Politics

BOSTON (AP) — Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. has sent flowers and a note to the woman who unwittingly sparked a national debate on race by calling police to report what she thought might be a break-in at Gates’ home. Wendy Murphy, the lawyer for Lucia Whalen, called the flowers a “gesture of gratitude.”…

From The American Prospect: Before the big House vote on the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), Representative Tom Perriello had a tough choice to make. Perriello won his seat by a small margin and worried about attacks from Republicans campaigning against the bill. Ultimately, he voted for it, in part because he believes…

From the NY Times: The far-flung Obama clan is coming closer together. President Obama’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, is moving her family here from Hawaii and will spend the next several months living in the nation’s capital, White House officials say. The extended stay means that the siblings will live in the same city, at least…

From our own David Swerdlick, originally published in the NY Daily News: After two weeks of controversy over the arrest of Harvard‘s Henry Louis Gates by the Cambridge Police Department‘s Sgt. James Crowley, I could really go for a cold brew. Couldn’t you? But that Bud Light at the White House last night wasn’t for…

Miller Time at the White House came and went. Most black people and police critics are still shouting, “Tastes great.” White people and police supporters are still shouting, “Less filling.” The deep problem beneath the surface of the Gates-Crowley encounter has not changed at all. Let the teaching begin. The issue now is the future,…

It’s been weeks since his arrest, but here we are still shouting about what happened that fateful day in Cambridge, Mass. And while it is somewhat striking that the murders of Oscar Grant and Sean Bell failed to generate anywhere near the same level of national attention as the Gates-Crowley affair, it is not surprising…

WASHINGTON (AP) — With mugs of beer and more-carefully chosen words, President Barack Obama tried to push himself and the nation beyond a political uproar, hailing a “friendly, thoughtful” conversation with the black professor and white policeman whose dispute had ignited a fierce debate over race in America. “I have always believed that what brings…

We’ve heard President Barack Obama say that the Gates incident is a “teachable moment.” As an attorney and educator, I love teachable moments. However, as a black mother of 24- and 19-year-old sons, I’m confused about what it is that we’re learning. In particular, what lessons will the Cambridge police—and police officers across the nation—learn…

The woman whose 911 call brought the Cambridge police to the home of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. said the last two weeks have been an emotional ordeal in which she feared for her safety after being vilified as a racist. In her first public statement since the incident, Lucia Whalen said she had…

If there’s a silver lining to the otherwise cloudy controversy surrounding the arrest of The Root’s editor-in-chief, Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr., it’s that when Gates and Crowley meet President Barack Obama at the White House for a beer Thursday, it’ll be the ultimate race-relations role reversal. Instead of a black emissary like Booker T.…