When political correctness comes before safety and honesty
Is race a detail that is too sensitive to be in a police report?
Now that the much anticipated “Beer Summit” is over, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Sgt. James Crowley, and Barack Obama now say that they can move on past the arrest incident and subsequent controversy surrounding the event.
Yet only the day before, the final piece of this bizarre puzzle came forward to have her say. Lucia Whalen, the woman who made the call to Cambridge police that she thought someone might have broken in to the home of her neighbor, Gates.
In a press conference on Wednesday, Whalen explained that she has suffered through this whole ordeal for words that she never said regarding the suspected burglars’ race.
But perhaps the most disturbing part of her strange statement is how she characterized her call. (At 3:05)
“Now that the tapes are out, I hope people can see, that I tried to be careful and honest with my words.”
In the video she also explained how well she was raised and how she is not a racist, how she learned to judge people not by their skin color but their character, and every other cliche about how to respect one another’s differences that we heard in the first grade.
But since when does giving a proper description of a suspect constitute racism? What if she had in fact seen two black men trying to knock down the door? If Whalen was more concerned with being “careful” than accurate, then there could have been a serious problem.
Conversations on race in America today more about being “careful” than being honest, and that seems to have extended to what one can say to the police. The fear of being called a racist is amplified when the president of the United States feels that it is appropriate to comment on the situation.
The “teaching moment” that Obama claims came from the event is a lesson that we should ignore: the practice of “being careful” about naming a suspect’s race has overtaken the need for honesty and safety in reporting a crime.
