The President, The Professor and The Sergeant; Is It Happy Hour Yet?

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the editor-in-chief of The Root, where he RSVP'd to President Obama's White House invitation last night:

"It was very kind of the President to phone me today. Vernon Jordan is absolutely correct: my unfortunate experience will only have a larger meaning if we can all use this to diminish racial profiling and to enhance fairness and equity in the criminal justice system for poor people and for people of color.

And to that end, I look forward to studying the history of racial profiling in a new documentary for PBS. I told the President that my principal regret was that all of the attention paid to his deeply supportive remarks during his press conference had distracted attention from his health care initiative. I am pleased that he, too, is eager to use my experience as a teaching moment, and if meeting Sgt. [James] Crowley for a beer with the President will further that end, then I would be happy to oblige.

After all, I first proposed that Sgt. Crowley and I meet as early as last Monday. If my experience leads to the lessening of the occurrence of racial profiling, then I would find that enormously gratifying. Because, in the end, this is not about me at all; it is about the creation of a society in which 'equal justice before law' is a lived reality."

Prof. Gates is right; the Cambridge incident has taken the spotlight off health care reform and caused the White House to go off-message. Critics of President Obama--almost all of them white--have eagerly picked at the scab of racism over the past few days because the president had a human moment in response to a question about Gates's arrest at his press conference Wednesday night. Many of these same critics traffic in race-baiting for a living, and have the credibility of the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan lecturing at a tolerance debate.

Pour some pints of Guinness, Mr. President, and have a frank discussion with Prof. Gates and Sgt. Crowley. Don't apologize for your emotions, and don't listen to those critics who gleefully seek to exploit this high-profile profiling.

My brush isn't broad enough to paint the Cambridge Police Department or Sgt. Crowley as blatant racists, but--unfortunately again in America--the palette is down to black versus white.