Besides all the important talk about health care and overall economic policy tonight, a major highlight of tonight’s press conference will probably be when President Obama took a question about the arrest of Prof. Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, and the issues of race that still linger in our society despite the undeniable milestone that his own election represented.
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“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,” said Obama. “What’s been reported though, is that the guy forgot his keys, jimmied his way to get into the house, there was a report called into the police station that there might be a burglary taking place. So far so good, all right. I mean, if I was trying to jigger into — well I guess this is my house now, so it probably wouldn’t happen. But let’s say my own house in Chicago. Here I’d get shot.”
The press gallery naturally laughed at the joke. It was unclear whether Obama meant he would get shot in the sense of hypothetically being some random guy trying to break into the White House specifically — or whether this was a very dark joke about himself becoming a victim of racial profiling. Perhaps it was a bit of both.
Obama then continued narrating the circumstances of the Gates story. “I don’t know, not having been there, and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that,” he said. “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 is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.”
“That doesn’t lessen the incredible progress that has been made. I am standing here as testimony to the progress that’s been made,” he added a short while later. “And yet, the fact of the matter is, this still haunts us. And even when there are honest misunderstandings, the fact that blacks and Hispanics are picked up more frequently, and oftentimes for no cause, casts suspicion even when there is good cause. And that’s why I think the more that we’re working with local law enforcement to improve policing techniques so that we’re eliminating potential bias, the safer everybody’s gonna be.”
