ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Boris Kodjoe owns a mansion in Atlanta. But when he goes to answer his door, the black actor knows what it's like to be an outcast.



Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested last week on a charge of disorderly conduct.



"When I'm opening the door of my own house, someone will ask me where the man of the house is, implying that I'm staff," said Kodjoe, best known for starring in Showtime's "Soul Food."



It's a feeling some African-Americans say is all too common, even to this day in America: No matter your status or prominence in society, you're still typecast. That's why the recent arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation's most prominent African-American scholars, has stirred outrage and debate.



Jelani Cobb, an author and professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, says it's troubling on many levels when "one of the most recognizable African-Americans in the country can be arrested in his own home and have to justify being in his own home."  Watch arrest of a Harvard scholar »



"It's really kind of unfathomable," Cobb said. "If it can happen to him, yeah, it can happen to any of us."



That's a sentiment echoed by Jimi Izrael. "If a mild-mannered, bespectacled Ivy League professor who walks with a cane can be pulled from his own home and arrested on a minor charge, the rest of us don't stand a chance," Izrael wrote Tuesday on The Root, an online magazine with commentary from a variety of black perspectives that's co-founded by Gates.



"We all fit a description. We are all suspects."



In an interview with The Root, Gates said he was outraged by the incident and hopes to use the experience as a teaching tool, including a possible PBS special on racial profiling.



"I can't believe that an individual policeman on the Cambridge police force would treat any African-American male this way, and I am astonished that this happened to me; and more importantly I'm astonished that it could happen to any citizen of the United States, no matter what their race," Gates said. "And I'm deeply resolved to do and say the right things so that this cannot happen again." Voices of black America: What it's like being black in America



Gates was arrested last Thursday in broad daylight at his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home for disorderly conduct -- what the arresting officer described as "loud and tumultuous behavior in a public space." The charge was dropped Tuesday on the recommendation of police, and the city of Cambridge issued a statement calling the incident "regrettable and unfortunate."



Gates had just returned from a trip to China when a police officer responded to a call about a potential break-in at his home that was phoned in by a white woman. According to the police report, Gates was in the foyer when the officer arrived.



The officer asked Gates to "step out onto the porch and speak with me," the report says. "[Gates] replied, 'No, I will not.' He then demanded to know who I was. I told him that I was 'Sgt. Crowley from the Cambridge Police' and that I was 'investigating a report of a break in progress' at the residence.



"While I was making this statement, Gates opened the front door and exclaimed, 'Why, because I'm a black man in America?' " Have race relations improved since the election of President Barack Obama?



According to the report, Gates initially refused to show the officer his identification, instead asking for the officer's ID. But Gates eventually did show the officer his identification that included his home address.



"The police report says I was engaged in loud and tumultuous behavior. That's a joke," Gates told The Root. "It escalated as follows: I kept saying to him, 'What
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