أوباما مزنوق عشان بوليس!!!

Quote: July 23, 2009 Obama Wades Into a Volatile Racial Issue By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE Americans got a rare glimpse Wednesday night of the perspective that a black president can bring to a racially charged situation. In response to a question at his prime-time news conference about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., the black Harvard professor, in his own home over the weekend, Mr. Obama declared that the Cambridge, Mass., police had “acted stupidly.” Mr. Obama’s response was his most animated performance of the hour-long news conference, and represented an extraordinary plunge by a president into a local law-enforcement dispute. And it opened a window into a world from which Mr. Obama is now largely shielded, suggesting the incident had struck a raw nerve with the president. In the public spotlight, Mr. Obama has sought to transcend, if not avoid, the issue of race. As a candidate, he tried to confine his racial references to the difficulty of catching a cab in New York, although he was forced to confront it directly during the Pennsylvania primary when his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, became an issue. And last week, at the 100th convention of the NAACP in New York, he spoke in uncharacteristically personal terms about his rise to power as a black man, while warning black Americans not to make excuses for their failure to achieve. Wednesday night’s press conference seemed to be a different deal as the president leaped into a highly charged controversy that has ignited passions across talk radio, the blogosphere and the old-fashioned water cooler. But in fact, racial profiling was a major issue for Mr. Obama when he was in the Illinois legislature. He was the chief sponsor of a bill, which became law, that requires police to record the race, age and gender of all drivers they stop for traffic violations and for those records to be analyzed for evidence of racial profiling. And so the substance of his response was not as surprising as the fact that a president so quickly joined the fray. The police were called to Professor Gates’s house on July 16 after a report of a burglary in progress. Professor Gates said he told the police that he lived in the house and that he was jimmying open a damaged front door. Still, the police report said he was arrested for “loud and tumultuous behavior in a public space.” He was held in police custody for four hours. Professor Gates said he was the victim of racial profiling and has demanded an apology, but the police officer involved, who is white, has said he has nothing to apologize for. On Tuesday, disorderly conduct charges against Professor Gates were dropped, and the city of Cambridge, its police department, the Middlesex County district attorney’s office and Professor Gates issued a joint statement calling the incident “regrettable and unfortunate.” Mr. Obama, asked on Wednesday what the incident said about race relations in America, noted up front that Professor Gates is a friend and that his comments might be biased. He said “words” had been exchanged and added: “Now, I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that, 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. And that’s just a fact.” He added later that the incident was “a sign of how race remains a factor in this society.” He also used biting humor, grinning broadly as he imagined being in Professor Gates’s seemingly preposterous circumstance of being arrested after trying to get into his own home. “Here, I’d get shot,” Mr. Obama said, referring to his new address of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The statement was a bit of political jujitsu that acknowledged the intense security that surrounds any president while letting sink in the image of what would happen to anyone, let alone a black man, who might seem to be breaking into the White House. Mr. Obama’s response lit up the blogosphere immediately after the press conference. The debate developing overnight was whether Mr. Obama had gone too far in his response. On nytimes.com, one commenter had this to say: “Shouldn’t we all be outraged that a black man can somehow be arrested attempting to break into his own home in 2009? Obama is right on the money on this one. Do we have to be black to get this?” Another said: “I don’t think the arrest was racially motivated. I believe it was a contest of egos. Mr. Gates lost that battle since he was beyond the ivy walls. I agree with the President that the arrest was stupid, but I think there was plenty of blame to go around.” It could not be determined how well Mr. Obama knows Professor Gates. But the professor, a widely respected expert in the field of race relations, had very kind words for Mr. Obama’s pivotal speech on race relations after the Wright affair threatened to sink his candidacy. “I think it was brilliant,” Professor Gates said of the speech in an interview with Tavis Smiley at the time. “It is a great speech about race, and race relations, particularly between black people and white people at the beginning of the 21st Century.” NYT