When Sgt. James Crowley says that “Speaking [irreverently] about my mother [is something that is] just beyond words,” I perfectly understand exactly what the Cambridge, Mass, police officer is talking about. For nearly two years now, I haven’t been able to pick up the receiver of the phone in my office at Nassau Community College because, in my painstaking and meticulous efforts at healthily exposing pioneering Ghanaian premier Kwame Nkrumah for the veritable dictator that he immitigably and inescapably was, and thus soundly restoring postcolonial Ghanaian history, I have garnered a slew of crank-callers, mostly Nkrumah fanatics, who call around-the-clock to leave messages alluding to some aspect of my late mother’s anatomy. And on the occasions that I pick up the receiver of my office phone, it is invariably to place calls rather than receive them. In class, I advise my students to use the college’s e-mail system to reach me; it is only during my contractually mandated office hours, when I expect students to either call for missed assignments or discuss any aspects of my lectures that may not be clear to them that I receive calls. Anyway, as more details emerge about the recent domestic arrest of Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., I have become convinced, more than ever before, that the latter’s widely reported and globally discussed arrest by Sgt. Crowley had anything to do with everything but the odious phenomenon of “racial profiling.” I am even beginning to be fully convinced that, indeed, Sgt. Crowley is the veritable victim of circumstances rather than the man who was erroneously, albeit inadvertently, arrested for breaking into his own home. A July 27, 2009 audiotape report of the suspected burglary, contrary to reams of published critical commentary, largely by people with their own stereotypical agendas, clearly indicated that in no shape or form did ethnic and/or racial prejudice constitute the primary motivation of the “9-1-1” caller. And, indeed, as Ms. Wendy Murphy, attorney for the caller, Ms. Lucia Whalen, emphatically indicated, the emergency call reporting the suspicion of a burglary in progress was solely motivated by the recent rash of burglary in the neighborhood in which Prof. Gates has, reportedly, been resident for a decade-and-half. Indeed, we are told that it was, rather, the “9-1-1” dispatcher who demanded to know the ethnic and/or racial identity of the alleged suspects, to which Ms. Whalen, unexpectedly staggered by such raw ideological demand, haltingly offered the predictable variables of a Hispanic and an African-American male. What the foregoing means is that if anybody deserves to be faulted for “racial profiling,” it is indisputably the emergency (or “9-1-1”) dispatcher. The latter may well imply the immediate and imperative need to retrain personnel charged with such hectic and sensitive vocational role in our “post-racial” American era. Needless to say, it would also be quite interesting to learn of the ethnic background, and/or identity, of the “9-1-1” dispatcher. Maybe such knowledge could throw a better light on the entire incident. It is equally significant to observe that in his Yale admission application submission material, Prof. Gates is reported to have written the following rather cynical and imperious indictment of that august academy’s white administrators and by extension white-Americans in general: “As always, whitey now sits in judgment of me, preparing to cast my fate. It is your decision either to let me blow with the wind as a nonentity or to encourage the development of the self. Allow me to prove myself” (Wikipedia.com). It is also quite edifying to learn that, indeed, Yale’s “whitey” admissions officials had magnanimously allowed the now-globally renowned Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., to prove himself; and prove himself, the Keyser, West Virginia, native handily did. What is not known, as of this writing (7/28/09), regards the fact of whether Prof. Gates’ being denied tenure at Yale University had anything to do with his evidently crude “Black Power” ideological proclivity. What we also don’t know as yet is what Sgt. James Crowley wrote in his application material to the admissions office of the Cambridge Police Academy. Did Prof. Gates’ nemesis, for instance, invidiously indicate his not desiring the stereotypical misfortune of sharing a locker or dormitory with an African-American? We ask the preceding because in his riposte to Sgt. Crowley’s gripe about Prof. Gates having insulted the former’s mother, this is what Harvard’s Alphonse Fletcher scholar in the humanities had to say: “I don’t talk about people’s mother…. You could get killed talking about somebody’s mother in the barbershop, let alone with a white police officer…. I think they did some historical research and watched some episodes of ‘Good Times’” (See Judith Warner’s “Domestic Disturbances” New York Times 7/26/ 09). There is, of course, a little problem with the foregoing Gatesian salvo; and it regards the risible logical contradiction of a rabidly racist cop actually sitting down to watch “some episodes of ‘Good Times,’” not even for the purposeful or pedagogically edifying purpose of therapeutically highlighting the sticky question of “racial profiling” in the police academy. What has especially piqued my attention, if unavoidably and irritably so, is the facile presumption, on the part of many a Gatesian sympathizer that, somehow, a “small, slight, cane-carrying” Prof. Gates who once described himself as “unabashedly a black upper-middle-class intellectual,” in riposte to the humble and passionate pleas of readers perplexed with his studied rhetorical abstraction, is also so abjectly devoid of the kind of oversized ego that comes with being globally recognized as an “Academic Superstar,” as to readily cringe before a Sgt. James “Nobody” Crowley. This is the sickening stereotype, were the reader to ask me. As to whether “washing down” the raging acrimonious national wrangling on racial profiling with beer in the Obama White House offers adequate remedy for an epic moral and cultural crisis, remains to be seen. Credit: Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of 20 books, including “The New Scapegoats: Colored-on-Black Racism” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.

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