This is hopefully my last article on the Gates/Crowley/Obama shenanigans. So as you know the shit went down in Cambridge a couple weeks ago, and no one was ready. Anyone who has enrolled in Cypress Hill 101 knows that when the shit goes down, you better damn well be ready.
Anyway, I jumped to some conclusions about the woman who made the 911 call, but after listening to the recording of the call, I have to take back the snarky statements I made about the woman being racist.
The woman, Lucie Whalen has been hounded by the press relentlessly. So much so that she has hired an attorney and released a statement to the press:
The woman who dialed 911 to report a possible break-in at the home of black Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. said during a tear-filled news conference in Cambridge Wednesday that she did the right thing calling the police and people who called her racist never understood the situation.
She said if she had to do it all over again, she would call the police again and she hopes the release of the tape recordings of her 911 call to police will vindicate her actions and intentions.
After listening to the call, it seems pretty clear that she was simply doing her civic duty. She didn’t mention race at all; it was only after being pressed by the police as to whether the suspected burglars were white, black, or Hispanic that she said one of them might have been Hispanic. (I am in no way intimating that the 911 emergency operator was racist either; it’s a legitimate question, obviously. We wouldn’t want 911 callers to have to describe people without reference to their race: “There’s a guy–I think he’s trying to break into a house. I can’t say if he’s black or not. No, no, I’m not color blind. I can tell whether or not he’s black, I just can’t say it. Saying “black” is racist! His skin is the color of a Snickers bar. No, I can’t say that he’s Hispanic either. Saying “Hispanic” is racist! What color is the house? Oh it’s black, with Hispanic trim.”
