Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrested. Seriously, Cambridge?

Preeminent scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., who holds one of 20 elite professorship at Harvard University and has hosted several PBS television programs was arrested in Cambridge, Mass., on Thursday at his home. According to an Associated Press report, police responded to a call about “two black males”:

Cambridge police say they responded to the well-maintained two-story home after a woman reported seeing “two black males with backpacks on the porch,” with one “wedging his shoulder into the door as if he was trying to force entry.”

By the time police arrived, Gates — the 58-year-old director of Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and one of the “two black males” — was inside the house, which he leases from Harvard. He’d just returned from a trip to China, had found the front door jammed and entered through the rear. The police report says that he initially declined to come outside and show an officer his identification, allegedly saying, “Why, because I’m a black man in America?”