Cooler heads prevail

Hoping to quell the racial tide in the Cambridge Police vs Henry Gates mess, President Obama made an appearance at Friday's White House Press briefing. The President admitted that he felt he was responsible for aggravating the situation by weighing in and should have "calibrated those words differently." In an effort to make this a "teachable moment" the President reached out to both Sargent Crowley and Professor Gates. Professor Gates responds:

Statement from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

"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."

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is editor in chief of The Root.