When Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was questioned by the police at his home in an affluent neighbourhood, many people across the country reacted with surprise and disbelief. But African American men from coast to coast experienced painful recognition; Gatesgate' was merely the very public manifestation of a phenomenon many black men experience regularly. Here a dozen eloquent authors tell their own personal versions of this story including a Harvard law school student, a New York Times reporter and a federal prosecutor.'