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guest post by Alvaro Huerta, doctoral student at UC Berkeley

Americans love to claim the death of racism. Conservatives in particular commonly posit that there’s no further need for affirmative action or so-called special treatment of racialminorities in higher education, government jobs and other areas, given the progress made in this country.

As someone who grew up in East Los Angeles housing projects, who attended elite universities--UCLA and now UC Berkeley--I often hear the “end-of-racism” claim in graduate seminars, academic conferences and in the news from conservatives, politicians and average Americans. Now that we’ve elected a black president, conservative political pundits argue racism has been defeated. The nomination of the first Latina to the Supreme Court, the argument goes, represents the end of discrimination in the U.S.

While millions of Americans were finally relieved to put racism in the dustbin of history, washing away all of that whiteguilt from over two hundred years of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation of racial minorities in barrios and ghettoes, white-flight to the suburbs, lack of minorities in higher education and high concentrations of minorities in prisons, here comes black Harvard scholar Henry Loius Gates Jr. to spoil the “victory party."

How dare the 58-year-old, black professor enter his house without a key and allegedly demand the name of the arresting officer? Doesn’t he know that providing proof of employment and residence doesn’t suffice for a black man in a white-dominated university town?

Sarcasm aside, what bothers me most about the national discourse surrounding the arrest of this prominent black man centers on how blame is being equally distributed on both parties, Cambridge police James Crowley and Harvard Professor Gates. If only both parties had acted rationally, many Americans assert, including President Obama after retreating from his assertion that the Cambridge police “acted stupidly,” then this “regrettable” incident could’ve been avoided.

Nothing can be further from the truth.

Based on the information provided to the public, it’s clear to me that we’re talking about an unequal power relation where Crowley abused his power by arresting Gates. On the one hand, we have a white police officer with a gun, with backup at his disposal, while, on the other, we have a 58-year-old black man in his own home, posing a danger to no one.

In addition, a recently released 911 tape shows that the woman caller, Lucia Whalen, stated she was not sure if the two men who forced their way into the house were actually breaking in or just had a problem with a key. Now, if these two men, one described by Whalen as someone who “looked kind of Hispanic” were actually breaking into the house in broad daylight through the front door, why did she patiently wait outside for the police to arrive?

Based on this scenario, the only issue the Crowley needed to resolve was whether Gates actually lived in the yellow house on Ware Street by obtaining proper identification. What was the need for Crowley to call campus police once Gates provided his Harvard ID and driver’s license, something Crowley writes in his police report? His report reminds me of high school bully who goes to the principal’s office and plays the role of victim.

Apparently, Crowley was just “doing his job” and represents a victim of verbal abuse by an elderly black man, claiming that Gates called him a racist and said to him, “Yah, I’ll speak with your mama outside.” For a moment I thought Crowley was talking about the rapper Snoop Dogg and not a respected professor from an Ivy League university.

While I found many contradictions in Crowley’s report, for the sake of argument let’s say Gates called him a racist and launched a “yo mama” joke at him. What kind of country do we live in where you--whether a professor or janitor--can be arrested in your own home for expressing how you feel to an authority figure, despite not posing a threat? Should we then arrest all the conservatives who called Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a racist?

Finally, if Crowley told the truth in this report, why were the charges immediately dropped? This makes no sense. If Gates broke the law, as Crowley maintains without apology, he should be prosecuted regardless of his privileged status as a Harvard professor.

Instead of being invited to drink some beers with Gates, Vice-President Biden and President Obama at the White House, Crowley should be investigated to determine whether he broke the law for filing a false police report and unjustifiably arresting a black man who just happens to be a distinguished scholar, in his own home.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at what happens when you judge too quickly. See his previous OUPblogs here.

In his press conference on July 22, President Obama’s knee-jerk reaction to call what the Cambridge police department did “stupid” was poor form. The president thought he was avoiding the hot spot when asked about the Gates arrest by saying that the controversy offered a “teachable moment.” But having admitted that he had imperfect knowledge of the facts, he went on and assumed that this particular incident invited a lesson about racial profiling and made the very indictment that his conversational segway was intended to avoid. In so doing, Obama confirmed conservatives’ belief that minorities love to whine about their beleaguered status (also another knee-jerk belief, incidentally) even if Obama could have made a case had he marshalled the evidence appropriately. Obama spoke like a liberal before he thought, and that was his mistake.

In so doing, he repeated the same mistake that Professor Gates made. Like Obama, Gates, too, jumped to the conclusion that Sgt Crowley was racist. I do not know if Sgt Crowley acted hastily in arresting the Professor for allegedly exhibiting “tumultous” behavior, so I won’t jump to conclusions but simply note my suspicion that there was probably a contest of egos on both sides. Those who have rushed to Crowley’s defense should ask themselves if they do not also have a knee-jerk reaction to give the benefit of the doubt to a law enforcement officer (or a soldier or a partisan affiliated with the Commander-in-Chief.)

Gates, Obama, and possibly Crowley were not the only people who have been jumping to conclusions, substituting unreflected intuition for a careful weighing of the evidence. Frank Luntz and his political students are encouraging Americans to become thoughtless automatons responding to carefully researched code words like “government takeover” and “health-care rationing.” The issue domain is different, but the error is the same.

It is very difficult to prove racial-profiling, for it demands an investigator to go inside the head of the alleged perpetrator. It is equally difficult to prove that the president’s and Democratic Congress’s plan for a “public option” is a precursor to a completely government-run health-care system. If it is not appropriate to rush to accuse someone of being racist, then it is at least premature to rush to accuse of someone of being socialist (assuming that that is a bad thing).

Those who are accusing Obama and Gates for rushing into judgment should look into the mirror to see if they too have not rushed to conclude that liberals are whiners and socialists who want a government takeover of health-care. At some level, we all have the instinct to cherry-pick the evidence to come to the conclusions we want.

Ideologies, like stereotypes, are cognitive cues or heuristics. They help us to “think” before we get the facts. They allow us to abdicate our duty to make sense of the world with our own independent judgment. They do the easy but intellectually dishonest work of guiding our reactions to the conclusions we want without us having to do the hard work of getting to know a person or a proposed policy before we came to a judgment. The people who are reinforcing such behavior in our politics are destroying our democracy and robbing us of our first freedom - the freedom of independent thought.

So the Gates controversy is a teaching moment, and the lesson is quite simple. Look before you leap; think before you conclude. It is probably the first lesson  of critical thinking, but two professors forgot it last week. If Obama wants us to learn this lesson, he should have been clearer about what the nature of his lapse was. It wasn’t that the president miscallibrated his words - for the question wasn’t about the intensity of what he said, but the very fact that he said something at all. Obama should have apologized for expressing what he felt and intuited without having first perused the evidence. If he had done that, he would have claimed the moral ground to shame some of his opponents in Congress into admitting that they too are doing the same thing in their knee-jerk opposition to what they call “Obamacare.”