Gates Arrest a 'Battle of Egos'

Racial profiling may have played a role in the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., but fellow black scholar Boyce Watkins says there's no reason to feel sorry for Gates. At heart, the scene was likely “a battle of two egos,” Watkins writes in the Grio. “What is abundantly clear is that this is NOT the case of a poor black male being exploited by the racist, classist power structure.”

This was a showdown between a Harvard professor who saw a cop as beneath him, and a policeman who apparently thought he could treat a black professor differently from a white one. “The idea that he is somehow the victim of the same racism that sends poor black men to prison simply doesn't fly with me,” Watkins writes. “Gates should be careful about appearing to exploit the plight of black men across America to win his battle of egos with the Cambridge Police Department.”
(More Henry Louis Gates Jr stories.)