Shouldn’t It be Reverse Profiling?

The run in between Harvard Prof Skip Gates and the Cambridge, MA police is a great illustration of the human factors principle that our analysis in the present is heavily dependent on our analysis in the past.  Think about the conclusions regarding race that most people, black and white, jumped to.  White police incorrectly arrest black person – so it must be racial profiling and discrimination. 

But think about the Cambridge, MA reality of 2009.  Prof Gates is one of the academic elite, at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, living in a nice house in a nice neighborhood.  The mayor of his city, governor of his state, and president of his country are of the same race that he is.  He first grabbed his Harvard ID to show the cop that he lived there.

On the other hand, the cop is a working class individual who lived in a less affluent town, didn’t graduate from Harvard, and is of a different race than the mayor, governor and president.  So what conclusions should the cop have jumped to in the Cambridge of 2009?  If anything, racial profiling should have led him to assume that Prof Gates was an elite, not a burglar. 

Of course I am stretching this because most of the wealthy in Cambridge are still white.  But times have certainly changed.  Our information processing will eventually catch up.