Not Really About Race: Analyzing the Gates/Crowley Conflict

Source: Gates & Crowley/Wikipedia Commons

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.

Race and Ethnicity Essential Reads

The Impact of Race and Ethnicity on Orgasm

How Parents Talked With Their Children About BLM

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."

Perceiving this "ego clash" similarly to Dowd, I'd like to review and expand on the points I've made above. But this time, I'd like to place them in the context of what I'd call normal human narcissism: the need to feel good about oneself and therefore react strongly to any outside force that threatens this positive sense of self--or essential self-love.

• In the edgy situation between the two men, Gates felt condescended to by Crowley--as Crowley felt talked down to by Gates. Both experienced a "narcissistic insult" that cried out to be remedied, and each individual used whatever resources he had available to right the balance. In retaliation, Professor Gates attempted to intimidate through the force of language; Officer Crowley sought to intimidate through the threat of force.

• Both Gates and Crowley's egos (i.e., their "normal narcissism") required that the other show him respect (if not obeisance). Each needed his authority to be recognized, honored and, hopefully, deferred to. In their particular situation, however, such mutual deference simply couldn't occur, especially since their encounter started out confrontationally. Crowley initiated contact with wariness and suspicion, immediately putting Gates--a man probably as proud as he was innocent--on the defensive. And Gates could hardly help but react contentiously to what he must have regarded as a blatant violation of his privacy.

In this mutual struggle for dignity and respect, it was the armed officer who ultimately held the power and was sufficiently ego-driven to use it. "Pulling rank," he aggressively used his official status to get the respect that Gates, psychologically, wasn't able to give him. Here Crowley was in his professional role as cop, whereas Gates--"off duty," as it were--was just a middle-aged black man with a cane. In a phone interview with Dowd, Gates referred to his being one-down in the situation by noting that here was "a big white guy with a gun. I'm 5'7" and 150 pounds. . . . I don't want another hip replacement."

• "Narcissistic rage" is a term describing the reaction a person may experience when suddenly feeling demeaned or humiliated. That is, underneath their fury is a sense of having been debased. Their deep-rooted need to feel positive about themselves has been endangered by another, whom they can't help but see as denigrating them. In the intense scenario entrapping Gates and Crowley, both of them reacted to the "narcissistic injury" they experienced at the hands of the other by losing control of their more mature, rational self and regressing to a more childlike state of non-empathic self- (or ego) protection. Thus were they catapulted into a mutually blaming, non-conciliatory contest of oneupmanship. (Compare O'Donnell's pithy dramatization above.)

• Both men felt falsely accused, desperately needing to assert themselves over the other--and unable to disallow that urge from taking precedence over all other considerations. Gates felt as though he were being addressed without the slightest respect for an authority he had fully earned, almost as though he were seen as little more than a common felon; Crowley, teaching a class on (or rather, against) racial profiling, felt abused and offended in Gates' repeatedly calling him a racist. Each man's buttons weren't simply pushed--they were pummeled, hammered, battered.

It may be, finally, that all of us, to varying degrees, have a chip on our shoulder. With sufficient provocation we can all turn indignant, then belligerent--particularly if we feel our boundaries have been seriously transgressed. Ultimately, this is what I think happened to both Gates and Crowley. Whatever deeper insecurities, or vulnerabilities, they may have been carrying from their past were awakened, and quickly boiled over into mutual animosity. It's not as though their enmity was merely a personality clash, because I suspect their personality similarities, as much as anything else, were what fueled the conflict between them.

At this point, any genuine emotional reconciliation between the two men (who've already agreed to meet President Obama in the White House for a friendly beer) would require an ability and willingness to compassionately understand each other's viewpoint. Can they empathically enter into each another's subjective world? And can each begin to recognize how their own unresolved issues contributed to the conflict that spiraled so badly out of control? There's a profound lesson for both of them to learn from all of this. And, to be sure, a profound lesson for the rest of us as well--who (consciously or not) have "identified" with this intriguing story as it's unfolded in the media.

And this lesson isn't particularly about racism but about how all of us, with the various provocations we're regularly subject to, deserve--and need--to be treated with dignity, forbearance, and respect. . . . And to treat others that way as well.

Note: I invite readers interested in my writing to follow me on Facebook and on Twitter, which in addition to providing links for just-published posts also includes my (and others') paradoxical psychological and philosophical musings