Skip Gates: The Ivy League Is Not Real Life

Editor's note: The person who submitted this piece to "This Week in Blackness" published it under the pseudonym "a Phantom Negro" because "Dr. Henry Louis Gates has reach and influence in the academy."

The Ivy League is not real life. College in general is not real life, and the Ivy League is a more fantastic version of college. The amenities are better, the rules are flexible and everyone, student and faculty alike, is well aware that the realities of life as most people know it are merely a peculiar footnote to the day to day of campus life. I do not speak out of turn when I say this. I know because I am in and of that world.

As a Black Ivy Leaguer, something funny happens as you become ensconced in ivy. You’re smart enough to understand that race and racism is a reality, you deal with on a daily basis, but you also know that your university ID sets you apart. Does this mean you are kept from hurtful incidents? No, but it is to say that much of the outrage felt at a racial slight is replaced by outrage at a class slight. Sure; we get pissed, knowing we’re getting hassled because we’re Black, but the real indignation comes from being hassled as members of an elite group. How dare you hassle me? I go to school here. I got to work here. That second part of the thought is always present. I go to school here. I go to work here. When the Ivy League Effect is going full tilt, our Black compass gets confused; the realities we know to exist become other peoples’ problems.

True story: One night, years ago, many of the Black students at school were throwing a party in a dormitory common area when three police officers arrived, flashlights searching the crowd. Nobody moved, nobody left, nobody did anything but keep dancing as three police officers walked through the crowd, flashlights in faces. I didn’t run either. In fact, I wondered if they were chasing someone on foot and wondered if they’d run into the party.

That could only happen in the Ivy League. Three cops come into a party and nobody, surreptitiously or otherwise, made for an exit? It seems like the beginning of a joke. On one hand, you could argue that this is a sign of progress; a sign that we’ve moved past the days of fearing police presence. I say that quasi-luxury is brought on by the muscle backing these students (and, by extension, the faculty) -- the school. All the lessons about dealing with police as a Black person seem to have no place in the Ivory Tower. We can forget those lessons because, more than we’re Black in America, we’re Ivy Leaguers.

Which brings me to Skip Gates. He isn’t outraged because he feels he was the victim of racial profiling by the police (that dubious honor goes to his foolish neighbor). He’s outraged because he was the victim of class profiling. He didn’t resent being identitified as Black; he resented being identified as that kind of Black, the kind of Black that can be hassled and pushed around by simpleton cops. How dare you hassle me? I’m Skip Gates: Harvard professor!

Skip has fallen victim to the Ivy League Effect. Check out his articles–you can definitely go to The Root–the website he is Editor-in-Chief of–if you want to see a repository for the whole masturbatory display. He all but says, “Do I look like that type of (Black) person? I was wearing a blazer and a polo shirt!” Gates is Ivy League pissed with a dash of Black anger. Not the other way around. Is this to say the police weren’t in the wrong? Hardly. As a person is familiar with the Cambridge/Boston PD, the prospect of some procedural malfeasance on their part is entirely believable if not an abject certainty.