Washington Post - Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation's most prominent scholars of African-American history, cast his recent arrest in his home in Cambridge, Mass., as part of a "racial narrative" playing out in a biased criminal justice system. Shortly before the charge against him was dropped this afternoon, the Harvard professor who has spent much of his life studying race in America said he has come to feel like a case study.
"There are one million black men in jail in this country and last Thursday I was one of them," he said in an interview with The Washington Post Tuesday morning. "This is outrageous and that this is how poor black men across the country are treated everyday in the criminal justice system. It's one thing to write about it, but altogether another to experience it."
"I was thinking, this is ridiculous, but I'm going to show him my ID, and this guy is going to get out of my house," Gates said. "This guy had this whole narrative in his head. Black guy breaking and entering." Read more [1].
Links:
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/21/AR2009072101771_2.html?hpid=topnews