WASHINGTON — Former Secretary of State Colin Powell was mildly critical Tuesday of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Powell, interviewed by CNN’s Larry King, criticized the way Gates dealt with the white officer who responded to reports of a possible break-in.
Powell said he was the target of racial profiling many times and he sometimes got mad.
On one occasion, he said, he tried to meet someone at Reagan National Airport “and nobody thought I could be the national security adviser to the president. I was just a black guy.” Asked how he dealt with the situation, Powell said: “You just suck it up. What are you going to do?
“There is no African-American in this country who has not been exposed to this kind of situation,” Powell said. But, he said, “when you are faced with an officer trying to do his job and get to the bottom of something, this is not the time to get in an argument with him. I was taught that as a child. You don’t argue with a police officer.”
