It all started with a question during President Obama’s prime time press conference on Wednesday. Lynne Sweet of the Chicago Sun Times asked him about his thoughts concerning the highly publicized arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. PBO said he thought that the Cambridge police officers acted “stupidly”. The ensuing uproar over that one word was so ridiculous and unnecessary that by Friday when the President asked Gates and the arresting officer to the White House for a beer, I was already through.
For one, I knew that in the end no one was going to be satisfied because within the black/white dichotomy of race in this country, people rarely if ever are satisfied. African Americans were upset with the President’s perceived capitulation and Whites were upset that he bothered to get involved in the fray in the first place. Everyone’s wrong as far as I’m concerned. The President has his own mind and no matter the occasion, he should feel free to express his thoughts as he wishes. African Americans need to understand that the President cannot suddenly don a Malcolm X T-shirt and walk down Pennsylvania Avenue with Spike Lee shouting, “Fight The Power” whenever there is racial incident. And white folks, *sigh* they just need to get a clue. Let me break it down real simple like, African Americans and other minorities have a very different view of the police than you. To many of us, the police aren’t always right, their motives sometimes lay outside the boundaries of law and order, and they often posses the same prejudices that the general population do. We’ve seen the video from Los Angeles, Oakland, and Houston. Many of our brothers have shared stories of being stopped for no reason, handcuffed, beaten, illegally searched, arrested, and sometimes killed.
There was a moment during PBO’s press conference that clearly illustrated this difference in attitude. The President joked about getting shot while trying to get into his own home and the crowd of mostly white journalists roared with laughter. For African Americans and Hispanics however, his statement was no laughing matter. That was the real “teachable” moment in my opinion, that even the President of the United States knows that sometimes justice isn’t for all.
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