Law Enforcement, Racism, and Sexual Orientation

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested on his front porch this past week, after police responded to reports from neighbors that an African American male might be trying to break into the house in a wealthy neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Meanwhile, earlier this month, several gay men were detained and harassed by law enforcement officials in Salt Lake City and El Paso simply for kissing.  Both incidents shed light on the fact that the criminal justice system in this country still has a hell of a lot to learn about racism and sexual orientation.

To be clear, the Gates incident and the incidents in El Paso and Salt Lake City are completely unrelated, except for the common denominator of law enforcement professionals acting inappropriately.  For Gates, his arrest has reignited the debate over racial profiling in this country (h/t to change.org's own Matt Kelley for his coverage on this one), and his particular incident certainly raises the question: "Would a white Harvard professor have received the same treatment?"  Sure, the Cambridge Police Department dropped any case against Gates, but the issue of the policeman's professionalism is still surely in question.  How do you arrest one of Time Magazine's most influential Americans without fully making sure you have a proper case to do so?  The answer: racism.

For Salt Lake City and El Paso, the issue of detaining and harassing gay men for kissing raises different, but similar issues regarding the professionalism of law enforcement.  Here, you have police officers and security officers playing "moral" crusaders.  The question of whether straight people would have been detained simply for kissing is a non-starter; the answer is simply, "No," they wouldn't have been.  Particularly troubling for the El Paso case is that the security officers actually tried to cite laws against sodomy that were thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court more than five years ago.

Both incidents showcase law enforcement professionals behaving badly - perhaps not maliciously, but certainly with a heavy hand that seems influenced by bias.  What are the lessons to be learned?

Well, for starters, here's the wrong way to approach these incidents. Richard Nicolazzo, a public relations consultant with the firm Nicolazzo & Associates, had this to say about the Gates arrest:

I think it will end when people stop talking about it, but by Obama surfacing this on a national level ... it gives the story major-league legs and elevates it way beyond a level it should be.

That's a terrible, terrible, terrible view to take on this incident.  Why?  Because it suggests that issues like racial profiling don't merit a larger conversation on a nationwide level.  They do.  Suppressing the Gates incident, or suppressing the anti-LGBT incidents in Salt Lake City and El Paso only do one thing: they bury serious issues with our criminal justice system in the ground, only to resurface in very volatile ways in the future.  The healthy thing to do here is dialogue - both to prevent incidents like these from happening again, but also to give all sides a chance to air their side of the story.

For activists, it's important not to let these moments slip away without exercising a "teachable moment," so to speak.  While the Gates incident is unraveling on a day-by-day basis, it's clear that whether it's the President of the United States or folks hanging out in the local bar, people are talking about this and wondering whether we really live in a post racial America.  And most are coming to the conclusion that we don't.

For the El Paso and Salt Lake City incidents, activists are taking to the streets to point out that gays and lesbians have every right to kiss, show affection, and enter into loving relationships as heterosexual people.  Organizers have launched a Nationwide Kiss-In to highlight these very sentiments, where LGBT people and straight people can stand in solidarity with each other and tell law enforcement officers, "No, you don't have the right to harass or detain queer people simply for kissing a member of the same-sex."  For more information on the kiss-in event, click here.

In the end, these unfortunate incidents demonstrate that no matter how far we've moved from the 1960s and the days of the civil rights movement and the days of the Stonewall Riots, it's still precarious to unjam your front door if you're a person of color, or kiss in a taco joint if you're a gay or lesbian couple.  And until we change these facts, there's still a lot to do in this country to unpack racism and homophobia.