Gates is of an age where everything, all his experiences and perceptions, are filtered through a lens of Jim Crow. Men and women of his generation see boogeymen where they don't always exist. It really is something an anglo saxon white person cannot ever relate to.
The whole Gates affair really does serve as a teachable moment in this way: Black American's can see and experience the incident being treated fairly. The psyche needs generational experiences of fairness to errase all that has transpired of unfairness. In short, the black man is not only suspicious and angry, but lacks a national conscience of institutional fairness...it's happening and I really believe that every time something like this happens is healthy.
A young man I know explained it to me this way: A black man goes into a store to buy something and the clerk is rude to him. He has to filter that rudeness through his brain and ask "was she rude to me because I am black, or because she is just rude or having a bad day?" Being white we generally never have to filter that kind of thing.
I can hear what you're saying but growing up in the Boston area it was very obvious that The Irish were supposed to hate the Italians and The Italians were supposed to hate the Jews and they were all supposed to hate the blacks. I knew that I could only travel so far, either way, on the Orange Line.
We had a black family living across the street and the boy was 5 years older and huge compared to me as a ten year old riding a high riser. One day he stopped me, grabbed my bike and threw it across the street because 'you're a damn whitey'.
As an Irish - German with a Jewish sounding name I was called a "Jew" by some girl in High School, after she had ran up behind me and kicked me full-force in the back of the thigh.
When I drove a motorcycle I had the gate guard to my parent's neighborhood on Cape Cod tell me to "turn that thing around and get the hell out of here" before I could loosen the chin strap on my helmet.
I used to carry my helmet with me instead of leaving it on the bike and with that, my leather "pilot" jacket and trimmed beard I got disrespect from many a store clerk, as well as nasty looks from many folks on the street.
I had several people try and run me off the road because I was riding a motorcycle. One guy did it twice in the span of two weeks.
When I was in college I saw an old high school teammate one night in a bar and gave him a friendly shove on the back. He turned around and in some ghetto voice that he didn't have when I knew him he told me to 'get my white ass away from him'.
I had two local kids from New York follow me for 20 miles on the New York State Thruway yelling 'Boston sucks and we're going to kill you', presumably because I had Mass plates and had the nerve to pass them on an eight lane highway.
I was coming back home from helping a friend build an addition on his house and decided to stop in the mall on my way back and buy my wife some earrings for our anniversary. I had on some grungy clothes and couldn't get a clerk to talk to me.
Gates need to figure out what I figured out by age ten.