10881: Quentin Tarantino Uncensored.

At The Root, Editor-In-Chief Henry Louis Gates, Jr. spoke with Quentin Tarantino about Django Unchained. Listen here.

7637: Borderline Nutcases.

Talking trash in a MultiCultClassics Monologue…

• The Reverend Al Sharpton declared he would fight the new Arizona immigration law. Wow, bet the folks in Arizona are shaking now.

• In Alabama, Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim James is running an ad that declares the state’s driver’s license exam should only be given in English (it’s currently offered in 12 languages). In the message, James says, “This is Alabama; we speak English.” Um, not exactly.

• Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates recently set off another debate on slavery reparations. Gates believes President Obama, “the child of an African and an American,” is “uniquely positioned” to address the subject. Hey, don’t count on another invitation to share a beer at the White House.

7005: Teachable Moment Has Passed. Again.

The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. / Officer James Crowley “Teachable Moment” turned out to be remarkably similar to the way diversity has been mishandled on Madison Avenue.

Think about it. Gates and Crowley initiated a scenario that should have inspired much discussion and subsequent action, as racial profiling remains a major dilemma in the United States. President Barack Obama entered the discussion by emphasizing the lingering problem. However, once the situation seriously escalated, it appeared as if the president and others pulled back, seemingly in an attempt to focus on more pressing topics like health care reform. The end result was a lame Beer Summit, where participants staged a photo op and essentially dropped the matter. The true issue was ultimately ignored and abandoned. Again.

In comparison, Sanford Moore and Cyrus Mehri initiated scenarios that should have inspired much discussion and subsequent action, as exclusivity remains a major dilemma on Madison Avenue. 4As President and CEO Nancy Hill — along with numerous leaders in the industry — entered the discussion by emphasizing the lingering problem. However, once the situation seriously escalated, it appeared as if the president and leaders pulled back, seemingly in an attempt to focus on more pressing topics like the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival and decreased advertiser spending. The end result was a lame minority awards show or inner-city internship program, where participants staged a photo op and essentially dropped the matter. The true issue was ultimately ignored and abandoned. Again.

Except the advertising industry didn’t even bother offering free booze to minorities.

6989: Keep Hops Alive.

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

President’s beer summit falls flat

By Jesse Jackson

What the press labeled the beer summit came and went with barely a burp. Professor Gates suggests that he and Officer Crowley are now virtually drinking buddies, ready to go to a ballgame together.

“I offered to get his kids into Harvard if he doesn’t arrest me again,” said Gates to laughter.

But the teachable moment was never about Gates and Crowley alone. It was about something society has to be very serious about: systemic racial profiling and the need to overcome it.

When Obama initially was asked about the Gates arrest at his press conference, he committed truth. He said he didn’t know the details of the incident, that everyone knew that racial profiling was a widespread problem, and that the police had acted “stupidly” in arresting Gates in his own home. All of that is clearly true, no matter how badly Gates was acting.

But the president’s remarks were like a stick hitting a wasp’s nest, with the president getting stung by the response. Police spokesmen denounced him, reminding us of the risks that police take every day. The rabid right accused the president of hating white people. The president, hoping to focus on health care reform, moved to “walk back” his remarks and defuse the situation with the beer summit.

But ensuring that a Harvard professor like Gates and a well-trained police officer like Crowley get along isn’t the point of what the president called a “teachable moment.”

It isn’t that easy. It’s institutional—banks that don’t lend, lenders that charge more, police that act differently.

For example, Lisa Madigan, the Illinois Attorney General, has just filed a suit against Wells Fargo for “discriminatory and illegal mortgage lending practices” that “transformed our city’s predominantly African-American and Latino neighborhoods into ground zero for subprime lending.”

The lawsuit accuses Wells Fargo of poor oversight that enabled its employees to steer blacks and Latinos into high cost loans. In 2007, about 49 percent of Well Fargo’s black borrowers and 25 percent of Latinos were sold a high cost loan in the Chicago area, in contrast to 15 percent of white borrowers.

“[The foreclosure crisis] isn’t the natural result of a slumping economy, and it isn’t the result of homeowners taking on more than they can handle,” Madigan has stated. “This crisis is the direct result of unfair, deceptive and discriminatory lending practices by the lending industry.”

This kind of profiling has had devastating effects in the African-American and Latino community. But African-Americans and Latinos haven’t been the only victims. As people lost their homes, the value of homes in their neighborhoods plummeted. As home values declined, tax revenues declined. Schools lost teachers; road and sewer projects were put off. The entire community suffered.

As America moves slowly toward being a nation made up of minorities, racial profiling and structural discrimination will increasingly hurt everyone. We know that blacks are stopped more, arrested more, tried more, charged more and jailed more than whites with similar records. But as a result of imprisoning young African-American and Latino men and women, states across the country are spending billions warehousing nonviolent offenders while laying off teachers, firefighters and police. That makes no sense.

The president had it right the first time. The Gates-Crowley incident was a teachable moment.

But a staged photo op of four guys being served beer by a waiter in the White House garden won’t get that done. We need a national inquest about where we are, what changes must be made to move us forward.

Most Americans seem eager to lower their voices and to have a serious conversation about race, pleased with the progress that Obama’s election represents. In this increasingly diverse nation, we have little choice.

6976: Boston Cop Acted Racistly.

From The New York Daily News…

Boston cop Justin Barrett suspended for calling Henry Louis Gates a ‘jungle monkey’

By Corky Siemaszko, Daily News Staff Writer

A Boston cop insisted he was not a racist as he apologized for calling Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates a “banana-eating jungle monkey” in a mass e-mail.

“I did not mean to offend anyone,” Officer Justin Barrett told WCVB-TV. “The words were being used to characterize behavior, not describe anyone.”

Barrett admitted it was a “poor choice of words.”

“I didn’t mean it in a racist way,” he added. “I treat everyone with dignity and respect.”

Boston Mayor Tom Menino said he doesn’t buy Barrett’s explanation and wants the officer, who has already been suspended, fired.

“He’s gone,” Menino said. “G-o-n-e. I don’t care, it’s like cancer. You don’t keep those cancers around.”

Barrett, 36, who is also a captain in the National Guard, said he will fight to keep his job. He said he was “just venting” about the July 16 arrest of Gates by a white Cambridge cop that became a national discussion about race when President Obama said the officers acted “stupidly.”

“People are making it about race,” Barrett said. “It is not about race.”

But it may be about whether Barrett has any sense.

Barrett got into hot water after he fired off the note to his buddies in the Guard — and, inexplicably, The Boston Globe.

In the email, Barrett called the Globe story “jungle monkey gibberish” and wrote that Gates’ “first priority should be to get off the phone and comply with police.”

“For if I was the officer he verbally assaulted like a … jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC deserving of his belligerent non-compliance,” Barrett wrote.

OC is pepper spray.

Barrett went on to question Gates’ credentials, called him a “God damned fool,” and twice challenged the paper to “ax” him what he thinks.

“I am not a racist, but I am prejudice [sic] towards people who are stupid and pretend to stand up and preach for something they claim is freedom,” Barrett wrote.

6974: Budweiser True Storyboard.

Inspired by Beer Summit featuring Obama, Biden, Gates and Crowley.

6973: Whasssssup?

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

6969: Drinking And Jiving.

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

After the brews, let’s start teaching

By Jesse Jackson

President Obama has stated that the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates in his home provides a “teachable moment” about racial profiling, and the “relations between police officers and minority communities.”

The president’s remarks—that the police “acted stupidly”—sparked a backlash that the White House has tried to defuse by inviting arresting officer Sgt. James Crowley and Gates to sit down over a beer at the White House. The meeting, slated to take place in the next few days, will no doubt result in consensus that we should all get along, and how hard it is to do so given conflicting histories and perspectives.

This will defuse the furor, but it won’t provide much of a lesson for the teachable moment. Racial profiling isn’t a matter that is unique to Gates and Crowley. The reality is, as the president suggested, despite the great progress this nation has made on racial discrimination—as attested by the president’s own election—we are still a long way from a post-racial society.

African Americans across the country understood Gates’ anger at being challenged in his home. Racial profiling remains a widespread reality. DWB—driving while black—is still more likely to get you stopped in areas across the country. Young African Americans are more likely to be searched if stopped, more likely to be charged, more likely to be arrested if charged, more likely to do time than be fined if convicted. In schools across the country, African-American boys and girls are more likely to be disciplined and more likely to be suspended for the same behaviors as their white classmates.

This isn’t a secret. We have passed laws and set up agencies to remedy these practices. Police and fire departments in many urban areas have made significant efforts to overcome them. Progress has been made as police forces have become more integrated, but we still have a long way to go.

Moreover, as the president stated in his speech earlier this month to the NAACP, “The most difficult barriers include structural inequalities that our nation’s legacy of discrimination has left behind; inequalities still plaguing too many communities and too often the object of national neglect.”

African Americans are more likely to go to poor and crowded schools; more likely to be unemployed, more likely to lack health insurance, more likely to be targeted by predatory lenders. These structural inequalities, as the president noted, require public action and initiative to change.

So while it would be a good thing for Gates and Crowley to apologize one to another and shake hands, that won’t fulfill the “teachable moment.” It wouldn’t have been sufficient if the bus driver in Montgomery had apologized to Rosa Parks, and Ms. Parks had apologized for refusing to obey his order to go to the back of the bus. That would not have addressed the basic question of access to public accommodations. It’s the policy that must be addressed, not just the personal interaction.

Attorney General Eric Holder has stated that this is a “nation of cowards” when it comes to discussing race. It is particularly hard for an African-American president who wants sensibly to establish that he is the president of all Americans.

But the Gates arrest—and the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Ricci case, overturning New Haven’s decision to throw out a test that had a discriminatory effect, that may toll the death knell to affirmative action—do provide teachable moments. It is time to teach. We need a White House Conference on Structural Inequality and Racial Profiling.

We’ve acknowledged that racial discrimination is bad and passed laws and programs to remedy it. But as Dr. King taught us, that is not enough. We have to fund the programs and enforce the laws. So let’s detail the reality of the practices and structural inequalities that the president mentioned, evaluate the programs and laws that exist to remedy them, fund and enforce the law, and set up goals and timetables to measure our progress.

6966: Obesity And Obscenity.

Hating Monday with a MultiCultClassics Monologue…

• A new study showed obesity and weight-related medical issues cost the U.S. about $147 billion in 2008. “If you really want to rein in health-care dollars, you have to get people dieting, exercising and living a healthier lifestyle,” said an expert from the study. “Otherwise somebody is going to be paying for treating these weight-related illnesses, either the government or employers.” Somebody ought to charge Mickey D’s. Although the fast feeder is probably responding to the news by updating its iconic signs to read, “Over 147 Billion Served.”

• Not surprisingly, the Henry Louis Gates, Jr. affair has inspired racist comments at The Root. Some of the remarks have been removed, but others will remain for public display. “For the most part, as long as the comments are not threats of violence, and the most vicious, nasty, racist comments, we leave them up,” said an editor for the site. Maybe they should bring in a special editorial board comprised of Michael Richards and Dog The Bounty Hunter.

6965: Racial Profiling On Madison Avenue.

All the drama surrounding the Henry Louis Gates, Jr. affair makes one think about the racial profiling that happens in the advertising industry.

On Madison Avenue, Blacks are routinely pulled over and presumed to be:

Security Guards
Mailroom Workers
Receptionists
Custodians
Cafeteria Cooks
Elevator Attendants
Chief Diversity Officers
Visitors From The Multicultural “Partner” Agency
Diversity Advisory Committee Members
Inner-City Outreach Program Interns
NAACP Officials
Rabble-Rousers
MC Hammer

And if an incident like the Henry Louis Gates, Jr. affair ever took place, the 4As President would probably invite the opposing parties to Madison Avenue for beer malt liquor.

6961: The New Elite.

From The New York Times…

Meet the New Elite, Not Like the Old

By Helene Cooper

WASHINGTON — They are the children of 1969 — the year that America’s most prestigious universities began aggressively recruiting blacks and Latinos to their nearly all-white campuses.

No longer would Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia be the domain of the privileged. Instead, in response to the national soul-searching prompted by the civil rights movement, America’s premier colleges would try to become more representative of the population as a whole.

Forty years later, America is being led, to a striking extent, by a new elite, a cohort of the best and the brightest whose advancement was formed, at least in part, by affirmative action policies. From Barack and Michelle Obama (Columbia, Princeton, Harvard) to Eric Holder (Columbia) to Sonia Sotomayor (Princeton, Yale) to Valerie Jarrett (Michigan, Stanford), the country is now seeing, in full flower, the fruition of this wooing of minorities to institutions that for much of the nation’s history have groomed America’s leaders.

And yet the consequences of that change remain unresolved, as became clear on Friday, when Mr. Obama grappled a second time with the arrest of the Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his own home.

The incident, the president said, offered the potential to soothe longstanding distrust between minorities and police officers. But it also laid bare another reality, that the children of 1969, even those who now occupy niches at the top of society, regard their status as complicated, ambiguous and vulnerable.

“Whether I were black or white, I think that me commenting on this and hopefully contributing to constructive — as opposed to negative — understandings about the issue, is part of my portfolio,” Mr. Obama said.

It was a reminder that Mr. Obama, in addition to being the most powerful American, is also the fulfillment of the ideals embraced by Ivy League minority recruiters in 1969. Mr. Gates entered Yale that year, as one of 96 black freshmen. Today that number seems small. But there had been only six black students just three years before.

Mr. Gates belonged to the first affirmative action wave at top universities — a wave that continued into the 1970s and the 1980s. I was one of its beneficiaries. A black 17-year-old from Monrovia, Liberia, I was one of some 200 black freshmen at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1983.

My first roommate was a white student from Seagrove, N.C., whose SAT scores and grade-point average were higher than mine. Privately, I consoled myself that I had qualifications that she didn’t: I could name the capital of every country in Africa; countries she had never heard of. I knew where the Zambezi River emptied into the Indian Ocean. None of that had been on the SAT.

But every now and then I feared I was faking it, that my white classmates had something I didn’t. There were things they seemed to know instinctively, that I had to look up. I remember getting laughed at during a game of Pictionary when I couldn’t come up with the word for a giant bird landing on a lawn with a baby in its mouth.

My feelings of inadequacy were not unusual, said David L. Evans, the Saturn/Apollo electrical engineer hired by Harvard in 1969 to help lead its affirmative action program. When Mr. Evans visited public high schools in Arkansas in search of promising black students, he was met with skepticism. “Even people who didn’t have any mean-spiritedness would say to the students, ‘You going to be up there with the Kennedys?’ ” he recalled. “ ‘How do you think you can make it there?’ ”

There was anxiety, too, among the originators of race-based affirmative action programs. “The idealistic version of why these universities embraced racial affirmative action is that they said, ‘Hey, we’re in the business of training elites, it would be better for America if there were a diverse elite,’ ” said Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and author of “The Big Test,” a history of the SAT and the rise of America’s meritocracy. To its architects, the minority recruitment was the next phase for universities that for years had paved the way for whites, particularly the offspring of upper-class alumni, Mr. Lemann said.

“The cynical version of why they did this is they said, ‘We can’t control this country, it’s becoming too diverse, we need to socialize the brighter minorities and make them more like us.’ ”

In many ways, being molded into people “more like us” gave the children of 1969 an advantage denied most of their white counterparts. They learned to navigate within a second world. They also absorbed some of its ideas and values. And they paved the way for the next generation.

“We had to go through this phase of larger integration for Barack Obama to be possible,” Mr. Gates said in an interview a few days after his arrest. “It would have been impossible for Barack Obama to go from a historic black school to become president, at this time. The whole point is that a broad swath of America had to be able to identify with him.”

It also enabled Mr. Obama to run “the most race-blind campaign” of any black presidential candidate, said Gwen Ifill, the PBS news reporter whose book “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama” examines the rise of African-Americans in politics.

Perhaps. But the children of 1969 dwell in a complex world. They retain an ethnic identity that includes its own complement of cultural, historical and psychological issues and considerations. This emerged at Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings. And it emerged again last week, when Mr. Obama joked in the White House East Room that if he ran afoul of the police, “I’d get shot.” In saying this, he seemed to draw on the fears of black men across the United States, including those within the new power elite.

What Mr. Obama seemed to be demonstrating was what Mr. Lemann of Columbia calls a “double consciousness” that allows the children of 1969 to flow more easily between the world which their skin color bequeathed them and the world which their college degree opened up for them.

It’s the same double consciousness I acquired at U.N.C., though I didn’t think about it that way as a student. Sure, my white friends were learning a little more about black (and African) culture from me. But I was absorbing much more from them, since they surrounded me in such great number. At the time it seemed I had the advantage; I would leave college having gotten much more from my interactions with my white friends than they could possibly have gotten from me. And the principal thing I learned was how to make them feel at ease around me.

Except, of course, on those occasions when one can’t. Life outside the university doesn’t duplicate the conditions of university life.

“I can’t wear my Harvard gown everywhere I go,” Professor Gates said. “We — all of us in the crossover generation — have multiple identities, and being black trumps all of those other identities.”

On Friday Mr. Obama said he hoped Mr. Gates’s incident might become a “teachable moment.” It is a daunting task for the children of 1969: finding out whether the double consciousness they honed in the Ivy League can actually get this country to listen — and react — to race in a different way.

Helene Cooper, a White House correspondent for The Times, is the author of “The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood.”

6960: Relating To Racial Profiling.

From The Chicago Tribune…

Black males’ fear of racial profiling very real, regardless of class

Several African American professionals find professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s recent encounter with police all too easy to relate to. Their lingering question is when to speak up.

By Richard Fausset and P.J. Huffstutter

Reporting from Atlanta and Fort Wayne, Ind.

Like Henry Louis Gates Jr., they are professionals, men of status and achievement who have excelled in a nation that once shunned black men.

And for many of them, their only shock—upon learning of the celebrated scholar’s recent run-in with police—was the moment of recognition.

They know too well the pivotal moment Gates faced at his Massachusetts home. It was that moment of suspicion when confronted by police, the moment one wonders, in a flash of panic, anger or confusion: Maybe I am being treated this way because I’m black.

Next comes the pivotal question: Do I protest or just take it?

Kwame Dunston says he has made the calculated choice to take it—repeatedly. The public school administrator says he has been pulled over more than 20 times in the last decade, but has rarely been issued a ticket. What factor other than race, he wondered, would account for all of those stops?

“It’s more important for me to make it home than to fight for a cause I’m not going to win,” he said.

Dunston, 36, a New York resident who was in Atlanta this week, pointed to the interior of his 2006 Toyota Camry. It was showroom-clean. He doesn’t want police to think he has something to hide.

“My job,” Dunston said, “is to make sure they don’t have any question about what’s inside the car.”

Such anxiety, deeply rooted in the African American experience, has endured into the era of the first black president.

For many black men, the feeling of remaining inherently suspect never goes away, no matter their wealth and status and the efforts by police forces to avoid abuses in profiling.

Lawrence Otis Graham, author of a book on affluent African Americans, said wealthy blacks may, in fact, be subjected to more racial profiling than others.

In upscale white neighborhoods, they sometimes stand out. In fancy restaurants, they’re sometimes mistaken for help. “We become almost numbed by the constant presumptions,” said Graham.

New attention

Those issues came crashing back into the spotlight with the arrest of Gates, a 58-year-old Harvard University professor, on July 16.

Early that afternoon, Cambridge police showed up at Gates’ home, responding to a tip on a possible break-in. Gates was inside the house, after reportedly forcing open a stuck door.

According to his police report, Sgt. James Crowley asked Gates to step outside to talk, and Gates began screaming, accusing Crowley of being a “racist police officer.”

Gates was arrested on suspicion of disorderly conduct, a charge later dropped. A number of people—most prominently, President Obama—rushed to his defense.

But Lorenzo Wyche, 32, is among those who wonder whether Gates picked the right time to take a stand. Wyche, a black restaurateur and Atlanta resident, said that his generation may not be as quick to ascribe nefarious motives to police as Gates’ generation. “I didn’t grow up with dogs chasing me down,” he said.

And yet Wyche is also gripped at times by the gnawing suspicion that his black skin makes him a target. He was recently driving in midtown Atlanta. In front of him, an attractive white woman walked across the road, catching his eye. Behind him, a white policeman turned on his lights and pulled Wyche over.

But there would be no fireworks. The officer warned Wyche about an expired tag on his Porsche, and drove away.

“So that was my moment,” Wyche said, with a laugh. “Did he run my tag just because I stared at this white girl?”

Wyche figures he will never know whether he was profiled. He prefers this mystery to the possible more serious outcomes. At the same time, the difficulty in proving profiling has created problems for police. Last year, members of the Los Angeles Police Department’s civilian oversight panel were incredulous when department officials announced that not one of more than 300 racial profiling complaints was found to have merit.

A Times review of department documents later showed that no claims of profiling—more than 1,200—had been upheld in at least six years. (Racial profiling isn’t confined to black men; women and other groups can be targeted as well.)

But LAPD Chief William J. Bratton dismissed criticism, saying that profiling allegations hinge on what the officer was thinking, and therefore are nearly impossible to prove. “How,” he said, “do you get inside someone’s mind?”

For some black men, the solution is to try to avoid the possibility of confrontation altogether. Graham, the author, lives with his family on a large spread in the mostly white suburb of Westchester, N.Y. When the house alarm goes off, his wife goes to the front gate to meet police. He fears that if he goes instead, they will mistake him for an intruder.

Vibert White, a University of Central Florida history professor, recalled driving along an Indiana highway and spotting a line of cars pulled to the side of the road. All of the drivers were black men. So White, too, pulled over, figuring that was expected of black men.

An officer walked up and asked him why he had stopped.

“I told him that I’d seen the line of cars and just reacted,” said White, 51. “He told me, ‘Sir, you can go on with your business.’ I realized how deeply ingrained this lesson had become—of not causing a ruckus, of just playing the game, of doing what you needed to do in order to live your life.”

Years earlier, he said, he had challenged a traffic stop and ended up in handcuffs.

In Detroit, Tony Spearman-Leach, 42, chief communications officer of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, said he gets tailed by police three or four times a year. He gets pulled over, on average, once a year, but has never received a ticket.

He keeps his replies clear, respectful and short. Each time the officer walks up to his black 1991 Volvo S70 sedan, his mind weighs the same questions.

“I know it’s because I’m black, and I’m driving the most conservative car you can get your hands on,” Spearman-Leach said. “But you have to weigh what to do. If I fight, am I going to escalate the matter? Is this a battle worth fighting?”

Fighting it

Leach’s answer has always been no. But before the Gates incident, other black voices had been encouraging people to say yes.

In January, Baratunde Thurston, a contributor to the influential blog Jack & Jill Politics (which bills itself as a voice of the “black bourgeoisie”) argued that with a black president entering office, it was important to speak up about such issues, rather than bury the lingering problems of race.

In the past, speaking up has sometimes brought real change. In 1992, Robert L. Wilkins, a Washington attorney, refused a Maryland trooper’s attempt to search his rental car with a drug dog. His federal lawsuit forced the state to enact a new training regimen for troopers, and to end race-based blanket drug sweeps.

But fighting back does not always yield such results.

In 1997, Aaron Campbell argued with sheriff’s deputies in Orange County, Fla., after he was pulled over for a suspected lane-change violation. He was pepper-sprayed and thrown in a police car. Campbell happened to be a major in the Miami-Dade Police Department.

“I think that if I was a white major on the turnpike, and was stopped unlawfully, they would have said, ‘Hey, major, go on about your business,’ “ Campbell said.

Campbell was found guilty of resisting arrest. The sheriff’s deputies said race had nothing to do with it. Campbell’s federal civil suit went nowhere.

Times staff writers Kate Linthicum and Joel Rubin contributed to this report.

6956: Police Chief Diversity Officer…?

The Associated Press story below appeared at NPR.org. Look for this cop to land a job on Madison Avenue as a Chief Diversity Officer. Or minimally win a position on the Omnicom or Ogilvy & Mather diversity advisory committees.

Officer Who Arrested Gates Teaches Diversity Class

AP — The white police sergeant criticized by President Barack Obama for arresting black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his Massachusetts home is a police academy expert on cultural diversity.

Cambridge Sgt. James Crowley has taught a class on diversity for five years at the Lowell Police Academy after being hand-picked for the job by former police Commissioner Ronny Watson, who is black, said Academy Director Thomas Fleming.

“I have nothing but the highest respect for him as a police officer. He is very professional and he is a good role model for the young recruits in the police academy,” Fleming said on Thursday.

The course, called “Racial Profiling,” teaches about different cultures that officers could encounter in their community “and how you don’t want to single people out because of their ethnic background or the culture they come from,” Fleming said.

Obama said the Cambridge officers “acted stupidly” in arresting Gates last week when they responded to his house after a woman reported a suspected break-in.

Crowley, 42, has maintained he did nothing wrong and has refused to apologize, as Gates has demanded.

Crowley responded to Gates’ home near Harvard University last week to investigate a report of a burglary and demanded Gates show him identification. Police say Gates at first refused, flew into a rage and accused the officer of racism.

Gates was charged with disorderly conduct. The charge was dropped Tuesday.

Gates’ supporters maintain his arrest was a case of racial profiling. Officers were called to the home by a woman who said she saw “two black males with backpacks” trying to break in the front door. Gates has said he arrived home from an overseas trip and the door was jammed.

Obama was asked about the arrest of Gates, who is a friend, at the end of a nationally televised news conference on health care Wednesday night.

“I think it’s fair to say, No. 1, any of us would be pretty angry,” Obama said. “No. 2, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. And No. 3, 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.”

In radio interviews Thursday morning, Crowley maintained he followed procedure.

“I support the president of the United States 110 percent. I think he was way off base wading into a local issue without knowing all the facts as he himself stated before he made that comment,” Crowley told WBZ-AM. “I guess a friend of mine would support my position, too.”

Crowley did not immediately respond to messages left Thursday by the AP. The Cambridge police department scheduled a news conference for later Thursday.

Gates has said he was “outraged” by the arrest. He said the white officer walked into his home without his permission and arrested him only as the professor followed him to the porch, repeatedly demanding the sergeant’s name and badge number because he was unhappy over his treatment.

“This isn’t about me; this is about the vulnerability of black men in America,” Gates said.

He said the incident made him realize how vulnerable poor people and minorities are “to capricious forces like a rogue policeman, and this man clearly was a rogue policeman.”

The president said federal officials need to continue working with local law enforcement “to improve policing techniques so that we’re eliminating potential bias.”

Fellow officers, black and white, say Crowley is well-liked and respected on the force. Crowley was a campus police officer at Brandeis University in July 1993 when he administered CPR trying to save the life of former Boston Celtics player Reggie Lewis. Lewis, who was black, collapsed and died during an off-season workout.

Gov. Deval Patrick, who is black, said he was troubled and upset about the incident.

Cambridge Mayor Denise Simmons, who also is black, has said she spoke with Gates and apologized on behalf of the city, and a statement from the city called the July 16 incident “regrettable and unfortunate.”

The mayor refused Thursday to comment on the president’s remarks.

Police supporters charge that Gates, director of Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, was responsible for his own arrest by overreacting.

Black students and professors at Harvard have complained for years about racial profiling by Cambridge and campus police. Harvard commissioned an independent committee last year to examine the university’s race relations after campus police confronted a young black man who was using tools to remove a bike lock. The man worked at Harvard and owned the bike.

6955: Acting Stupidly.

Dumbing down the news in a MultiCultClassics Monologue…

• President Barack Obama weighed in on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. by remarking, “I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry. Number two, that the Cambridge [Mass.] police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.” Hey, it’s unlikely the cops are Harvard graduates.

• A subscriber to the now-defunct Vibe Magazine has filed a class-action lawsuit, charging the publication with failing to notify or refund money to subscribers. The suit complains, “This conduct includes … continuing to sell subscriptions to Vibe Magazine to consumers without disclosing that the company was on the brink of ceasing its operations.” In lieu of a refund, maybe they could offer free Black porn videos and obscene ringers from the magazine’s last remaining advertisers.

• Kool Moe Dee is making news as part of a group of performers backing new legislation that would require radio stations to cough up performance royalties. Let’s hope the artists fare better than Vibe subscribers.

6949: Fifteen Ways…

6948: Gates Counterpoint.

From The New York Daily News…

Henry Louis Gates should skip the racial histrionics: Instead, teach kids to cooperate with cops

By Michael Meyers, Special to NYDailyNews.com

The most famous black professor at Harvard lives in a very safe neighborhood because, in part, residents look out for and report suspicious activities, and because cops respond quickly to reports of possible break-ins. Yet that’s not how Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, took it when cops showed up at his door after a neighbor reported two black men (Gates and his driver) seemingly pushing into a vacant residence, which turned out to be Gates’ home.

He was arrested for disorderly conduct, and the rest is now histrionic history. (The charges have since been dropped, but the incident is not going away.)

Gates was returning from a trip to China, and he couldn’t get in through a jammed front door, so he apparently went around the back, shut off an alarm and worked with his driver to get the door open.

In any neighborhood — especially one of the safest in America — that kind of behavior would be cause for suspicion and a call to the cops, no matter the color of the guys “breaking” in.

But when police showed up, the “he said, he said” has Gates indignant and, according to the cop, refusing to present himself and his ID, then complying and at some point getting loud - with Gates saying, according to the police report, “Why, because I’m a black man in America?”

Had I been the cop, I would have probably gotten suspended for saying to Gates: “No, stupid, because I need you to step outside so that I may do my job. I need to know that you are who you say you are.”

The cop’s job is not the most famous black professor at Harvard’s concern. Yet Gates’ automatic reflex was racial — that of a victim rather than a property lessee. The man with all the brains did not have the common sense of the average citizen who appreciates good and effective police work.

Calling the cops when one sees suspicious activities underway is exactly what good neighbors do. It is what a woman who works nearby did — and all indications are she acted in good faith. When cops follow up on such a report by asking suspicious persons who’ve seemingly gained entry to a vacant house to present ID, they are doing their jobs.

Nevertheless, Gates and the race industry spokesmen who’ve rushed to his defense have leaped to the fast conclusion that this was an incident of racial profiling — and that one of America’s most famed black academics was a victim of police misconduct. Choice reaction by the Rev. Al Sharpton: “I’ve heard of driving while black, and I’ve heard of shopping while black. But I’ve never heard of living in a home while black.”

Give me a break. Why isn’t it enough that the charges of disorderly conduct have been dropped against Gates? The question answers itself: The race activists need to posture that the nation has to pause and contemplate and endure yet another round of guilt around their “truth” and constant observation of racism by cops. “See,” they exclaim, “in postracial America, the black man with a Ph.D. can’t get into his own home without causing suspicion and getting arrested.”

The real truth is that Gates did not get arrested for being black or even for being suspicious or for breaking into his own home. He was arrested for disorderly conduct — for failing to do what civil rights activists and race experts always advise innocent black men, and all others who come into contact with the police, to do: cooperate.

It makes sense to repeat this message now, especially for the benefit of young black men. If the police confront you, don’t go demanding badge numbers and reading the cops the riot act. Be courteous and calm. Explain yourself and, if asked, present ID.

If there has been a constitutional violation of some kind by the cops, that can be taken care of once the police have left you alone, moving on — let’s hope — to investigate other suspicious behavior.

Meyers is executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition.