Harvard’s Professor Gates and the Cambridge Elitists

There has been some discussion of the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at his own home for “disorderly conduct,” when he apparently locked himself out on return from a trip to China. It seems to be a case of two people getting carried away in a situation and that, while Gates should have shown his ID when asked by the officer, he shouldn’t have been arrested. The Boston Herald’s Peter Gelzinis has a piece on that here, as does the Herald’s Joe Fitzgerald here.

The Herald also has an article on Gates’s rush to label the cop’s behavior as racist. And now, the Rev. Al Shrapnel is getting involved. At this point we can be assured that it is just another example of what is known as typical Harvard Elitist craziness. And the mayor of Cambridge is joining others in saying how racist the city is. Well, they’re sort of right. Cambridge is where the real racists are, the ones obsessed with race, who conclude racism when anything controversial happens. Dr. Sanity has a great blog on the paranoia of the Left, referring to how so many in our culture are fixated in group victimhood. I would like to know if Prof. Gates has any empathy for the neighbor who was concerned, or for the cop who was responding to a possible burglary and trying to do his job. And, would Gates have shown his ID when first asked if the officer had been African-American?

This whole thing reminds me of another elitist Cambridge fiasco from the late 1980s, in which a private school, the Commonwealth Day School, which would see a 90% Black student population, was the victim of Brattle Street major league NIMBY rich snobs. Among the signers of the petition to get rid of the school were cooking queen Julia Child, local PBS head David Ives and Harvard Law Professor Lawrence “Lost” Tribe (as the Herald’s Howie Carr would call him). This archived National Review article on that whole situation is a must

Julia Child (Wikimedia Commons)

read if you really want an idea of who these Harvard-Cambridge elitists really are.

Now, I have told this about a thousand times, but,  I’ve been living in the greater Boston area for many years, and I would go into Harvard Square  all the time in the 1980s and 90s. But I haven’t been there for at least 10 years now, I wouldn’t dare. All those activists, and punks, and weirdos. And that’s just the Harvard faculty hanging out there. That’s why I now call it “Harvard Scare.” And I’m not kidding about that.

Harvard Square (Wikimedia Commons Photo)

They’re nuts there at Harvard University. Don’t send your kids there–they’ll get a much higher quality education at UMass Boston or UMass Amherst. At Harvard all they’ll get is brainwashing, or attempted brainwashing. And some of those Harvard Square activists are really way out there, like those “anti-vivisectionist” people.

On a local talk show a few years ago, Alan Dershowitz described himself as the “right-wing conservative of Harvard,” so I’m not surprised about this nutty situation.