Brown Professor on Gates Episode

In case you missed it, Brown University professor Glenn C. Loury had a powerful op-ed in the New York Times over the weekend on the controversy surrounding the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Loury, a black man who has had his own run-ins with the law, bemoans the simplistic, predictable quality of the debate on race and law enforcement that has sprouted up around the incident. From the piece:

...this much-publicized incident is emblematic of precisely nothing at all. Rather, the Gates arrest is a made-for-cable-TV tempest in a teapot. It is the rough equivalent of a black man being thrown out of a restaurant after having berated an indifferent maître d’ for showing him to a table by the kitchen door, all the while declaring what everybody is supposed to know: this is what happens to a black man in America.

Certainly, the contretemps shed no relevant light on the plight of the millions of black men on society’s margins who bear the brunt of police scrutiny and government-sanctioned coercion. I find laughable, and sad, Professor Gates’s declaration that he now plans to make a documentary film about racial profiling. Is that as far as his scholarship on the intersection of race and policing in America extends? Where has this eminent scholar of African-American affairs been these last 30 years, during which a historically unprecedented, politically popular, extraordinarily punitive and hugely racially disparate mobilization of resources for the policing, imprisonment and post-release supervision of those caught up in the criminal justice system has unfolded?