Skip Gates: The Ivy League Is Not Real Life

By Anonymous , This Week in Blackness. Posted July 27, 2009.

But I’m also sure, the good doctor was talking some shit. The Ivy League Effect, when it’s potent, wouldn’t allow otherwise. It made Gates forget that, no matter what, even when you’re right, you don’t talk shit to the police. And that’s not a matter of manhood or pride; it’s a question of survival. Why? Because you’re Black before you’re a Harvard professor. Because, in an extreme case, you can’t tell your side of the story if you get shot reaching for your ID. As a Black man and a Harvard professor, Gates’ thought process should have been: “Wow. I am so thoroughly pissed right now. When this current situation is resolved and am out of harm’s way, I’m going down to the station and I’m going to use my considerable influence to make heads roll. But right now, I need to be the smart one, remember all the details and not give him any reason to escalate this situation.” That’s what any of my fellow colleagues have done, guns drawn on them at night in the middle of campus by the police. They didn’t get loud; they got smart. They diffused the situation, then got pissed and did something about it. And I assure you, they did so with much less juice than Dr. Gates.

I remember when I heard about the story, I couldn’t help but think: Wow, that Ivy League Effect has washed out his healthy fear of the police. Yikes.

Can he be outraged? ABSOLUTELY. The circumstance should outrage any person that happened to. But why is he outraged? Because he didn’t think the Black Tax applied to him anymore. In his mind, he was Skip Gates, well-regarded Harvard professor who was being treated poorly in his home by the police. Believe me, if this took place at North Carolina State his sense of indignation would be far different and his ability to garner attention would be much less. And if he was just a working-class stiff? Forget it.

But this didn’t happen anywhere else. It happened in Cambridge on Ivy turf and now, his story has taken on Paul Bunyon-esque qualities. If you didn’t know better, you’d think a lynch mob was waiting outside Gates’ door with the rope and the hitching wagon before Ving Rhames came along and saved the day.

Skip Gates thought that he’d worked hard enough, achieved enough, become Harvard enough that this sort of treatment did not apply to him. And now, rather than channel that outrage in a such a way that is subtle but effective, he’s very publicly suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, having ‘joined the ranks of the million incarcerated Black men in America.’ That’s laughable. He does not see those million men as kin and he doesn’t, by and large, give a damn about those guys. He’s merely annoyed that such an annoyance as police misconduct found its way into his home. If he read about this story happening to a plumber in Roxbury, he’d shake his head in disappointment and then go on with his life.

So before we heed the call of racism, let’s be mindful of the tower from which that call came. This has something to do with race. But it as a lot more to do with messing with Skip Gates.

The Ivy League Effect, people. The Ivy League Effect.

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