squad car like a sack of groceries.
You weren’t concerned with the plight of the average black person, because you are insulated in that privileged Ivy League world. However, as soon as a Caucasian offends you, like that Cambridge cop did, you un-holster the race card faster than a gunslinger. You flood America’s airwaves with this outrageous outcry of racial victimization.
Most likely, Professor Gates, you verbally assaulted the police officer to the point of forcing his apprehension. I’ve interviewed you before and have seen you at public events. You’re part of a cadre of seemingly unashamed, unrepentant black elitist with an extraordinary sense of entitlement. You look down your long, broad nose at the rest of the black community from which you have profited. African American studies have provided you a prime platform to earn a nice living and pontificate alongside America’s aristocracy. Now you want us to come running with Band-Aids to help dress your injured ego, then take up placards and go marching toward the White House?
Unlike your colleagues of similar educational stature, Princeton professor Cornel West and Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson, you are conspicuously quiet on matters such as urgent urban dilemmas — a very curious thing since you’re the director of the W.E.B DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Now, you want us to sympathize with you for having the handcuffs slapped on? This is why your quick and convenient use of the race card reeks worse than an abandoned port-a-potty.
Hey, Skip. Guess Malcolm X was right, huh? –terry shropshire
