TheLoop21.com

By: Raechal Leone (Add to your loop)
Thu, 07/23/2009 - 11:21

President Obama says Cambridge police acted 'stupidly.'

The disgraceful arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. could have been just one more incident of racial discrimination quickly brushed aside by the mainstream media and the public.

Instead, the president, during a news conference on prime-time television, called out police officers for the way they handled it. Cambridge, Mass., Mayor E. Denise Simmons, the first black woman to have that job, is going on news shows to say she called the Harvard University professor to apologize. Gates' arrest prompted CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien to speak from the heart about how people at her children's private school mistake her for their nanny, and landed Gates and Tom Joyner prime air time to talk about what happened.

The difference is that today black Americans have more than a consolatory seat at the table. Because Obama is in the White House and Simmons is the mayor of Cambridge, because Gates is editor-in-chief of a Web site owned by Washingtonpost Newsweek Interactive, and because journalists of color like O’Brien are in newsrooms, these issues will no longer be ignored.

People in power don't have to be convinced that when police officers arrest a 58-year-old black man for entering his own home, race has something to do with it. They don't need to see any statistics about racial profiling or even talk to the officers to determine whether Gates' race affected the Cambridge Police Department's assumptions about him. They know it as an ugly fact of life.

You could hear it in President Obama’s comments. "I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry," the president said. "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 is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately, and that's just a fact."

Of course, the president's words and the fact that the media has provided a massive platform for them doesn't change everything. It doesn't mean we've moved past race any more than when Obama or Simmons were elected, or when CNN decided to begin making shows like Black in America 2. And apparently, none of this can make James Crowley, the officer who arrested Gates, apologize. “I just have nothing to apologize for,” he tells told the Boston Herald. “It will never happen.”

But it's clear things are different, and they will be going forward. I can't imagine President George W. Bush ever making a comment on Gates' arrest, or Diane Sawyer saying what Soledad said about how people perceive her because of race, in part simply because, like me, they aren't black. This case has given us a living, breathing demonstration of the benefit of having people with different perspectives in power in government and even in the mainstream media.

When President Obama was elected, many Americans wondered if it would make any difference for the country to have a black president. A lot of people, including the overly optimistic post-racialists, and at times, even Obama himself, shrugged off the idea that the race of our political and thought leaders mattered. Now, we know better.

Raechal Leone is TheLoop21.com's senior editor and writes the Inside the Loop blog.

Has mainstream media given too much coverage to the murder of Annie Le?

Yes, way too much

Yes, a little too much

No, the right amount

No, not enough

I don't know