No racial consensus on Gates case

A new poll out today shows deep racial divisions over the case of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released this afternoon found that whites tend to blame Gates and blacks tend to fault Cambridge police Sergeant James Crowley, who arrested Gates while responding to a reported possible break-in at the professor's home.

While 58 percent of white respondents and 44 percent of black respondents said that Gates "acted stupidly" in the confrontation, 59 percent of blacks and 29 percent of whites said Crowley "acted stupidly." Also, 66 percent of whites but only 25 percent of blacks said they believed that a white homeowner would have been arrested if they had acted the same way as Gates.

More broadly, 56 percent of blacks but only 6 percent of whites said they had been treated unfairly by police because of their race.

President Obama, who ratcheted up the controversy by initially saying that Cambridge police "acted stupidly," received generally high marks for how he has handled race relations since taking office -- 61 percent total approved, including 92 percent of blacks and 56 percent of whites.

But a majority of all respondents -- including 63 percent of whites -- said Obama acted stupidly with his remarks and 28 percent overall said the episode made them feel less favorable toward the president.

Most respondents, however, said the "beer summit" that Obama hosted with Gates and Crowley last week was a good idea, including three-fourths of black respondents.

Still, 58 percent said the incident has not taught Americans a lesson that will lead to better race relations.

The poll, conducted Friday through Monday, has an overall margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The margin of error is 6.5 percentage points among black respondents, and 3.5 percentage points among whites.