Inside Harvard's Gates

As racial theorists like to say, “it’s all about context.” Well, here is some recent Harvard context which may be illuminating. I will let readers debate and decide.

Two months ago, a young African American man was shot by (allegedly) another African American man in the basement of Kirkland House, a Harvard campus dorm. Neither was a Harvard student.

Text messages sent by the victim, along with a pound of marijuana and approximately $1000 found with his body, suggest that he was a drug dealer. The alleged shooter, up from New York, was (and possibly remains?) the long term boyfriend of a Harvard co-ed. Meanwhile, a second female student, who was suspected to have given the shooter a Harvard access card and had past disciplinary problems, was banned from campus and denied graduation with her class. All of which, of course, roiled the campus and inflamed racial tensions.

The second female student told the Boston Globe, “I do believe I am being singled out… The honest answer to that is that I’m black and I’m poor and I’m from New York and I walk a certain way and I keep my clothes a certain way… It’s something that labels me as different from everyone else.”

Blackplanet.com reported it this way:

This isn’t the first time the university has been accused of racial profiling. Since the murder, black students have reported receiving extra scrutiny.

“Lately I’ve definitely been getting some interesting looks from white people, security guards and other security personnel,” said Malcolm Rivers, a black Harvard student… “As a black man on campus, you understand that that’s part of the territory… People are going to be like, ‘These girls brought the hood with them.'”

These fresh events may not have contributed to Gates’ behavior with Officer Crowley. Nor, clearly, would they provide any justification for treating Professor Gates, or any other Cambridge African American citizen, with suspicion. And I don’t believe they did.

But they may help explain why during Henry Lous Gates’ CNN town hall meeting, young African American students were eager to reclaim their status as victims of pervasive racism — particularly in a law enforcement context. This story also, of course, complicates the “narrative” of race at Harvard in some uncomfortable ways for those who do the narrating.