The-all-about-me President just couln't contain himself
On Cambridge-Race Case, Obama Spoke Stupidly
By Bob Parks Thursday, July 23, 2009
This is not another
“just words” moment.
During a primetime press conference on the whole black-Harvard-scholar-being-racially-profiled-and-arrested-in-his-Cambridge-Massachusetts-home thing, President Obama said,
“Well, I should say at the outset that Skip Gates is a friend, so I may be a little biased here. I don’t know all the facts.”
This is where the president should have stopped and minded his own business, but the all-about-me man just couldn’t contain himself…
Now, I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.
President Obama admits he didn’t know much about the case, and yet slams a
police department on national television. Is this stupid or what?
When hearing about the arrest of professor
Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, something just didn’t smell right.
The way the story’s been reported, Police arrived at Professor Gates’s home near Harvard Square to question him as he had trouble unlocking his door after it became jammed.
According to the police report, Professor Gates accused the investigating officer of being a racist and told him he had
“no idea who he was messing with,” and that he was being targeted because
“I’m a black man in America.”
The term “racial profiling” is negative code for police doing their job. If a disproportionate number of redheaded teens were seen as committing crime, it would be irresponsible of the cops to not keep an eye out for redheaded teens.
Cambridge, Massachusetts is 12% black. I haven’t been able to easily find the racial breakdown of crime there, and that may be due to the very liberal make-up of the city. But if blacks are committing more than 12% of the crime in the affluent area where the professoriate live, then the Cambridge police would be hassled for not following up on reports of suspicious behavior.
And if Professor Gates was this victim of police profiling and harassment, he sure didn’t act like the victim he portrays himself as.
Bill Carter, the man who snapped a photograph of Gates being led away in handcuffs, said police officers were calm and that Gates was “slightly out of control” and “agitated” when he was arrested.
“The officers around kind of calmed him down,” Carter said. “I heard him yelling — Mr. Gates yelling. I didn’t hear anything that he was saying so I couldn’t say that he was belligerent.”
Professor Gates is in the race business and displayed elitism when all he had to do is cooperate. Now, the problem is Gates has gotten a taste of the international limelight; a race peddler’s dream, and he’s going to
milk it for all it’s worth.
“He should look into his heart and know that he is not telling the truth and he should beg my forgiveness.”
Mouthing off to cops gets congresspersons, multi-millionaire celebrities and athletes arrested, and the police know whom they’re messing with.
Should I side with Professor Gates just because he’s black? Many seem to believe I would and should. But if Gates fully cooperated with the police and was courteous, chances are this wouldn’t have escalated as it did.
The officer, Sgt. James Crowley, told CNN affiliate WCVB earlier Wednesday that he will not apologize.
“There are not many certainties in life, but it is for certain that Sgt. Crowley will not be apologizing,” he said.
Kudos to Sergeant Crowley for not apologizing and giving added juice to
America’s latest race huckster, Professor Henry Louis Gates.
Gates said he’d be prepared to forgive the arresting officer “if he told the truth” about what the director of Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research said were “fabrications” in the police report. He said Wednesday that he and his lawyers were considering further actions, not excluding a lawsuit.
Gates said that although the ordeal had upset him, “I would do the same thing exactly again.”
The same President of the United States who constantly reminds us of that status yet claims it’s not all about him, has carelessly interjected himself with yet another reckless statement.
Unlike Professor Gates, I don’t make my money looking for racism, so I don’t see it when it’s not there. Unlike President Obama, my words don’t resonate nationally to the point where they can influence policy… yet. His words can cause unrest if not spoken wisely.
Barack Obama’s election was supposedly a sign of the end of racism in America, however his actions (including the dismissal of charges against election day intimidating Black Panthers) are now showing he thinks with the race head first, and that is very dangerous, especially when his mouth is equally unrestrained.
Bob Parks Most recent columns
Bob Parks is a is a member/writer of the National Advisory Council of Project 21, Senior Writer for the New Media Journal, VP of Marketing and Media Relations for the New Media Alliance. Bob’s websites are Black & Right and youtube.com/BlackAndRight
