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I live in Amherst, I teach at Amherst College, and have done so for 24 years. I have never been stopped by police on suspicion of anything, except once, a UMASS traffic cop pulled me over because I had illegally u-turned at a light. I got off with a warning. I am a white man, who enjoys all the idiotic privileges that come with that accident of birth.
I have a colleague, an African American woman, a recently tenured professor who has been in Amherst for six years now. She has been pulled over by Amherst, Hadley, and Massachusetts State police close to once a month for the years she has lived here, in this predominantly white, famously progressive and inclusive town.
Those of you who have written suspecting Professor Gates, a 5'7" 150 pound, soft-spoken and deeply dignified man, did something worthy of being handcuffed are at best naive, but naive in the sense that William James once explained, that is to say, viciously naive. (James, for you ignoramuses, was a Harvard psychologist and philosopher of the 19th and early 20th centuries, who lived not too far from the same neighborhood as Professor Gates, but to my knowledge he was never led away in handcuffs,finger-printed, booked, and made to cool his heels for four hours in a police cooler.) Shame on you who point the finger at him. Your hate is showing.
