<p>Pinkslip, wow, you don’t get it. “Less qualified” is subjective. Harvard receives 30,000 applications a year; let’s say 25,000 of them are from kids who are academically capable.
Their desire is not to rank those 25,000 applications in order from 1 to 24,999 by SAT scores and GPA and pick the top 1,000 Most Smartest Students. Their desire is to craft the most interesting, exciting, diverse, unusual freshman class by picking 1,000 Very Smart students. So just because you got a 3.9 GPA and a 2300 SAT and the black kid down the block has a 3.8 GPA and a 2100 SAT doesn’t mean that you are #900 on the list and he’s #1100 on the list and by golly if he gets in and you don’t, he unfairly usurped your spot. It doesn’t work that way.</p>
<p>Yes, that is exactly what I’m saying. However, my statement above was made within the context of speaking of those individuals who indeed emphatically state that AA is the reason why black students are admitted to elite colleges. I say this about those who are not assuaged by the fact that a given black student’s academic abilities fall comfortably within the statistical margins occupied by non-black students admitted to the same institutions. </p>
<p>I am not assuming that all whites feel this way, given the fact that this thread alone proves they don’t</p>
<p>any person is shocked when their entire accomplished selfhood is reduced to handcuffable flesh. It would be tragic had the professor submitted and cowered, deciding to lay down and protect his comfort without even considering that his accuser might yet see reason. How then could he return to teaching the worth of ideas? Instead a physically unimposing academic risked getting beat up, let his decent rage surface and thereby achieved a heroic public moment. Holy crap!</p>
<p>Please. Obama, as few humans have ever done and ever will do, was able to commandeer the honor and respect of hundreds of millions of people and now commands the greatest military force in the history of mankind. Even if he does nothing else, if that does not mark one of the most exceptional people in human history, then nothing does. You’re simply not thinking here.</p>
<p>Of course this is quite exactly what I have said here for years now. And this bias is not a trivial matter. With medicine, it has power to give life to whites and death to blacks. With personal development, it is the single most important killer of black imagination, intellectual and academic strength, because it begins to assault children even before they can speak, and it suppresses them for the rest of their lives. It does this to rich blacks as well as to poor ones. On the other hand it elevates intellectual imagination for whites and others. They have a remarkable, and false, advantage over blacks. They have always have had it.</p>
<p>In this case, the police officer did his job by the book. If the professor was not satisfied with the situation, he should have filed a complaint with the police station or whatever, not yelled at the officer in the middle of the street. However, the woman who was the good samaritain learned a very valuable lesson. I bet next time, she’ll just mind her own business, and keep going…</p>
<p>^^ Oh my goodness. I marvel that this man was not ashamed at having written such a slavish and un-American piece. He actually thinks Gates’s arrest comes from ‘an unwillingness to defer to massa’ when Gates’s only requirement was to fulfill the basic requests of American law, which he did.</p>
<p>No, the cop did not go by the book. The “book” – i.e., the US Constitution – required him to leave the premises once he ascertained that Gates was the resident, and when Gates told him to go. Instead he violated the law in several ways:</p>
<p>1) He unlawfully demanded that Gates produced ID. Gates was under no legal obligation to identify himself to anyone while in his own home.
2) He appears to have entered Gates’ home without permission. 4th Amendment violation.
3) He arrested Gates without proper cause, because Gates had not violated any laws. Yelling at a cop is not illegal, and is in fact Constitutionally protected speech.</p>
<p>No, it’s not a trivial matter. I am sad to learn that if you were to meet me IRL, Dross, you would automatically assume that I was out to get you, or that I thought you were likely to be a criminal, etc. Just as it is sad to learn that Gates may have assumed that a white cop was out to get home.</p>
I suspect that this is true, which is probably a significant distinction between black and white people in America. A thousand posts back or so there is a very sincere, if cringe-inducingly naive post from a white person stating that they are sure that police officers rarely lie, because they would be caught and punished if they did. A white person can actually believe something like that. I seriously doubt that many adult black people do.</p>
<p>As to the whole AA sub-argument, I feel compelled to repeat my family’s own tale of woe: My daughter (ACT 34, class officer, honor student) and a kid (ACT 30) who had lived in our neighborhood at one time, and whose family we kept in touch with, both applied to Harvard. She was rejected, he was accepted. Of course, we weren’t surprised. After all, she was an affluent suburban white girl, and he was…</p>
<p>[wait for it]</p>
<p>an affluent suburban white linebacker.</p>
<p>The real tragedy, of course, was that he really wanted to go to Boston College, but was rejected there. Apparently you have to be a really, really good linebacker to make that team. Oh, well…</p>
<p>eucalyptus2, according to everything I’ve read, Sgt. Crowley handcuffed Professor Gates as soon as Professor Gates stepped through his door onto his porch. It is possible that he was yelling at the police officer in the middle of the street, but if so, he was handcuffed while he was doing it. Why did you make the comment about yelling in the middle of the street? </p>
<p>The article from the Chronicle of Higher Education is just shameful. I suspect that it was written before some of the information came out, such as the conflict between statements in the police report and the statements of the 911 caller (as well as the tape of her call).</p>
<p>calmom - How can the officer ascertained the professor as a resident of the home, without ID? Anyway, I have NEVER EVER heard of anyone using a crowbar to open their front door. This entire situation looks like a publicity stun to me.</p>
<p>The Constitution is increasingly meaningless, and it is not because of liberals that it loses meaning. Conservatives have already killed the heart and soul of that document. Conservatives complain bitterly that liberals tend to give “special rights” where none exist in the Constitution. But what conservatives obviously do not understand is that this is quite the right thing to do where rights are concerned. The correct aim of genuine philosophical Americans is to allow humans to have as many rights as possible, rights with which we may personally disagree, so long as doing so does not infringe upon the rights of others. This is the American thing to do. Philosophically, the Constitution is not a document that grants rights. It is a document the purpose of which is to restrict the rights of government. There is no requirement to defer to police in the Constitution. There is a restriction on police, however, against their doing what they have done to Gates. Yet conservatives are actually claiming Gates here is wrong. These people actually think of themselves as Americans when in fact they are nothing more than rank statists.</p>
He can stand outside and ask for ID, but if the resident refuses he is out of luck. He needs probable cause to enter the home, and that means he has to be observing something serious, like people in imminent danger in the house. (so if he came to the door and saw a man inside beating up a woman, he could come in). </p>
<p>But without probable cause, if the resident tells him to get lost and refuses ID, then he’s out of luck. The third hand report he got from the dispatcher did not give him probable cause - that would have to come from something he observed himself. So if he observed someone inside doing burglar-type things (like putting all the silverware into a bag) – he would have p.c. to enter to stop a felony in progress. But in this case, he saw a man inside talking on a cell phone. That’s legal conduct. As soon as that man said “I live here” or “this is my house”… it had the legal effect of putting the brakes on the cops ability to take further action without that man’s permission.</p>
<p>Agreed in part, Drosselmeier–I’m not willing to give up the Constitution as meaningless. Instead, I’d like to see careful insistence on people’s Constitutional rights. In addition, I think that the 9th Amendment is often overlooked:
“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
This speaks directly to your point that the Constitution does not grant rights–the people have them, and the fact that they are not specifically listed in the Constitution does not eliminate them. I don’t know a whole lot about James Madison, but this particular amendment was well-crafted.</p>