(CBS/AP) Making his first foray into a divisive racial issue, President Barack Obama sided with Henry Louis Gates Jr. after the black scholar's arrest by a white police officer, a striking departure from Mr. Obama's "post-racial" impartiality.
Saying that the white sergeant acted "stupidly" in arresting Gates, Mr. Obama inflamed an already volatile topic. Although he backed off that comment slightly Thursday, Mr. Obama stood by his assessment that the arrest of the Harvard professor "doesn't make sense."
After years of deftly defusing racial land mines, why did Mr. Obama speak out now? Because Gates is a friend and fellow Harvard man? Because racial profiling is an issue close to the president's heart?
Or could Mr. Obama, contemplating the idea of a white cop questioning a black man in his own home, have lost his legendary cool?
"I think he was responding emotionally. It was a visceral reaction," said Mary Frances Berry, a University of Pennsylvania history professor and former chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
"It is a milestone, in a sense" said Berry, who was watching the news conference when Mr. Obama made the original statement. "It's his first foray into putting his tippy-toe into the water, to respond directly to something about race."
The journalist Ellis Cose, author of "The Rage of a Privileged Class," about anger among successful blacks, pointed out that Mr. Obama had sponsored legislation while an Illinois state senator to combat racial profiling.
"To the extent that he did drop his sort of nonracial face, so to speak, it was because this is an issue he feels personally passionate about and an issue that has clearly touched most black men in America of a certain age," Cose said. "I think he was personally outraged."
From the start, Gates' claims that he was racially profiled seemed like a case from the divided past, when truth was subjective, sympathies color-coded - and most presidents stayed neutral.
Indeed, since Mr. Obama's election, many Americans see improving race relations. A CBS News poll in April found that 23 percent of whites and 33 percent of blacks felt Mr. Obama's presidency has improved relations in the country, compared with just 7 percent and 5 percent, respectively, who said his election has worsened them. (Read more about recent CBS News polling on race). - CBS News Story
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