Gray Area / Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics:
The Gates arrest and its fallout—the infamous beer summit—have turned out to be a lesson in understanding the concept of partial: partial as in incomplete; partial as in biased. Everyone overreacted. I overreacted because I generalized from personal experience. I’d once been pulled over for failing to dim my lights while leaving a parking lot. The deputy shone a flashlight in my face, then into my daughter’s. She was five, in a booster-seat in the back, crying. He said: “Whose kid is that?” I answered, “Mine.” During the next part of the interrogation, I was out of the car and saying the alphabet backward while touching my nose and walking a straight line. “Are you married?” he asked me. I wasn’t, I said, ceasing my recitation, holding my balance steady. “She’s adopted,” I added. I hated saying this. It meant I wasn’t challenging the stereotype—that if I’d once had sex with a black man, I was likelier to be drunk now. But I wanted to go home. The deputy asked where I worked and lived. He looked at my driver’s license a second time to verify my address. “Do you own or rent?” Once we established I was a professor, a homeowner and taxpayer, my daughter and I were on our way.