Despite the historic election of Barack Obama, America still awaits its first post-racial president. The president who was elected, in part, to transcend race and racial politics, inserted the issue of race into the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates.
After admitting that he didn’t know the facts and was biased by his friendship with Gates, President Obama insinuated that there was a racial motivation behind the arrest and went on to say that the Cambridge police “acted stupidly” in charging Gates with disorderly conduct.
The facts tell a different story. As the recently released audio of the 911 phone call reveals, the caller never identified the race of the man she thought was potentially breaking into the home.
The arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, is an 11-year veteran of the force, an Obama-supporter, and for five of the past six years has been the handpicked choice of a black police commissioner to teach cadets how to be racially sensitive and avoid profiling.
Following an investigation that found no wrongdoing, a group of police officers – black and white – came together to show support for Crowley. The group called on Obama to apologize for his reckless comments.
Obama’s jumping into the fray on race is part of a worrisome pattern: His history of associating with radical, leftist, race-based ideology, and its proponents, such as Jeremiah Wright.
In his best-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama admits his early cultivation of an angry, race-based political identity. “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout,” he writes, “I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.”
Since the administration took office, his actions have only added to these concerns. Eric Holder, the man Obama appointed to be the nation’s first black attorney general, called America a “nation of cowards” on race.
Sonia Sotomayor’s bid for the Supreme Court has mostly centered on her controversial comments that a “wise Latina woman” would have superior legal judgment, and her reversed decision to allow the city of New Haven, Conn. to discriminate against white firefighters.
The Gates story also follows Obama’s recent speech to the NAACP, where he minimized the progress of America, stating: “The pain of discrimination is still felt in America. By African-American women paid less for doing the same work as colleagues of a different color and a different gender. By Latinos made to feel unwelcome in their own country. By Muslim Americans viewed with suspicion simply because they kneel down to pray to their God.”
Obama’s entrance into the Gates, and particularly his comments, helped to stoke racial fears, enlarged the wedge between law enforcement and the black community, and even led to talk of the Congressional Black Caucus calling for hearings on racial profiling.
There was a chance to use this teachable moment to remind us that not all misunderstandings have a basis in race. He could have stomped the fire out instead of putting gasoline on the flames. Or he could have remained silent.
Instead, he chose to see Crowley as simply another “typical white person.”
So much for the first post-racial president.
Booker T. Stallworth is a marketing and media strategist, social commentator and lecturer from Tacoma, Wa.
