Prof. Henry Louis Gates and the Convenient Concoction of Racial Profiling

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

I was not the least bit unamused when the legendary Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was recently shown on television handcuffed by the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police. It was actually the alleged crime for which the man was cuffed that made the resplendent spectacle all the more amusing. Professor Gates had been espied by an elderly white lady neighbor breaking into his own house; naturally, viewing the entire scenario with strikingly plausible and logical suspicion, the woman dialed “9-1-1,” the emergency phone-line used throughout the United States. The suspect would shortly be charged with disorderly conduct, regarding the allegedly crude manner in which the erudite African-American educator conducted himself while in the custody of the Cambridge police.

Fortunately, at the time of this writing, all charges, including that of burglary, had been dropped against the sometime chairman of the Pulitzer Prize Awards Committee. Where I come in, though, regards an incident that happened to me between 2004 and 2005. The Affirmative Action Officer where I teach – I have since learned of his shocking firing via reliable campus sources – and then-cochairman of the African-American History Month Committee, of which I was a member, had invited Professor Gates for a keynote lecture presentation for the Black History Month festivities of February 2005. The former chairman of Harvard University’s African-American Studies Department would promptly decline the invitation, as personally related to this writer by the now-ex Affirmative Action Officer at his school, on the rather curious grounds that my being employed at Nassau Community College inordinately militated against Professor Gates’ presence on the college’s campus.

The explanation of his grounds for declining the invitation from the African-American History Month Committee was that I had written and published a series of articles vitriolically and personally lambasting the distinguished author of “The Signifying Monkey” and “Colored People” for some unspecified and apparently gratuitous reasons in the florid imagination of the renowned Harvard professor. In the telling, therefore, the Affirmative Action Officer, before whose office desk I stood, alarmingly asked whether I fully appreciated the gravity of my “crime” vis-à-vis the nonesuch legendary status of the narrator of the infamous documentary titled “Wonders of the African World.” I promptly responded that, indeed, Professor Gates was one of the few luminaries in the discipline of global African Studies whom I greatly admired but who, unfortunately, in recent years appeared to have inexplicably assumed a decidedly hostile stance towards non-American-born African people and therefore deserved to be promptly and frontally challenged. I also painstakingly explained the gist and objective of my series of articles – thirty parts in all – titled “The New Scapegoats: Colored-on-Black Racism” (iUniverse.com, 2005), which has since been collected into a mini-book of the same title.

In essence, my book, “The New Scapegoats” frankly and poignantly exposes two anti-African stances adopted by Professor Gates over the past decade, namely, that continental Africans, rather than Europeans and European-Americans, both unilaterally instigated and subsequently collaborated with Westerners to callously and massively enslave their fellow Africans; and two, that America’s post-civil rights dispensation, with direct regard to the implementation of Affirmative Action policies and programs were primarily tailored for the exclusive benefit of African-Americans who could directly and forensically claim ancestry from America’s “Plantation South,” and thus it constitutes the flagrant height of abject criminality for mainstream American academic institutions to extend the same favors to Africans of Caribbean and continental African descent. On both counts, as more amply discussed in my book, “The New Scapegoats,” I vehemently refute the “Gatesian” stance by detailing the collective and bilateral – or mutual – scourge that was the massive African enslavement by the West between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries.

What is of direct relevance here, however, is the fact that in declining to do a Black History Month presentation at Nassau Community College for the February 2005 festivities, Professor Gates also, according to the former Affirmative Action Officer, promised to award two annual scholarships to Black Studies majors of my college in order to afford the latter the rare and prestigious privilege of a Harvard education. In not-so-subtle ways, the former Affirmative Action Officer signified the fact that predicated upon the preceding, perhaps, it would not be such a bad idea, after all, to engineer my removal from Nassau Community College in order to guarantee that the college took advantage of such ravishing gesture. The Affirmative Action Officer, who shall remain anonymous, at least for the nonce, also added that the Macarthur Foundation “Genius Award” recipient had also promised my college an undisclosed sum of monetary currency.

Earlier on, I had asked the Affirmative Action Officer to inform the renowned Harvard University professor that since I would be going on a sabbatical leave during the spring semester of 2005, it was highly unlikely that I would be attending Professor Gates’ lecture presentation if the latter decided to rescind his invitational refusal. Needless to say, since 2005, my on-campus existence at Nassau Community College has become more than a “Dantesque Inferno.” I would be brought up on a baseless and forensically unsubstantiated charge of sexual harassment and come close to a proverbial Chinaman’s chance of having my promotion to Associate Professor summarily revoked by the president of my college. I was actually not supposed to know anything about the fact that an emergency conference of all 21 heads of department, or so, at my college had been called in order to solicit enough signatures to have me promptly demoted to Assistant Professor, barely a couple of weeks after having been “heartily” congratulated in a promotion letter by the same president who had personally, and voluntarily, endorsed my promotion. Following directly from the preceding, I would also lose a half-month’s paycheck! I would be informally and privately informed vis-à-vis the latter by the then-faculty union president.

Indeed, it was with the foregoing in the back of my mind that I laughed myself out sillily when in his recent address to the Ghanaian parliament, President Obama beamed proudly and asserted that most Ghanaians resident in the United States were doing epically well. I vividly recall chuckling to myself and wistfully remarking: “Not so fast, Mr. President!”

The point I have been trying to make here is that when Professor Gates protests against getting arrested and cuffed for forcibly breaking into his own home, he protests unnecessarily loudly. The eerily stark fact of the matter is that at another time in a predominantly white neighborhood such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, the author of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man” would have been shot and wasted before the police learned to their utter chagrin, and perhaps even horror, of having slain a “suicidal burglar,” or a man burglarizing his own home. Indeed, it is rather inconceivable that Professor Gates would actually attempt to so sophomorically break into his own home merely because he had either misplaced his keys or could not get the keys to open the main door into his house, and expect no eyewitnesses to call in the police, simply because he is Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the world-renowned Harvard University scholar and anti-African hatchet filmic documentarian.

Indeed, what the Piedmont, West Virginia, native ought to do now is thank his stars for being resident in such a neighborly neighborhood, and come off his rather bratty bluff of exploring the “remote” possibility of suing the Cambridge police. Professor Gates also says that he is considering filming a documentary on “racial profiling.” I hope that his latest, apparently self-inflicted contretemps is not the basis of such a documentary.

*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. ###