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Howdy-hope you all have a safe and happy weekend. Here's tonight's missive: GATES LATEST-President Obama did a little outreach today, two days after his comments regarding the Henry Louis Gates Jr. story seemed to inflame an already heated situation. Making...
President, prof, police: 'This one's for you'
by Mark Silva
It was Sgt. James Crowley, the Cambridge police officer who led Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. Jr., out of his own home in handcuffs, who suggested to President Barack Obama, who first criticized the arrest as stupid and later told the officer that was a bad "choice of words,'' who suggested they grab a beer.
Gates says he is ready for that beer.
It could be "a teaching moment,'' he saysthough we're not sure that's what the police sergeant had in mind with the invitation to share some cold ones.
Gates also is looking forward to his work on a PBS documentary about racial profilingwhich the president maintained was at work in this arrest.
Both Gates and Crowley got phone calls from Obama on Friday, with the president attempting to quell a controversy that he spurred with his remark about the arrest at a prime-time news conference this week. It was Crowley, the White House said, who suggested the beer. The president, making a surprise appearance in the press room between calls, suggested the two might be coming in for a beer.
"It was very kind of the president to phone me today,'' Gates, a noted scholar of African-American culture at Harvard and editor-in-chief of The Root, said in a statement published today at the Web-site , a " daily online magazine that provides thought-provoking commentary on today's news from a variety of black perspectives.''
"Vernon Jordan is absolutely correct: My unfortunate experience will only have a larger meaning if we can all use this to diminish racial profiling and to enhance fairness and equity in the criminal justice system for poor people and for people of color,'' the Root's editor-in-chief writes today.
"And to that end, I look forward to studying the history of racial profiling in a new documentary for PBS,'' Gates says. "I told the president that my principal regret was that all of the attention paid to his deeply supportive remarks during his press conference had distracted attention from his health care initiative.
" I am pleased that he, too, is eager to use my experience as a teaching moment, and if meeting Sgt. [James] Crowley for a beer with the president will further that end, then I would be happy to oblige,'' Gates says.
"After all, I first proposed that Sgt. Crowley and I meet as early as last Monday. If my experience leads to the lessening of the occurrence of racial profiling, then I would find that enormously gratifying,'' he says. "Because, in the end, this is not about me at all; it is about the creation of a society in which 'equal justice before law' is a lived reality."
Previously, Gates has demanded an apology from Crowley, who has refusedstanding by his conduct in the arrest.
That beer may get pretty warm before this reunion ever takes place.
Gates Now Seeks To 'Move On' After Arrest Flap
"In the end, this is not about me at all," the black Harvard scholar says, in an apparent bid to end the ongoing controversy over his arrest by a white police officer. President Obama, who helped escalate the furor over the incident, has invited Gates and the arresting officer to the White House for a beer.
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