From the Boston Globe:
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. said this evening that he would accept President Obama’s invitation to meet with him and Cambridge Police Sergeant James M. Crowley at the White House.
Gates said in an email to the Globe that he was pleased to talk to the president today and to be asked to meet with Crowley, adding, “I said I would.”
“My entire academic career had been based on improving race relations, not exacerbating them. I am hopeful that my experience will lead to greater sensitivity to issues of racial profiling in the criminal justice system. If so, then this will be a blessing for our society. It is time for all of us to move on, and to assess what we can learn from this experience,” he said.
Obama extended the invitation today in phone calls to the two men as he sought to calm a national debate over racial profiling that reached a fever pitch after news broke of the white officer’s arrest of the black scholar at his home last week.
Hopefully this will be the start of a national conversation about racism. We can hope it will be anyway. The skeptic in me says it won’t do squat..but the forever hopeful side wants this to be a good thing for Amerika.
