Is Obama an angry black man?

President Obama definitely raised some eyebrows when he answered a reporters question about the disorderly conduct arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. He said, even though he admitted not a lot of knowledge of the facts of the case, that he didn't know what role race played in his arrest. This is troubling, that the president of the United States assumes that because a black man was arrested for disorderly conduct, that race played a role. He went on to say, even though admitting he didn't know the facts of the case that the Cambridge police acted stupidly. As more comes out about this incident, it is becoming clearer that the only one who injected race into this incident is professor Gates, and now our president, and there is no reason to assume that officer Crowley would have acted any differently if he was confronting a white professor who became verbally abusive.

This comment all took place in the context of a press conference about health care, where vague and incomplete answers were the rule of the night, that is up until this question. The president had the perfect opportunity to take a huge step forward into the post racial era by simply stating, as Charles Krauthammer said," professor Gates is a friend of mine, and thus I'm inclined to believe him, but not knowing the facts of the case I'll decline comment." Instead he fell back into his default position, "blacks in America are victims of institutional racism," something probably ingrained from twenty years of Reverend Wright's sermons.