The furor isn’t unexpected. If it could happen to him, it could happen to anyone else.
Yes, I am talking about the recent arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Skip Gates on his front porch by a white city of Cambridge police officer. Some of the facts are being disputed, but to me a few things are clear:
Gates has been writing and talking about race for his entire professional life. A week ago, he received the most profound personal lesson about race in America. The intellectual has become personal.
No matter how big, how prominent a black man becomes in America, he will encounter moments of utter and abject humiliation. At those moments, he will rightly blame race and racism. But at those moments, he must reach deep down and find the will to not let the bigots win.
I don’t know Gates, never met the man,, but I couldn’t help but feel that his anger, his righteous anger at that Cambridge police officer, was fueled in part by frustration- after all the work he has done, after all the things he has accomplished, a three-striped cop could reduce him and his Ph.ds to ashes and he becomes just another brother under criminal suspicion.
I believe as part of our education, every black man needs to experience the helplessness of being unjustly handcuffed. It’s a grounding experience; it’s a life-changing experience. Below is an account of my arrest one night in Fort Mill, S.C.
A version of this essay appeared in the St. Petersburg Times' Floridian section.

Handcuffs that won’t come off
By Andrew J. Skerritt
As the light turn from red to green, I lurch forward. Half a block away a white sedan slips into the traffic behind mse, sitting in my lane. The blue lights on the roof of the cab are unmistakable. They are coming for me. I drive using my rear view mirror mostly. What's behind me is more fearsome than what's ahead. That wasn't always the case, not until I got four traffic tickets in one month. Two stops, three tickets in less than one week and you're spooked. You think of what you'll say when the officer comes to your car door, how you'll phrase the apology: ‘I didn't know the speed limit, officer.’
‘Is there a problem, officer? How fast was I driving?’
Each flashing blue light and I am dragged backwards to the Thursday night in February. Every one remembers their first time. The sharp edge , the silver steel bracelet. the powerlessness, the shame. I kept thinking it was a dream. I'm respected. I'm innocent. This was supposed to be Pizza Thursday night and I was driving home. My son sat in the back seat reading with the light on. Pizza pepperoni and mushroom rested on the floor. As we turned around the bend, a police patrol car came flying in the opposite direction. Soon after it passed me , it made a u-turn and fell in behind me. Unperturbed I kept going. I slowed down turned the corner. lights flashed. I pulled over. I sat; I waited.
License and registration. I waited some more. My son wants to know why we have been stopped. I ask the question. There has been a report of a white car overtaking and driving recklessly with no lights coming over the bridge, she replied.
I wait.
Sir you have no insurance. We will have to take you in. Do you have anyone to take care of your son?
I stall, unbelieving. I paid insurance the week before. My wife wouldn’t let our insurance lapse. I stalled further, knowing she would drive up soon and show the officers that we had insurance. Passersby slow down and stare at another black man being stopped by police.
My wife arrives and transfers the pizza and my son to her car. Mine will be towed at my expense. She reaches for her handcuffs. Is that necessary, I ask in protest.
She must follow regulations. I'll handcuff in front, not behind your back, she promised. I was grateful for that a major concession. It made me feel better already.
There is a peculiar view you get of the world from the back seat of a police cruiser. The world seems less safe, smaller, less colorful. It is mostly gray, black and white. But this was my movie, I could choose the colors. This was all a mistake.
But the black dye under my fingernails when I awoke the next morning was real. So was the slow, unbuckling of my belt, loosening my silk paisley tie; removing my wristwatch, wedding bands and chain, posing for the mug shot.
I was quiet and cooperative, even though I seethed inside.
At any moment I expected someone to say it was all a mistake, apologize and let me go home. After all I was a newspaper columnist; my picture appeared in the paper three times a week. They'll know who I am and release me on my own recognizance. I lived in town. I owned a house down the road.
That kind of treatment was reserved for a different kind of suspect.
I'll have to lock you up in the cell until the magistrate arrives, the booking officer said. He should be here around 9:30.
The short walk to the cell empty except for one cellmate who had made up his bed and slept fitfully. I sat on the concrete slab. Inside I wanted to scream, but I remained silent. There was no one to hear me. So I wrapped my soul in the comfort of innocence. But how many others had been brought here before me loudly protesting their innocence only to spend the rest of their life behind bars?
The worst I could do was thirty days in a county jail. But I refused to contemplate that eventuality. I had insurance. I had the card to prove it. I was innocent.
I counted the bars in the cell. I read the hate mail my predecessors left behind for jail guards. Bereft of my watch I could only imagine time. The metal caged my spirit. I couldn't relax. I couldn't sleep. The police officer brought me a blanket. Did he expect me to sleep overnight? I replayed the entire day in my mind. The ifs. if i had used the other route home instead of driving through town. What if I hadn't gone for Pizza? The answers astounded me. In order for me to have been stopped required a series of coincidences, too random to fathom. I was here for a reason. Someone wanted to teach me a lesson. I needed to remember who I was; what I was. No matter who people saw you as, it was who you were that truly mattered. Secretly I kept hoping one of the officer would recognize me. "You're the fella from the newspaper. I like your stories," I waited to hear her say. But she never does. Her eyes remain hard, steely, suspicious. She cuffs me with the practiced indifference of crime wary big city cop. I was her anonymous thug unconventionally dressed in jacket and tie.
She didn't recognize me. I wasn't going to drop names. In the South, being known is, even more than race, everything. If the officer who pulls you over knows your or your family, your chances of driving away with an admonition to ease up off the accelerator increases dramatically. But if he doesn't know you or your kin, you'll help him make quota this month. But how could I claim to be a black man and never been arrested?
The only moments I've spent behind bars were on guided tours of county and state prisons. I had to earn my badge. Every black man had to be arrested at least once. It was a rite of passage. Mine had been delayed. There was no postponing it.
Later that night, the magistrate arrived at the station house. He recognized me, alright. ‘You’re Mr. Skerritt from the newspaper.’
He demanded $350 bail before he released me. I could call a bail bondsman if I needed help. Instead I called my wife. When she arrived, the magistrate sent her back to get exact change. Later, as she drove me home, my son wrapped in a blanket in the back seat, she tapped my knee. Are you doing okay, she asked. Yes, I said. I'll be fine. The sense of innocence wrapped even more tightly around me. salving my sense of being wronged. But it also bolstered the knowledge on that February night that when I walked into that jail cell, I walked through a portal, the one of experience shared by millions of other black men in America. But unlike so many others I walked out unsullied and unbowed by the experience. At the same time, I drove home knowing that each time a police patrol car pulled in behind me, I would always see those blinking blue lights tinged with chrome, the color of handcuffs binding my wrists, humiliating me in public, reducing me to just another, anonymous thug unconventionally dressed in jacket and tie.

Notes and observations

The last month has  been intriguing with all the political and celebrity news. Some brief observations:

The Gov. Mark Sanford affair scandal is sad in  so many ways. Here is a man with big ambitions to be president risking it all on a romantic affair that he knows has no future. Matters of the heart- reason just doesn't work. Can you imagine how miserable it must have been to be at home with his wife and four sons when his heart was in Argentina? That is hell if there is one. 

This is not an attempt to gloat. This kind of failure happens more often than we hear about it.  I'm no fan of Sanford's but I wish him luck in rescuing his marriage, if not his political career. Makes me want to guard my heart more carefully than ever.

Later today some belated comments on the Steve McNair murder suicide.