I’ve been  thinking about this whole thing and wondering, is it really a race issue or is it a class issue ?

I don’t know the background of the officer involved, but if he’s a Boston area police officer the odds are he grew up in a middle or working class home, probably a blue collar neighborhood. He probably did not grow up in an upper class family. This is not to look down on him in any way, simply it’s a likely background for most police officers in the Boston area.

Now he’s working in Cambridge, dealing with what might generically be called ‘the Harvard class’. The upper crust students who, in many cases, grew up in wealthy homes are all around. The professors are also largely elitist in their attitude. Again this is not to denigrate them, it’s just how most of them grew up or have evolved.

So every day this hard working cop has to deal with spoiled rich kids and elitist faculty types. Then he has someone say ‘do you know who I am’, implying he has special rights based on his status.

I could easily see this as a class issue, and if Gates had been an albino the same thing would have happened.