Shannon Love offers an unusual perspective on the recent teachable moment:
I worked my way through college as a security guard for a company that specialized in security for the campus area of a major flagship university. The area was simply stuffed with the children of the wealthy and connected, most of whom belonged to sororities and fraternities. Most of the security and police work revolved around controlling the excesses of the frats. I got to see how the police had to deal with people quick to claim immunity because of their membership or parentage. I saw how irritated the police got every time they had to talk to one of those little snots.So, when I read the police report on the Gates incident I understood immediately that Gates’s mistake wasn’t “being a black man in America,” it was this:
I then overheard Gates asking the person on the other end of his telephone call to “get the chief” and “what’s the chief’s name?” … Gates then turned to me and told me that I had no idea who I was “messing” with and I had not heard the last of it.I can only imagine how many hundreds of times the Cambridge police have heard some arrogant little snot of a Harvard frat boy utter variants on that same claim to privilege. The Cambridge police also well know that frats only claim privilege when they know they’re in the wrong and they need to weasel out the consequences. When Gates played the privilege card like a frat snot, Officer Crowley immediately suspected that Gates was up to something and was trying to intimidate the officer into backing off and not investigating further.
He was also most likely seriously pissed off.