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Gates in a photo in the Harvard Crimson, 2002
Skip Gates' arrest 7/21/09
Henry
Louis ("Skip" to people who know him) Gates is not a man you'd expect
to be in the middle of a confrontation with police, let alone the
old-fashioned, unreconstructed "race war" which the wingnuts in the white blogosphere keep predicting.
Read his Wikipedia entry, which rightly describes Gates as a "public intellectual."
The foremost scholar of African-American literature in the U.S., his career
has been studded with achievements: he was the first African-American
Mellon Fellow and the 
recipient
of a MacArthur ("Genius") Award; he revived scholarly and public
interest in long-buried slave narratives and began a movement to
preserve and archive literary artifacts of African-American life; he's
built African-American studies departments at major universities and
guided the careers of specialty's most prominent teachers and scholars.
One thing he's known for is his subtle and complex understanding of race in
America in general and in the creation of African-American studies
programs in particular:
Gates has argued that a
separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes and
maintains that it is "ridiculous" to think that only blacks should be
scholars of African and African-American literature. He argues, "It
can't be real as a subject if you have to look like the subject to be
an expert in the subject,"[1] adding, "It's as ridiculous as if someone said I couldn't appreciate Shakespeare because I'm not Anglo-Saxon. I think it's vulgar and racist whether it comes out of a black mouth or a white mouth."[4]
Physically, Gates is a small man, dapper (at least when he taught at Cornell in the
mid-1980s), witty, and likeable. In public intellectual debate, he
typically exemplifies the triumph of reasonable discussion and humor
over dogmatism and piety.
You can see what he's like if you you watch the PBS miniseries he 
co-produced and hosted, African American Lives (2006) and African American Lives 2 (2008) (Gates learns through genealogical research and DNA testing, that his ancestry is half white European and that he is descended from an Irish king called Niall of the Nine Hostages. as well as from the Yoruba people of Nigeria.)
In a graduate seminar I sat in on when he taught at Cornell, there were
among us two students named Phil, one white, one African-American. On
the first day, he turns to one of them and says, "I bet in all your
classes you're always though of as 'Black Phil.' Well in here," he
turns toward the other Phil, "you're going to be 'White Phil' and he's
going to be known as 'Phil.'" It was subtle, it was funny and everybody
loved it, in particular White Phil for whom, I imagine, this
acknowledgement of subterranean racial assumptions was a relief.
I'm sure that there are times when Skip Gates can be as nasty, grumpy,
petulant and selfish as the next academic superstar. Especially when
he's jet-lagged, it's late, and he's locked out of his house. And one
of his neighbors calls the police because she thinks he's breaking into
his own house (good work beng a community watchdog, but it's too bad
she doesn't recognize her neighbors on sight.)
For the vast
majority of us who read about the incident -- i.e. who weren't there to
hear what was said -- it's absurd to cast this single incident as a
barometer of racial tensions in this country. Ironically, it's probable
that every single thing about the interaction between
