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Gates speaks to an interviewer he knows well

E-mail|Link|Comments () July 22, 2009 02:54 PM

By Globe Staff

Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. is speaking out about his arrest by a Cambridge police officer to a familiar interviewer, his own daughter, Elizabeth Gates, in a piece posted on The Daily Beast website.

"If I had been white this incident never would have happened. ... So race definitely played a role. Whether he's an individual racist? I don't know -- I don't know him. But I think he stereotyped me. And that's what racial profiling is all about. I was cast by him in a narrative, and he didn't know how to get out of it," Gates said in the interview.

Elizabeth Gates said in the piece, which is presented as an informal conversation between her and her father, that her family is "both saddened and outraged" at the incident.

Controversy is swirling around Gates's arrest last Thursday outside his own home in Cambridge. Gates is a renowned black African-American studies professor; the sergeant who arrested him was white. Authorities dropped criminal charges Tuesday, but the story made headlines nationally and sparked debate over racism and racial profiling.