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.