I do not know what really happened because I was not there but I have a feeling the black dude has chip on his shoulder being a successful black man and academic and mouthed off to the cop in a cocky manner and the cop did what he would have done to anyone who was out of line in a situation like this...black or white.
It\'s been fun living in Cambridge for all of this! Today for my run I ran past the professor\'s house for shits and giggles.
I\'m very left politcally and I don\'t generally like cops. BUT I gotta go with my gut on this one. And my gut tells me that Mr Professor got way too brash with the cops because
1. He\'s a black intellectual whose very profession is to have a political agenda all day every day and
2. He was just coming home from a 16 hour flight, which would leave anyone tired and irritable.
And maybe Mr Popo was having a bad day too. Certainly it\'s all a case of two men meeting up on a day when they should not have met up.
I can\'t believe I\'m taking the right-wing approach on this, but something tells me Mr Professor had it coming. I guess he just seems a little nuts because the first thing he did was speak about the oppression of the black man by law enforcement as if it\'s still the 1960\'s and all the world is the deep south, or as if he were living in South Central in the 80\'s.
Bro, your arrest in Cambridge, MA in 2009 is not symptomatic of some sweeping epidemic of oppression against black people. I\'m sure racist stuff still happens but nobody\'s buying this oppression business anymore. It\'s 2009 not 1849. The goddam President and the governor of your state are both black. Here\'s what really happened: You were tired and irritable, you got in a cop\'s face because your entire life centers around spouting political agenda, and you probably forgot what racism is like because it is nonexistant in Cambridge. So as soon as a cop asked you some questions even though you weren\'t doing anything wrong, you stupidly assumed his actions were race-driven and flew off the handle. In so doing you
1. Got yourself arrested
2. Caused a national mess
3. Baited the President into making an ass out of himself and
4. Totally trivilized the plights of your fellow black men who really
were oppressed by cops, like Amadou Diallo and Rodney King. If everyone starts crying racism wolf the way you just did, racism is gonna come back in a huge way because nobody will believe it\'s happening when it really happens.
And that, my friends, is the most right-wing shit I have ever written! But that\'s how I feel about it!
