Reply #19: "Missed it by *that* much..."

[LooseWilly]

As a fellow English Major, I thought you'd appreciate a quote...

Here's another... and the point where I think your piece "went off the rails"

Every day, minorities are hassled even more than white people are. I get it. But the Gates incident was not one of those occasions. It does a disservice to the real incidents to try to compare the Gates incident to the others. Gates....a wealthy Harvard professor, is not a young black man dressed in hip hop fashion who is hassled daily by the police. Not even close. Gates just flew off the handle, and the way I see it, thought he was too important to have to comply with a working person's request, and of course, he no doubt has some trauma from his experiences as a young man, that he revisited on this new person who was doing nothing more than his job.

Specifically, the "Gates....a wealthy Harvard professor, is not a young black man dressed in hip hop fashion who is hassled daily by the police." sentence suggests the "template" of the minorities that "are hassled even more than white people are"... which you apparently "get"... as in acknowledge the truth of.
However, as you go on in the paragraph, you juxtapose this "template" with Dr. Gates... "the way I see it, thought he was too important to have to comply with a working person's request". I can't help but notice the adjectives you chose "he thought he was too important", and "a working person's request". I'm sure you realize that those choices of adjectives load your statement with implications... and create a classist opposition, which is liable to falsely, in my opinion, lure those who "self identify" as "not wealthy" into feeling obligated to side with Crowley against the "rich oppressor" Dr. Gates.

If you are going to try to reframe the whole incident in a "class warfare" frame, the least you could do is honestly and explicitly construct and point out the frame. The way that you have done it in this piece, on the other hand, suggests an insincerity of motive on your part which leads me to suspect that, for whatever underlying reason, your whole OP is actually a rather artfully constructed rationalization to justify a distaste you have for black people being wealthy.
Contrast your choice of adjectives to describe Dr. Gates with your descriptions of rich white people:

Ava Gabor, another rich person who thought she could treat a lowly working officer disrespectfully by slapping him, found herself arrested. As did Mel Gibson, Robert Downey Jr., Sean Penn, and a whole host of rich white people.

I notice that, while you do use the "treat a lowly working officer disrespectfully" set of adjectives to describe Ava Gabor's behavior, you don't actually go so far as to also assert that she thought she "was too important to have to comply", and as for the rest of them, there's nary a single word to disparage their uprightness of character.

Seeing all that, I think you might want to re-consider what it is about the furor over the arrest of Dr. Gates that is really bothering you...