My take on this is, two people with bigger than average egos were involved, and that had much to do with the problem.

Gates has been a pretty colorful (no pun intended) character during his career. He's brilliant and knows it. He has had on-going issues with the Harvard administration and pretty much wants to call the shots in his life. That's nothing new for academics. I'm like that, myself, and have paid a price for arrogance more than once.

Police in general have a lot of authority, due to the nature of the job. Sometimes, when they're presented with difficult situations, they appear to act like they're "strong-arming" people, when there is a real possibility that they're simply in over their heads. They resort to being control freaks, and that doesn't work very well with a man like Gates, who has made the news many times for not just automatically rolling over and taking things as they are dealt.

Neither thought the situation through, and tempers flared.

There's no question racisim still exists. The protests, sit-ins and riots are mostly gone, but the issues are still there; they just surfaces in different ways.

It is impossible to tell the degree to which racism enterted into the picture, and pretty naive to think that it wasn't a part of this conflict...what about the neighbor who called the police? And then there is the old truism...bad news makes good copy...so there's the whole media sensationalism issue. But, I think mostly, two good folks lost their composure and things got out of hand.

The challenge is, take care of the situation, apologize where necessary, but be careful to not make it into something it probably wasn't.

And, I think the Obama "teaching incident" reference is pretty dead on.

Thanks, Squeak, for such a well thought out, reasoned approach to a very serious issue.

Russ




[This message has been edited by captain Russ (edited 07-28-2009).]