Lets talk about Race...

Okay I have had many conversations over the last few days about the Gates-Crowley affair.

We can go back and forth over whether it involved racial profiling. I have come to the sad conclusion that a persons views on this issue is mainly determined via the prism of their ethnicity (at least in the case of the media, or even in my own) .

I personally can not detach my own feelings and experiences from this situation.

But that all being said, this story is probably the greatest example of why racism/bigotry/biases are so hard to talk about.

People literally do not realize when they are doing it. This letter is disturbing on so many levels. Here are some follow up commentary by, Andrew Sullivan and Jeffery Goldberg.

And the CNN story that is sort of its coda.

A Boston police officer who sent a mass e-mail — in which he referred to Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. as a “banana-eating jungle monkey” — has apologized, saying he’s not a racist.

Officer Justin Barrett told a local television station on Wednesday night that he was sorry for the e-mail.

“I regret that I used such words,” Barrett told CNN affiliate WCVB. “I have so many friends of every type of culture and race you can name. I am not a racist.”

Now you can form your own opinions on this. No matter what person says or does, they in the sanctity of their own mind never thinks their actions are tinged by bias.

An article that deals with some of the statistics on the racial profiling subject in Illinois. Once again the Atlantic.

-Cheers