Let me declare my bias up front. No, I am not a friend of Henry “Skip” Gates, but I had an encounter with the Cambridge police similar to that of the good professor—36 years ago!
The strange saga involving an African-American Harvard professor, a white Cambridge, Mass., police officer and a crash course in racial politics may have reached a (somewhat) happy ending—or at least an interesting one—now that President Obama has invited Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley to the White House to try to work it all out together.