Gates' Rage: It's Class, not Race

Skip Gates isn’t outraged because he was the victim of racial profiling. He’s outraged because the cops didn’t recognize his Ivy League credentials, a fellow black Ivy Leaguer writes anonymously on This Week in Blackness and Salon. "He didn’t resent being identified as Black; he resented being identified as that kind of Black, the kind of Black that can be hassled and pushed around by simpleton cops. How dare you hassle me? I’m Skip Gates: Harvard professor!"

It's the Ivy League Effect, the writer says, that seems to have made the professor think he could harass the cops he thought were harassing him. Sure, they were almost certainly in the wrong. “But I’m also sure the good doctor was talking some shit. That Ivy League Effect has washed out his healthy fear of the police.” Gates says he’s “joined the ranks of the million incarcerated black men in America,” but that’s laughable, the writer says. “He does not see those million men as kin.” (More Henry Louis Gates Jr stories.)