Was it the Color of His Skin????? Harvard Professor accused of breaking into his own home...

http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/07/harvard.html

Police say they were investigating a possible break-in... but they arrested this Black man in front of his own home for disorderly conduct in the middle of the afternoon.... what???

Please visit the link above to see the comments people have made. Not everyone believes that racial profiling or racism in any form still exists simply because we have a Black president....

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Harvard professor Gates arrested at Cambridge home

July 20, 2009 12:16 PM Email| Comments (39)| Text size – +

By Tracy Jan, Globe Staff

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation's pre-eminent African-American scholars, was arrested Thursday afternoon at his home by Cambridge police investigating a possible break-in. The incident raised concerns among some Harvard faculty that Gates was a victim of racial profiling.

Gates

Police arrived at Gates’s Ware Street home near Harvard Square at 12:44 p.m. to question him. Gates, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, had locked himself out of his house and was trying to get inside.

He was booked for disorderly conduct after “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior,” according to the Cambridge police log.

Friends of Gates said he was already in his home when police arrived. He showed his driver’s license and Harvard identification card, but was handcuffed and taken into police custody for several hours last Thursday, they said.

Gates, 58, did not return calls for comment today.

The arrest of such a prominent scholar under what some described as dubious circumstances shook some members of the black Harvard community.

“He and I both raised the question of if he had been a white professor, whether this kind of thing would have happened to him, that they arrested him without any corroborating evidence,” said S. Allen Counter, a Harvard Medical School professor who spoke with Gates about the incident Friday. “I am deeply concerned about the way he was treated, and called him to express my deepest sadness and sympathy.”

Counter, who had called Gates from the Nobel Institute in Sweden, where Counter is on sabbatical, said that Gates was “shaken” and “horrified” by his arrest.

Counter has faced a similar situation himself. The well-known neuroscience professor, who is also black, was stopped by two Harvard police officers in 2004 after being mistaken for a robbery suspect as he crossed Harvard Yard. They threatened to arrest him when he could not produce identification.

“This is very disturbing that this could happen to anyone, and not just to a person of such distinction,” Counter said. “He was just shocked that this had happened, at 12:44 in the afternoon, in broad daylight. It brings up the question of whether black males are being targeted by Cambridge police for harassment.”

Cambridge police would not comment on the arrest, citing an investigation into the incident by Middlesex District Attorney Gerard T. Leone Jr. A spokesman for Leone said Gates is scheduled to be arraigned on Aug. 26 and said the office could not provide details on the arrest until that time.

Friends said Gates is being represented by Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree, who has taken on previous cases with racial implications.

Stanford U. / Former Inmates / Humanities

I was back at Stanford in 2007 and 2008 and had no idea that this program exists. How could I not know that Stanford was already doing some of the work I want to focus on???

The actual talk picks up about 10 minutes into the video...

copy and paste this link into your browser:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uJCdJJEirM

Where the heck is the National Slavery Memorial???

Okay so.... why do we not have a national memorial surrounding slavery in Washington DC??? How is it that we can have a national holocaust memorial since 1993 with federal funding but the Slavery Memorial bill was shut down in 2003???

Below is a 2003 article from Capitalism Magazine...... tell me what you think....

An Appalling Idiocy: A Slave Memorial
www.CapitalismMagazine.com ^ | May 28, 2003 | Thomas Sowell

Posted on Wed May 28 19:35:01 2003 by Tailgunner Joe

With the passing years, it becomes ever more painful for me to read the preambles of legislation. Time and time again, the wonderful and inspiring words in those preambles have turned out to have no relationship whatsoever to the actual consequences that followed. The real issue is not what pious words you can come up with, but what incentives are you creating and what are the likely consequences of those incentives.

It is especially painful to read a proposal to create a "National Slave Memorial" on the Washington Mall. Supposedly this memorial will promote "reconciliation" and "healing," according to both the Republican and Democratic supporters of this proposal.

It is hard to imagine that any sane adult actually believes those words. You know and I know that a slave memorial will not reconcile anybody to anybody nor heal any racial divisions. Just the opposite.

A slave memorial is guaranteed to become a magnet for every race hustler from Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton down to any local demagogue who can scare up a crowd to go stand in front of the slave memorial and spew venom at American society on TV. Some reconciliation, some healing!

As for whites, when a proposal was made some years ago by Congressman Tony Hall for a Congressional apology for slavery, so much hostile mail came in that the idea was killed. If a slave memorial is going to inflame both blacks and whites, who is going to be "healed" or "reconciled"?

Anyone whose IQ is not in single digits must know that, once a slave memorial is put on the Washington Mall, it will be politically impossible to remove it. Expediency-minded politicians of both parties may think of a slavery memorial as a cheap way to "throw a bone" to the black community, as someone put it, but it is in fact just a down payment on racial polarization that can cost this country dearly for years to come.

This proposal has bipartisan support in Congress -- as so many other disastrous policies have had. If the Democrats were to propose that all Americans leap off a thousand-foot cliff, moderate Republicans would come up with a compromise proposal that three-quarters of us leap off a 500-foot cliff. The slave memorial is apparently that kind of compromise proposal -- "reparations light," as it were.

None of this is affected in the slightest by whether the sponsors of this legislation are honest and earnest, or by whether their intentions are good or they write an inspiring preamble to the legislation. We all know what road is paved with good intentions. We don't need to have it proven one more time.

This is the kind of low-budget time bomb that can easily sneak into legislation in the last days before Congress adjourns, when everyone is too busy preparing to go home to read all the provisions of the bills they vote on.

The only way to prevent this from happening, either this year or in future years, is for the voting public to inform their Senators and Representatives loud and clear that they do not want any such memorial created by the federal government, whether on the Washington Mall or anywhere else.

Among the pious cant that we are being fed by those pushing this proposal is that a memorial will serve to remind future Americans that slavery was cruel and evil. Most Americans understood that in the 19th century!

What a memorial would do is perpetuate the fraud that slavery was something peculiar to the United States, when in fact it was one of the oldest and most widespread of all human institutions, existing for thousands of years on every inhabited continent, involving people of every race and color as both slaves and slaveowners. Even in the United States, there were thousands of black slaveowners, and in Africa many more.

The United States was one of many Western nations which turned against slavery in the 19th century -- while non-Western nations bitterly resisted efforts by the West to get them to abolish slavery. Only the fact that Western imperialists had more firepower enabled their revulsion against slavery to prevail.

Maybe we should have a monument to historical truth somewhere, though Washington hardly seems the place for it.
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Hopefully the current administration will revisit this issue and correct this blatant disrespect for the memory of Black Slaves and contributions my ancestors made to this country.

- Anndretta

Amusement

Okay so... I went to a theme park over the weekend. Pure joy. The first few rides were like a shock to my system... its been a long time. But by the end I was having so much fun! There's nothing like being up in the air. I love it :) On the very last ride I ended up like six stories high... suspended... above the trees... and then finally swirled down and around an upside down at high speed smiling and shrieking the entire time!

gone too soon

So... like a million other people everywhere I watched the memorial service. I cried several times.

I am still coming to terms with everything I watched because the limitations of mortality are so clear when a life is lost. Another reason to get busy. Starting now.