opens IMAGE file The incident involving Harvard Professor Skip Gates and the Cambridge police has a very long and tortured “back story.” It involves attitudes that were formed as for back as the Revolutionary War. First and foremost we must remember that African people were brought to the New World to be slave labor for Europeans and the idea that Africans might be in any way entitled to any kind of rights was out of the question. The Dred Scott decision handed down by the Supreme Court stated that slaves and people of color had no rights that any white person had to acknowledge. This concept was a foundation for race relations in America until the aftermath of the Civil War. At that point, even thought blacks in theory were considered to be citizens of America the reality on the ground was entirely a different matter. In the states that had been part of the Confederacy white Americans used specially designed laws to totally negate any attempts to make blacks legally equal citizens of the republic. No money was spent for black children to go to school. Blacks were denied the right to vote, serve on juries, run for political office or in any way challenge the legal restrictions imposed on them. Vigilante violence and violence perpetrated by the law enforcement apparatus was the cement that held these policies in place. It was not until the success of the civil rights movement that this situation was challenged. That was 100 years after the Civil War. The culture of our legal system still had the mind set of white supremacy being the law of the land and that mind set still peeks through the veneer of equal rights that is now supposedly the law of the land. For black Americans and Latinos, the concept of “presumption of innocence” rarely applies to any encounter between them and the police. ‘Probable cause’ for many white policemen is simply having black skin. Juries are inclined to side with police in any dispute about facts when testimony is given. If it were not for the video camera held by a random onlooker, Rodney King’s case would just have been another black criminal’s false complaint about police brutality. Black motorists have a term “DWB” ( i.e.-driving while black) to describe why they are stopped in disproportionate numbers by traffic cops. We as a nation must find a way to change the culture of harassment that survives to this day on our streets. Justice should be blind especially color-blind and able to fairly deal with the very real need for honest law enforcement.