Jennifer Foster: What we can learn from Gates-gate

After Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley arrested Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. at Gates’ home following a call about a potential burglary in progress, I knew race would be involved.

But I never, ever expected that President Obama would dive headlong into the fray.

Asked about the incident, the president told the world last week that the police “acted stupidly” in arresting Gates. Then, apparently unaware that Crowley teaches a class to rookie cops on how to avoid racial profiling, Obama opined about … racial profiling.

It was a mistake of unmitigated proportions, and Obama has been in damage-control mode ever since.

So Obama brought the police officer and the professor to the White House Thursday to take advantage of a “teachable moment.”

Fair enough. What can we learn from Gates-gate?

Lesson No. 1: Anyone who puts on a uniform day in and day out and willingly risks his or her life for a stranger – for you – deserves the benefit of your doubt. Of course, these public servants aren’t any more perfect than you are. But they accept dangers on a regular basis that most of us have the luxury to never conceive.

A journalist friend seemed incredulous when I wrote on my Twitter feed this week, “Unless you’ve walked a beat, hold your critical tongue.” Was I saying that citizens can’t question the police now? he asked. (Of course not.) He said he thought it was the job of every journalist to be “suspicious of the government, including police.”

I was (almost) speechless. Here I’ve been thinking all along that the job of every journalist is to find the facts first, and then to report them fairly, not to receive and filter facts through a predetermined lens of suspicion.

One might almost call that latter approach “bias.”

Lesson No. 2: The press can make things worse. By playing up the racial angle, the national media only inflamed the situation. Their coverage of the so-called “Suds Summit,” complete with all manner of juvenile puns (President Obama was trying to get over “the hangover” from his comment, tensions were “brewing,” etc.), was a disgrace to the profession. At least two major cable news channels had clocks counting down to the meeting, as if it was a presidential debate.

Lesson No. 3: Racism and racial profiling are real, but they are not ubiquitous. Much like the little boy who cried wolf, racial reactionaries who falsely charge racism and racial profiling only make it harder for legitimate victims of such practices – and there are legitimate victims – to be heard.

America has traveled a long, tortuous, bloody road from the days of counting a slave as three-fifths of a person to having a black president of the United States, and the Gates case proves that we still have progress to make toward achieving a colorblind society.

But Gatesgate also demonstrates that we have reached the point where our achievement of that colorblind society depends more on us, as individuals, than it does on laws. In pursuit of that goal, individuals must consciously abandon their assumptions about race. Assess the person – his values, his experience, his abilities – not his color.

Ask yourself: As an American, and as an individual, is that your determined course?

It is a difficult, constant and often uncomfortable process. But it is worth it, because it can advance us toward that colorblind society.

And it can help keep us – all of us, including policemen, professors and presidents – from “acting stupidly” along the way.

Jennifer Foster is a political enthusiast who lives in Auburn and writes a column for the Opelika-Auburn News. She can be reached at