Q: What do you call a black man with a PhD? 
A: Nigger.

Q: Where do liberal white people go to socially die?
A: Cambridge
These two jokes come to mind when contemplating the horrific Skip Gates arrest.   The Harvard scholar was handcuffed on his own property, having been accused as a thief.

The first joke reveals an age-old truism:  All the credentials in the world do not protect black men from the actions of certain racists.

The second joke, well - that's the New York take on Cambridge.   My friend Chester, a hip, white architect who had a cushy professorship at Harvard's graduate school, nevertheless fled Cambridge, since he feared he would die of either boredom or conformity.  Chester complained that Cambridge's upscale, vanilla lifestyle would condemn him to a life-sentence of smug liberal orthodoxy.   Chester noted that Cambridge is the most socially conservative politically liberal bastion in America: The town's p.c. doctrinaire ways of thinking and living - oh, the dull dinner parties discussing The Nation -- have a decidedly conservative and stifling effect.  

"Cambridge is where fancy white people go to spiritually die," Chester likes to say.

Having lived in Cambridge for six months in the mid-1990s, and visited several times in later years, I have similar opinions of Cambridge.

Liberals in Cambridge, in my experience, like to make big statements about improving the status of black people.  But they don't have much use for ordinary blacks themselves.  Hands down, Cambridge is one of the most racially hostile places I've ever lived.

And I am not exactly imagining things. 

Sudhir Venkatesh, the William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, and bestselling author of Gang Leader for a Day, named Boston, in 2008, "America's Most Racist City":

"The city puzzled me. I knew about the strong liberal sentiment among the populace, but I didn't have to look far to see that racism was part of its historical core. For example, school integration was violently resisted by many of its white ethnic residents. In sports, the city has been home to some of the most extreme forms of racism -- check out Howard Bryant's terrific book, Shut Out, in which he explores the longstanding bigotry in the Red Sox baseball organization."

A paradox reigns: Next to the racism of the Tom Yawkey Red Sox syndicate is the forward-thinking, inclusive racial legacy of Red Auerbach's Celtics.

Even sports expose the two faces of Boston.
Cambridge was ranked "The Most Liberal City in America" by a 2005 study.  Residents even call it "The People's Republic of Cambridge." 
Gates's arrest revives Cambridge's, and greater Boston's, two faces: the bastion of liberalism and the fortress of prejudice.  After all, Cambridge's mayor, E. Denise Simmons, is a black woman who even grew up there.  Before that, Cambridge was the first city to elect an openly gay black man as mayor, Kenneth Reeves.  What gives?
Aggravating Boston's racial turmoil, of course, are class divides.   The Cambridge police force that arrested Skip Gates is charged with keeping the upscale enclave "safe" from some decidedly downscale neighborhoods nearby.   Wealthy communities abutting poor ones often produce a class anxiety that borders on paranoia. Gates' white neighbor who failed to recognize him works at Harvard magazine.  This "neighbor" so evidently suffers from said class anxiety, at least as much as racism.    Such community anxiety - every "outsider" is a suspect - often demands "tough" policing, which curdles into abusive policing.

Poor Skip Gates.  He likely experienced some racial profiling.  
But the less discussed problem: how poor people, and perceived outsiders like Gates, get abused in a mini Police State where the wealthy get to write and enforce all the rules.  

Frank Ricci just wanted to ace his firefighters exam.

He rallied to overcome dyslexia and  "several learning disabilities." He spent more than $1,000 to purchase study materials and to pay his neighbor to read them on tape to him.  And never mind the 8 to 13 hours a day he studied to prepare for the test.

The white firefighters Supreme Court decision generates far more media buzz and public interest than the other 33 cases decided by the Court since May of this year.

First, the heroic status of firefighters after 9/11 is only growing.

Add the mounting pique of perceived racism against whites to our fascination with firefighters and you get the picture why Ricci v. DeStefano pops with such notoriety.

In 2003, 118 firefighters took examinations required for promotion to lieutenant or captain in the city of New Haven.

The city hired an independent consultant (at $100,000) to design the exam for each position.  Each exam had 100 multiple-choice questions, written below a 10th grade reading level.  The exams used hypothetical situations designed to test incident-command skills, firefighting tactics, interpersonal skills, leadership, and management ability, among other things. Under the contract between New Haven and the local firefighters' union, the written exam counted for 60 percent of a firefighter's score and the oral exam 40 percent. An applicant had to earn 70 percent in order to pass.
 
When the firefighters took the exam, only eight lieutenant and seven captain positions were open. Such promotion examinations are offered infrequently, so firefighters felt the stakes were high.
 
77 firefighters took the lieutenant exam (43 whites, 19 blacks, and 15 Latinos).  Only 34 firefighters passed (25 whites, 6 blacks, and 3 Latinos). According to the existing rules, the top ten performers were eligible for immediate promotion. All 10 are white.

41 firefighters took the more prestigious captain exam (25 whites, 8 blacks, and 8 Latinos).  22 candidates passed (16 whites, 3 blacks, and 3 Latinos).  On the captain exam, the pass rate was 64 percent for white candidates and 38 percent for both black and Latino candidates.

Due to the severe discrepancy in test scores, New Haven faced a dilemma: Should it certify the results or scrap them?

Ultimately, 18 firefighters (Ricci, 16 other whites, and one Latino) sued the City: New Haven discriminated against them on the basis of race, they charged, when it shelved the test results.

The question before the Supreme Court: Did the city of New Haven discriminate against the 18 plaintiffs by annulling the test?  Was New Haven's plan to shield itself from 'adverse-impact' lawsuits from minorities legally justified?

No, said the Supreme Court's 5-4 majority opinion.

"Fear of litigation alone cannot justify the City's reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions," writes Justice Kennedy in the ruling decision. "All the evidence demonstrates that the City rejected the test results because the higher scoring candidates were white. Without some other justification, this express, race-based decision- making is prohibited." 

Justices Roberts, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas joined the majority decision.

"The white firefighters who scored high on New Haven's promotional exams understandably attract this court's sympathy.  But they had no vested right to promotion," notes Justice Ginsburg in the dissenting opinion.  Reaffirming a lower court ruling -- which present nominee Sonia Sotomayor once joined -- Ginsburg maintains: "The intent to remedy the disparate impact of a promotional exam is not equivalent to an intent to discriminate against non-minority applicants. Ginsburg tartly noted that New Haven's actions were "race-neutral" since everyone's test result was discarded - nobody was promoted!

During the Obama Multiracial Honeymoon, this case would seem to be No Big Deal.  But in Reality, this case lands at our feet against a very prickly racial backdrop.

Economic insecurity often trumps social idealism.  Ricci - for all his scrappy ambition - is a sympathetic victim, and an intelligible symbol, to most Americans.

Given our growing and intermixed minority populations, controversy broils about how Uncle Sam and local governments deal with race and opportunity.   How can public institutions achieve "diversity" in a way that's fair and legal.

Both the philosophies and practices that further integration are under intense assault through many local government actions, voter initiatives, and court cases. Two recent landmark Supreme Court rulings (2007) prohibits assigning students to public schools for the purpose of achieving racial integration and declines to recognize racial balancing as a "compelling state interest." (Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson.)

In those rulings, Chief Justice Roberts scolded the government for its "sordid business" of "divvying us up by race."  

Roberts: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

With a black president, impatience with affirmative action - and behavior like New Haven's - brews furiously. Doesn't a black president mean that racial discrimination has been vanquished?  Can't minority grievances finally be buried?  If not, when? When will white people no longer be held to different test standards than blacks? When will racial minorities scrap race as an excuse for failure? Four years?  Eight years?  Fifty years? When?  See: There's a black president!

"We are all multiculturalists, now," Nathan Glazer once notoriously crowed.

Yes, we laud diversity and race mixing in public, but our actions don't stack up. "Americans Say They Like Diverse Communities -- Election, Census Trends Suggest Otherwise," declares the title of a 2009 study just released by the prestigious Pew Research Center. "Despite most respondents stated preference for 'diversity,'" the study concludes, "American communities have grown more racially, politically, and economically homogeneous in recent decades." 

All of this helps explain the quiet, but formidable, riot that is the white firefighters discrimination case.

Is Ricci the end of the White Man's Burden?  Or the beginning of white racial grievance?

In her surprisingly beautiful memoir, Resilience, Elizabeth Edwards puzzles that the man she built a life with, including a 30,000-plus square-foot homestead, could fall like Dominoes for such a tacky pick-up line ("You are so hot!") and, by implication, for such a tacky broad (a woman whose very name, Rielle Hunter, seems to say, "Bad blonde highlights, courtesy tin foil scraps.")

 

In the hilarious romp of political man-boys behaving badly - cue Clinton and Livingston and McGreevey and Gingrich and Craig and Vitter and Spitzer and Ensign and now Sanford - I can only wonder, What if the gender table were turned? 

 

Imagine a high-profiled female politician standing at the press conference lectern, muttering the inane mea culpas of the philandering men:

 

Kathleen Sebelius: "It depends what the definition of sex is is."

 

Sarah Palin: "My truth is that I am a gay American."

 

Hillary Clinton: "And so oddly enough, I spent the last five days of my life crying in Argentina."

 

Jennifer Granholm: "I did nothing wrong at the Minneapolis airport elaborately tapping my foot in a bathroom stall."

 

Better yet, just imagine these women's husband's sticking around by the press-conference lectern to hear such gibberish.

 

Or just think of the hypocrisy. Republican Senator David Vitter, of Louisiana, frequented the DC Madam and the Canal Street Madam, yet fiercely advocated abstinence-only sex education and amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage!  Or better yet, could you imagine a Congresswoman sponsoring the Child Modeling Exploitation Prevention Act of 2002 to outlaw web sites featuring sexually lewd images of minors  and then trading sexually lewd  instant messages with, well, minors?  ("Don't Ask, Don't Email!")

 

Why don't women leaders get snared in such scandals? Do women lack the hypocrisy gene?  (Apparently not: Sarah Palin supports abstinence only education for all youth!)  A golddigger is a hooker - only smarter.  Perhaps less male golddiggers prowl Capitol Hill for prize prey.

 

Or perhaps women leaders just have more common sense.