Much has been written about Henry Louis Gates Jr., a prominent black Harvard professor, and his being charged with disorderly conduct by Sergeant James Crowley (a charge later dropped). So far the media has focused on what (on the surface at least) appeared to be a Cambridge, Mass. arrest motivated primarily by racism. Carefully examining the emotional dynamic between these two inflamed individuals--equally ensnared in a tense and trying situation--I'd like to offer a fairly detailed psychological explanation for what transpired that fateful day. Hopefully, this account will shine new light on this unfortunate, and highly controversial, conflict, a clash that got so out of hand not so much because of racism but because the two men involved both had strong wills--and strongly threatened egos.
The core details of the conflict are simple enough. Returning from a trip to China, Gates and his driver found the front door of his home stuck and tried forcibly to open it. A neighbor suspecting a burglary in progress called the police. By the time an officer, Sgt. James Crowley, arrived at the scene, Gates has already gotten in through the back door and was in his home calling Harvard maintenance to get his front door fixed (it had at this point been pried open). Inside his house, a confrontation quickly developed between Gates and Crowley. And then, taken outside, the verbal hostilities escalated to the point that Crowley arrested Gates, putting him in handcuffs for what the officer later reported as "loud and tumultuous behavior in a public place" (i.e., Gates' porch!).
Now let's look at the situation, both intrapsychically and interpersonally, to better appreciate what most likely happened between policeman and professor to cause such an unruly scene.
To me, the defining elements in this case involve the closely related issues of status and authority. Unquestionably, there's a great deal of status associated with being a Harvard professor, just as a police officer (if only by dint of his uniform and license to carry a weapon) can hardly help but experience himself also as someone of substantial power (i.e., a person to be reckoned with). So--seen man-to-man--the situation had a "something's got to give" quality to it.
According to Crowley's police report, Gates initially refused to provide him with ID. And, psychologically, it would hardly be surprising if Gates--in his own home and implicitly experiencing it as his castle--bristled at having to validate his identity when he was innocent of the slightest wrongdoing. Moreover, having just gone through the very stressful experience of being shut out of his house, he might well have been in an irritable state of mind, one easily exacerbated by a policeman's demanding that he prove he was who he said he was--and, additionally, entering his home uninvited.
In Gates' version of events (offered in an interview), after he showed Crowley the requested ID, he felt within his rights to ask Crowley for his own. According to Gates, he repeatedly asked for the officer's name and badge number, and it was Crowley who resisted, essentially refusing to provide what Gates had already provided him.
Can you get the picture here? Grasp the essence of this escalating power struggle: the verbal dueling to demonstrate who had more authority, whose stance was more moral, justified, and righteous? The almost macho competitiveness of the two men should be evident--each of them feeling aggressively challenged by the other, and each of them feeling compelled to assert an authority equally felt as fully "earned." Certainly, Professor Gates was an authority, and fully recognized as such in his role at Harvard. Officer Crowley may not have shared his superior intellect but nonetheless had substantial legitimate power vested in him by being an officer of the law.
Clearly what was going on here was a battle of wills. And in the jousting of the two men the proverbial pen was shown not to be mightier than the sword. For when Crowley was verbally unable to subdue Gates, his sense of losing control over the situation must have led him to feel desperate. And in such an enraged state, he apparently found it irresistible to counter his opponent's "vocal authority" by declaring the professor now under arrest, "victoriously" putting him in handcuffs.
Once egos get involved and neither individual feels he can afford to back down (without, that is, looking weak, submissive, or defeated--both to himself and his antagonist), things can't help but turn nasty. For, as it were, "Now, it's personal!"--the point at which calmer heads and compassionate hearts not only can't prevail but are in fact "missing in action."
Having a clinical specialty in anger management, I know that if anger, ironically, helps you feel in control, it's unlikely you'll be able to control that anger. In this instance, both men were obviously feeling a serious loss of control. Gates, experiencing an officer as invading his home and expressing doubt over whether he was the legal occupant--even entertaining the notion that he might be a black burglar--would have felt a keen threat to his sense of security, pride, and personal power. (According to Gates, without permission Crowley walked into his house and followed him when he walked off to locate the ID he was ordered to show the officer.) On the other hand, Crowley would have experienced a threat to his own, lawfully conferred power when Gates resisted acting in a cooperative, compliant manner. Even worse, to Crowley, Gates maligned him as a racist, and the officer had actually been chosen by a black police commissioner to teach a course in racial profiling, which he'd been co-instructing since 2004--apparently priding himself on educating academy students on the even-handed application of the law.
Even after the charge of "disorderly conduct" was dropped by the County district attorney's office, Crowley refused to apologize for his actions--particularly since, as I believe, his impulsively acting out his displeasure with Gates' attitude really wasn't motivated by racism. And Crowley certainly wouldn't have wanted any apology on his part to suggest otherwise.
It's interesting that when President Obama was under considerable pressure to modify his original statement that the police had acted "stupidly" in arresting Gates, his second statement expressed the more measured opinion that both men may have "overreacted" in the situation. Which to me is an accurate depiction of what actually took place. That is, almost by definition, we all overreact when we get our buttons pushed-when we're momentarily enchained by our emotional, not rational, mind. And the evidence I've examined in the case supports the notion that both men fell victim to an ego virtually in a panic to vindicate itself through attacking and invalidating the other. But whereas the professor may have fought the battle with carefully selected derogatory words, the officer ultimately won it with three words sufficiently powerful to trump anything Gates might possibly say to him: namely, "You're under arrest!"--in effect, resorting to the ultimate (however primitive) authority of "might makes right."
Here's how Lawrence O'Donnell, Jr. summed up the entire scenario for Time:
GATES: You're not the boss of me!
CROWLEY: I am the boss of you.
GATES: You are not the boss of me!
CROWLEY: I'll show you. You're under arrest.
To O'Donnell, the real "criminal" in all this was Crowley, whom he sees as committing a false arrest, pulling rank over Gates in a totally unprofessional way.
I prefer, however, to focus less on who the guilty party was than on the situation itself--which, unfortunately, seems to have been perfectly contrived to bring out the very worst in both men. Maureen Dowd's editorial for The New York Times agrees with Obama's (and my) assessment by observing that "two good people got snared in a bad moment." The author then alludes to their sharp "clash of egos"--a clash, as she says, between "the hard-working white cop vs. the globe-trotting black scholar . . . [and] the Lowell Police Academy vs. the American Academy of Arts and Letters."
