Quote:
Originally Posted by inBOIL
I think race is one of a number of factors that led to this outcome. Would this have happened to a white person? Probably not. Did Mr. Gates handle the situation maturely? Probably not. If I had had to force my way into my own home, I wouldn't be surprised if the cops showed up and viewed me with suspicion.
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Oh, I dunno. I happened to fit the description of some punk that'd been firing a gun into the air in the neighborhood where I was walking a few years back. The cops saw me as a white male and made me put my hands up until they could establish that I wasn't the guy they were looking for.
The neighbor in this case called the cops and said that a black male was breaking into the house. If the cop comes over and finds a black male in the house, it's entirely reasonable for the cop to want to make sure that the particular black male in the house actually belongs there. The cop was trying to protect the man's property. All the guy had to do was to prove that he lived there (easy enough - here's a bill to this address and here's my driver license with the same name on it).
The racism door swings both ways. I've personally interviewed cops that I know damn well are racist as hell, and who WILL pull you over for driving-while-black. So I'm not trying to say that cops are perfectly non-racist at all. And for all we know even this cop is racist as hell. But in this case, his actions are justified and should therefore not be assumed to be racist.
As a thought exercise, let's pretend the cop was also black. What do you think the reaction from Mr. Gates would have been then? How about your reaction? Does that not prove that Mr. Gates, and probably some of you, are assuming that a white guy has racist motivations in his dealings with a black man? Is that not prejudice?