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Gates-gate, as it has come to be known, has transfixed not just a nation but the entire world.
The story has all of the requisite elements: Power (a sitting United States president), class (an elite Harvard University professor vs. a working-class cop), race (black president and professor vs. white cop) and conflict (professor arrested, president condemns police officer involved).
The President, Barack Obama, has not fared well in public opinion polling measuring his handling of the incident. Only 26% of respondents in a recent Rasmussen survey felt that Obama gave a good or excellent answer when asked about Henry Louis Gates' arrest during a prime-time press conference last week that was supposed to be about health care.
Adding to the intrigue was Obama's friendship with Gates. Critics of the president have offered that he should not be getting involved in any local matters such as a Boston police arrest, particularly when the person arrested is one of his friends and when the president did not, as he admitted, have all of the facts of the case in his possession when he spoke.
The real elephant in the room, of course, has been the issue of race. Welcome to America.
Obama's charge that Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department "acted stupidly" in arresting Gates was inflammatory enough. The temperature was only raised, though, when Obama then went on to discuss the history of racial profiling in the United States.
The implication was clear: Sgt. James Crowley had racially profiled Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Gates added fuel to this fire by allegedly calling Crowley a racist during the investigation which led to his arrest. After the incident, Gates went on to say that Crowley was a "rogue policeman."
Crowley's fellow cops, including some black officers, immediately rushed to his defense (see second link). It emerged that Crowley provides racial profiling instruction for young cops at a local academy. Crowley also had tried to revive former NBA star Reggie Lewis (an African-American man) with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, an act which would seem unfitting for a purported racist.
As the controversy has raged on, the microscope has begun to turn towards Gates and his own potential racial prejudgments as regarded Crowley.
In this 1994 interview with C-SPAN's Brian Lamb, Gates reveals that his mother "hated white people," and the professor tells of his affinity for Malcolm X getting in the face of whites and telling them off.
The first link here leads to a full transcript of the interview. Watch the video and read the words for yourself.
For a man who seemed eager to cast an allegation of "racism" towards his fellow citizen, this interview could provide further questions about Henry Louis Gates' own possible bias.