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  1. OK, my take on the Gates situation. I agree with Bxgrl and ENY.

    The Harvard worker SHOULD have recognized Gates. They don’t have that many famous short, bespectacled, middle-aged black professors who live in Cambridge. He’s all over public tv, the news, national forums, tv pundit shows, the works. If not from that, she should have recognized him from events around the university. There aren’t that many short, bespectacled middle-aged black professors at Harvard.

    At best, she should have taken a minute to see what was actually going on. I’ve seen people doing things that looked a bit hinky in the moment, such as trying to open a car door with a hanger. A little observation would reveal shopping bags, a child, an attache case, or panicked behavior that tell me this is the car owner, not grand theft auto. If she had taken a moment, she may have seen Skip’s bags, the livery car the driver pulled up in, or best yet, she could have called a co-worker or 2 over, who may have recognized Gates, and told her who he was, or at least said that they had seen him coming and going into his house before.

    The cops should have swallowed it, and put up with some verbal abuse from a tired, pissed off man with a cane who just came home from a long international trip and had to break into his house. After standing in long customs lines, waiting for luggage and a long ride home, I’d be a bit pissed too. Thank goodness his Caucasian wife wasn’t home, who knows what he’d have been accused of doing besides breaking in? After showing his ID, with his address plainly on it, the cops should have apologized, and left. There was absolutely NO reason for them to have arrested him. Worse case there, they should have stayed at the house and called headquarters the minute they realized they were about to be in a bucket of deep public relations poo.

    Full disclosure, Skip Gates was in grad school when I was an undergrad, and I knew him well, years ago. Scholarship was always his first love, but he never suffered racial indignities well, nor should he. He’s worked hard to get where he is, and it’s a shame that even now, a middle-aged, bespectacled little black man in a suit is assumed to be up to no good, rather than any other scenario possible.

  2. bxgrl, Are you profiling insects? You say they have no feelings? Hmph. I’m calling PETA.

    Btw, an mosquito type insect kept me up half the night…buzzbuzzbuzzz…I killed it! They’re eating me alive this year! Again!

  3. quote:
    Snappy, there are many people on this board, including me, trying their best to interbreed with other races so that in the end there will just be one race, probably a nice mocha color. DIBS hasn’t produced any progeny yet, but his heart is in the right place.

    LOL somewhere out in Ditmas Park, Eloise’s head EXPLODES!

    *rob*

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