WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s summary of the furor over a black Harvard professor’s arrest was so understated, and perhaps obvious, that it barely rose above the cable-news driven din.
“Race is still a troubling aspect of our society,” the nation’s first black president said Friday, as he tried to tamp down a controversy he had helped fuel two days earlier.
Without doubt.
What’s less clear, however, is whether Obama’s history-making election is triggering changes in the day-to-day racial interactions of ordinary Americans.
After all, if one of the country’s most prominent black scholars can be arrested in his home after a heated exchange with a white police officer, doesn’t that suggest Obama’s racial breakthroughs apply more to the political world than to the broader society?
No, say a variety of people who welcomed his plunge into the controversy. He is uniquely positioned, they say, to pour light on one troubling issue — racial profiling by police — and to nudge the nation to talk more openly about race in general, if only for a short while.
“Obama’s election gives us someone in a position of authority to speak personally to this experience,” said James Lai, director of the ethnic- studies program at Santa Clara University in California. Questions of whether police officers disproportionately stop minorities for questioning and frisking “will get a much more thorough debate now,” he said.
But Obama “has to walk a very fine line” when discussing race, Lai said. “He must be careful not to fall into the box of being the black candidate.”
Even Obama was surprised by the intensity of the uproar over the arrest of professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. by Cambridge, Mass., officers who were checking a possible burglary report, which proved unfounded. At a Wednesday news conference, Obama said the officers had “acted stupidly” after they realized Gates was in his own home.
After two days of wall-to-wall media coverage, Obama placed conciliatory calls Friday to Gates and the arresting officer.
Obama’s actions will probably help that cause, and over time, he will reshape other parts of America’s racial fabric, said Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
His impact “will be measured in time” on the way it affects white Americans “and the lives and morale of black families,” said Guillory, a Louisiana native and former journalist. “To have a young, black family in the White House remains a powerful symbol, a powerful message, without any words being attached to it,” he said. “We can’t know the impact just yet.”
