Obama takes stand on race

associated press

Making his first foray into a divisive racial issue, President Barack Obama sided with Henry Louis Gates Jr. after the black scholar’s arrest by a white police officer, a striking departure from Obama’s “post-racial” impartiality.

Saying that the white sergeant acted “stupidly” in arresting Gates, Obama inflamed an already volatile topic. Although he backed off that comment slightly Thursday, Obama stood by his assessment that the arrest of the Harvard professor “doesn’t make sense.”

After years of deftly defusing racial land mines, why did Obama speak out now? Because Gates is a friend and fellow Harvard man? Because racial profiling is an issue close to the president’s heart?

Or could Obama, contemplating the idea of a white cop questioning a black man in his own home, have lost his legendary cool?

“I think he was responding emotionally. It was a visceral reaction,” said Mary Frances Berry, a University of Pennsylvania history professor and former chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

“It is a milestone, in a sense,” said Berry, who was watching the news conference when Obama made the original statement. “It’s his first foray into putting his tippy-toe into the water, to respond directly to something about race.”

Journalist Ellis Cose, author of “The Rage of a Privileged Class,” about anger among successful blacks, pointed out that Obama had sponsored legislation while an Illinois state senator to combat racial profiling.

“To the extent that he did drop his sort of nonracial face, so to speak, it was because this is an issue he feels personally passionate about and an issue that has clearly touched most black men in America of a certain age,” Cose said. “I think he was personally outraged.”

From the start, Gates’ claims that he was racially profiled seemed like a case from the divided past, when truth was subjective, sympathies color-coded — and most presidents stayed neutral.

The Harvard history professor and prominent intellectual returned home from a trip to China last week and had to force open his jammed front door. A white woman who works nearby called police to report a possible break-in. Sgt. James Crowley arrived to find Gates inside the house and demanded to see some ID.

Gates says Crowley treated him rudely and refused to provide his badge number; Crowley says Gates yelled at him, accused him of racism and refused to calm down. Gates was charged with disorderly conduct and spent a few hours in custody. The charges were quickly dropped.