Huh?

There was an incident in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this week that almost brought Al Sharpton to town.  He still may show up.  A Harvard Professor, Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr., was returning home from a trip only to discover his key did not work in the lock on his door.  Mr. Gates and his driver attempted to strong arm to door to get inside Mr. Gates' house.  A neighbor, seeing the activity and not recognizing Mr. Gates as the resident of the house, called the police.  The police showed up and checked id.  Evidently at this point Mr. Gates became verbally abusive to the policeman for not recognizing who he was.  That resulted in charges against Mr. Gates.  The police have since dropped the charges in an attempt to insert sanity into the situation.  Frankly, I think most of us would appreciate the police investigating a call saying that someone was breaking into our home.

According to an article in today's Boston Herald:

"As it turns out, there won't be any need for Rev. Al to exploit the incident on Ware Street, because Skip Gates has decided he's going to create a full-length documentary for PBS based on his arrest.

"The idea never crossed my mind," Gates told The Washington Post yesterday, "but it has now."

I expect the documentary will soon be prefaced by Skip's 10,000-word treatise in The New Yorker.

Exploitation can assume many forms - including Skip Gate's sudden decision to train his historian/journalist eye on the subject of racial profiling. Obviously, there's no need to ask why he wasn't moved to make such a documentary before yesterday."

I'm really sorry this is the caliber of the instructors at one of America's most prestigious universities.