"I’m saying ‘You need to send someone to fix my lock.’ All of a sudden, there was a policeman on my porch. And I thought, ‘This is strange.’ So I went over to the front porch still holding the phone, and I said ‘Officer, can I help you?’ And he said, ‘Would you step outside onto the porch.’ And the way he said it, I knew he wasn’t canvassing for the police benevolent association. All the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, and I realized that I was in danger. And I said to him no, out of instinct. I said, ‘No, I will not.’

My lawyers later told me that that was a good move and had I walked out onto the porch he could have arrested me for breaking and entering. He said ‘I’m here to investigate a 911 call for breaking and entering into this house.’ And I said ‘That’s ridiculous because this happens to be my house. And I’m a Harvard professor.’ He says ‘Can you prove that you’re a Harvard professor?’ I said yes, I turned and closed the front door to the kitchen where I’d left my wallet, and I got out my Harvard ID and my Massachusetts driver’s license which includes my address and I handed them to him. And he’s sitting there looking at them.

Now it’s clear that he had a narrative in his head: A black man was inside someone’s house, probably a white person’s house, and this black man had broken and entered, and this black man was me.

So he’s looking at my ID, he asked me another question, which I refused to answer. And I said I want your name and your badge number because I want to file a complaint because of the way he had treated me at the front door. He didn’t say, ‘Excuse me, sir, is there a disturbance here, is this your house?’—he demanded that I step out on the porch, and I don’t think he would have done that if I was a white person.

But at that point, I realized that I was in danger. And so I said to him that I want your name, and I want your badge number and I said it repeatedly."
Skip Gates Speaks

By now you have heard about the case of Henry Louis Gates Jr, who was arrested in his house not under the original suspicion of breaking and entering his own home but because he dared to ask the white police officer for his ID and police badge.

I can't tell you how many times, even when I was pregnant, I was harassed by a cop who wouldn't identify himself nor show me his badge. When did this happen? When did it become OK for police officers to cover their badges and refuse to identify themselves when they come into any contact with a civilian? Especially when a person of color asked them to identify themselves? When the WHITE MAN who happens to be the father of my children has asked the same, the police officers have obliged.

And people who tell me that if we will things, they will become true are shocked when call it all a crock of shit; especially when the "power of positive thinking" involves describing the United States as a "post-racial" America.

It didn't matter that Cambridge has a black mayor. It didn't matter Massachusets has a black governor. It didn't even matter that we have a black man in the white house. We haven't willed a post-racial America by thinking about "Hope" and "Change".

A senior police officer who had a Latino as his rookie, made the decision to arrest a black man in his own home because he asked him for his ID and badge after said policeman not only invaded the man's home but refused to accept as true the Harvard ID he gave him to prove he was Henry Louis Gates Jr.

I have tons to say about what happened between Skip and the white officer (a James Crowley, if you need to know). Yet am more interested in the power dynamics created by the report of the Latino officer, Carlos Figueroa.
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Seems rather convenient for the governor to have had our Alaskan friends release the abuse of power investigation way past 5pm EST on a Friday. And it's a 263-page report at that!

It looks like a mixed bag of findings. Palin didn't break labor laws when she decided to reassign the then Public Safety Commissioner, Walt Monegan, as retaliation for his insubordination. Of course, her camp is spinning it as a decisive victory for her.

Yet the report does say she broke ethics laws by abusing her executive power. In her case though was her inability to reign in her husband's "inappropriate efforts" in trying to get their ex-brother in-law fired
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So let me get this straight : The US had 750 billion dollars to bail out Wall Street; a sector of the US economy which has been historically controlled by "white" or US Americans of European ascendancy. The US Congress found 750 billion dollars for them and their European and Asian investors. A bailout, by the way, that now said banks are pooh-poohing, lest the US Treasury and tax-payers find out the depths of their accounting infamies. Yet there's no money to pay back reparations to African Americans for the evils of slavery and Jim Crow laws?

Discuss.

[A scene from the movie Birth of a Nation (1915). Image found in Wikipedia under "Lynching in America")

And allegedly, out of spite, voted against the bail out. Of course, Barney Frank offers them a hug and a kiss :

Give me those twelve people's names, and I will go talk uncharacteristically nicely to them, and tell them what wonderful people they are, and maybe they'll think about the country.

LOL!

That said, I still think this bill was a crock of horse effleurage. We the people of the United States deserve to be better informed about this fiasco. George Bush's 14 minutes on TV didn't do it. Paulson's screaming "the markets are falling" didn't do it. Certainly the non-answers I got from my Senators and US Congresswoman didn't help either --they seem to have been characteristic of most of Congress communication skills.
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The freedom loving sheriff of Denver aided and abetted by the city's major, has created a detention pen full of cages just in time for the DNCC. The place is not even a correctional facility --it's is cages inside an abandoned warehouse with no visible water, bathrooms, ventilation or access to phones and lawyers.

Oh, did I mention this detention place full of human cages was supposed to be a secret?

Denying due process to people without US citizenship, residency papers, green cards or a visa is becoming a business racket for private prisons and private security (aka paramilitary) companies.

The more people are thrown into those jails, the more money the concentration camps make.

Welcome to the new American economy.

h/t American Humanity