It is genuinely sad. The woman who tried to help by stopping a possible crime ends up receiving death threats and denounced as a racist.
The now-demonized 911 caller never even mentioned the race of the men until she was ASKED by the 911 operator:
911: Were they white, black or Hispanic?
Whalen: Umm, well there were two larger men, one looked kind of Hispanic but I’m not really sure. And the other one entered and I didn’t see what he looked like at all.
And even then she didn’t say that the men were black.
But that doesn’t stop the REAL racists from attacking her.
Lucia Whalen tearfully said, “I was called racist – I was scorned and ridiculed because of things I never said.” And the people who made her cry, the people who attacked a woman who performed a public service by getting involved and calling the police when she witnessed a possible crime in progress, are the ones who are racist.
911 caller in Gates case hurt by racist label
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — The woman who dialed 911 to report a possible break-in at the home of black Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. said Thursday she was pained to be wrongly labeled a racist based on words she never said and hoped the recently released recording of the call would put the controversy to rest.
With a trembling voice, Lucia Whalen, 40, said she was out walking to lunch in Gates’ Cambridge neighborhood near Harvard University when an elderly woman without a cell phone stopped her because she was concerned there was a possible burglary in progress.
Whalen was vilified as a racist on blogs after a police report said she described the possible burglars as “two black males with backpacks.”
Tapes of the call released earlier this week revealed that Whalen did not mention race. When pressed by a dispatcher on whether the men were white, black or Hispanic, she said one of them might have been Hispanic.
“Now that the tapes are out, I hope people can see that I tried to be careful and honest with my words,” Whalen said. “It never occurred to me that the way I reported what I saw be analyzed by an entire nation.”
Cambridge police Commissioner Robert Haas acknowledged that the police report contains a reference to race, but said the report is merely a summary of events. The arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, has said his information on the race of the suspects came during a brief encounter with Whalen outside Gates’ house; she contradicted that Thursday, saying she made no such description.
The arrest of Gates for disorderly conduct in his own home by a white police officer sparked a national debate over racial profiling and police conduct. The controversy intensified when President Obama said police “acted stupidly” when they arrested Gates, his friend.
Gates has said he was outraged and has demanded an apology from Crowley; Crowley said he followed protocol and responded to Gates’ “tumultuous behavior” appropriately.
Whalen, a Harvard alumni magazine employee who is a first-generation Portuguese-American, said she lived in fear during the immediate aftermath of the arrest when she was dogged for comment and maligned based on the information attributed to her in the police report.
“The criticism at first was so painful I was frankly afraid to say anything. People called me racist. Some even said threatening things that made me fear for my safety,” said Whalen, whose husband, Paul, put his hand on her shoulder in comfort her as she spoke. “I knew the truth, but I didn’t speak up right away because I did not want to add to the controversy.”
She said she felt more comfortable speaking publicly after the tapes were released. She refused to answer any questions about the police report or what she saw that day.
“I am proud to have been raised by two loving parents who instilled in me values including love one another, be kind to strangers and do not judge people based on race, ethnicity or any other feature than their character,” she said. […]
“I was called racist and I was a target of scorn and ridicule because of the things I never said,” she said. “The criticism hurt me as a person, but it also hurt the community of Cambridge.”
Lucia Whalen was raised by her parents to love one another, to be kind to strangers, and to not judge people based on their race, ethnicity, or any other feature but their character. Martin Luther King would have applauded her as everything he wanted to see in an American.
But the “Civil Rights” movement was long-ago hijacked by people who actively despise Martin Luther King’s prescription:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Unfortunately, we now have men like Henry Louis Gates, Jeremiah Wright, and the close personal friend of both men, Barack Obama. And they are men who seem to have King’s standard turned completely around.
Watch Henry Louis Gates and tell me that he isn’t consumed by race and by racism, as opposed to concentrating upon the content of anybody’s character:
Here’s another little racist gem from Henry Louis Gates:
GATES: Probably. I didn’t know until — in 1959 we were watching Mike Wallace’s documentary called “The Hate that Hate Produced.” It was about the Nation of Islam and I couldn’t believe — I mean, Malcolm X was talking about the white man was the devil and standing up in white people’s faces and telling them off. It was great. I mean, it’s what black people did behind closed doors, but they would never do it in — I mean, they were too vulnerable to do it, say, where they worked, at the paper mill or downtown, as we would call it. And here was a guy who had the nerve to do that, and I think if I had been a character in a cartoon, my eyes would have gone Doing! — like this. I couldn’t believe it. As I sat cowering in a corner of our living room, I glanced over at Mama and her face was radiant. I mean, this smile — beatific smile started to transform her face. And she said quite quietly, “Amen.” And then she said, “All right now,” and she sat up and she said, “Yes.”
Gates describes his and his mother’s experience with hard-core racism – the labeling of an entire race of people as “devils” – as a spiritual epiphany bordering on a religious experience. And what chance did Sgt. James Crowley have when a 911 call reporting a possible break-in have when he encountered such fanatic racist zeal?
And there’s absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Sgt. James Crowley – who appears to be a model police officer – thinks anywhere nearly as poorly of black men as Henry Louis Gates thinks of white men. And it has been Gates who has made the incident not only racial but racist since the moment he first laid eyes on Sgt. Crowley. Because Gates was a racist since long before the two men ever met.
Now add another racially biased man who “acted stupidly,” Barack Obama. From the LA Times on July 25, 2009 (page A18):
Describing Crowley as an “outstanding police officer,” the president said: “Even when you’ve got a police officer who has a fine track record on racial sensitivity, interactions between police officers and the African American community can sometimes be fraught with misunderstanding.”
That’s nice, Barry. Are you saying that even an outstanding (white) police officer is still racially biased, or are you saying that the African American community is so trapped in racism – like Obama’s own close personal friend ‘Skip’ Gates – that it doesn’t really matter how racially sensitive a white officer is?
Obama once said of his white grandmother:
“The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity, but that she is a typical white person. If she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know – there’s a reaction in her that’s been bred into our experiences that don’t go away and sometimes come out in the wrong way and that’s just the nature of race in our society.”
Maybe Obama is saying that Sgt. Crowley, as a “typical white person,” has his racism “bred into him”? (Didn’t Jimmy the Greek get fired for saying something about racial “breeding”?). Perhaps THAT is why Obama was so quick to jump to the conclusion of racial bias – even right after admitting that he didn’t know any of the facts of the case – in his now infamous press conference?
Let us not forget, in the first Jeremiah Wright sermon Barack Obama ever heard he heard Wright describe a world where “where white folks’ greed runs a world in need.“ And something clicked for Obama so powerfully that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright became his pastor, his mentor, and his spiritual leader for the next 23 years. And Barack Obama voluntarily submitted himself and his family to plenty of sermons demonizing the white man in the years since.
I listened to the tapes of the hateful sermons that came out of Barack Obama’s Trinity United Church, and I couldn’t get past the question, “How could Obama stay there for so long?” Obama said that none of those hateful messages impacted him, but there is little question that they in fact affected him deeply.
This isn’t about whites vs. blacks. There are plenty of decent people of both races. Take a black female police officer who stood by her fellow police officer, was appalled by the racist displays she saw, and said, “I voted for Obama. I will not vote for him again.”
And there are plenty of slimebags of both races too. A Boston police officer who had nothing whatsoever to do with the Gates arrest called Gates a disgusting racist slur which I shall not repeat in an email.
There are racist white people. There are racist black people. And God knows we don’t need any more of either. The question is, who showed their racism in THIS case? Lucia Whalen and Sgt. James Crowley, or Henry Louis Gates and Barack Obama?
This isn’t about whites vs. blacks. Rather, it’s about a terribly bitter attitude that holds on to racism and officially institutes that racism into social policy – this time just in reverse. It’s perfectly okay to embrace naked racism, as long as you are a member of a “minority.” It’s okay to embrace a “wise Latina” who thinks her decisions are better than those of a “white male”; but a white male who thinks the same of a minority be destroyed. It’s okay to have a “Black Caucus” in Congress; just don’t you DARE have a white one. And as a result the racism of that white Boston cop is rightly damned; the racism of a black Harvard African-American Studies professor is wrongly celebrated.
During his campaign, Barack Obama presented himself as a man who transcended race, and stood as the man who could heal any and all divides. He spent 23 years in a racist church that demonized ‘white America,’ but we believed him because he gave a nice speech. He selected a racially biased “wise Latina woman” who trampled on the rights of white firefighters in New Haven, Connecticut. But that doesn’t appear to matter, either. And now he’s demonstrating that he holds the same racially biased attitutudes as his “friends.” And he doesn’t transcend anything.
That shows in a CNN survey of African-Americans and how they feel about race relations.
“During the 2008 election, 38 percent of blacks surveyed thought racial discrimination was a serious problem. In the new survey, 55 percent of blacks surveyed believed it was a serious problem, which is about the same level as it was in 2000.”
It is frankly amazing to consider that Barack Obama – the first black president of the United States – hasn’t done ANYTHING to change the racial attitude of African-Americans. And the only possible conclusion is that this president has utterly squandered a truly historic opportunity due to his own increasingly apparent personal inadequacies.
I most certainly think race relations has become a serious problem due to Barack Obama. Because he could not help but drag the ghosts of too many men like Jeremiah Wright and Henry Louis Gates with him. And Barack Obama may have the political intelligence to say the “right” things in the future, but – to quote one of his speeches – they will be “just words.”
When Obama, Gates, and Crowley (who is reportedly bringing a lawyer and a union representative to the meeting) get together for a “beer,” you can bet that there will be a lot of empty and hollow “just words” floating around. This entire meeting is nothing more than a political attempt by Obama to fix his own major screw-up.
Start Thinking Right 