It's clear from the video clip below that the entire Gatesgate affair has been a stressful ordeal for Lucia Whalen. She is the woman who made the 911 call that led to the arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., the "stupidly" remark by President Obama, endless hours of cable news chatter and tomorrow's "beer summit."
After the 911 tape revealed that Ms. Whalen did not identify Gates and his driver as "black men," the cable news channels concluded that she must not be a racist after all. It's fortunate for Ms. Whalen that she could not see well enough to identify the race of the men, else they would still be calling her "racist." Is it just me, or has the country gone stark raving mad?
A clearly distressed Lucia Whalen addressed reporters at a press conference in an effort to clear her name after the city released the 911 tape. It revealed that Whalen did not identify either of the men she thought she saw trying to break into Gates' home as black, even though an initial police report said she did.
"When I was called racist and I was a target of scorn and ridicule because of the things I never said, the criticisms hurt me as a person, but it also hurt the community of Cambridge," Whalen said. Whalen said repeatedly in the July 16 call that she didn't have a good vantage point and could not see what the two men trying to get into the home looked like. When pressed by a dispatcher on whether the men were white, black or Hispanic, Whalen said one of them might have been Hispanic.
Progressive Politics Race, Class, Gender News Gatesgate Cambridge