Cop in Gates case: I'm not racist - I gave mouth-to-mouth to black NBA player

By GottaLaff

Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley says that he's not racist for arresting Henry Louis Gates, citing the CPR he gave the Celtics star Reggie Lewis (below) as proof.

Pam says it better than I could even hope to, so I won't even try:

The Cambridge cop who arrested Dr. Henry Louis Gates in his own home told the press that he's not racist, as Gates has charged, because he tried to save the life of Celtics star Reggie Lewis 16 years ago by giving him CPR. [...]
The Cambridge cop prominent Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. claims is a racist gave a dying Reggie Lewis mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in a desperate bid to save the Celtics superstar's life 16 years ago Monday.

"I wasn't working on Reggie Lewis the basketball star. I wasn't working on a black man. I was working on another human being," Sgt. James Crowley, in an exclusive interview with the Herald, said of the forward's fatal heart attack July 27, 1993, at age 27 during an off-season practice at Brandeis University, where Crowley was a campus police officer.

It's a date Crowley still can recite by rote - and he still recalls the pain he suffered when people back then questioned whether he had done enough to save the black athlete. "Some people were saying 'There's the guy who killed Reggie Lewis' afterward. I was broken-hearted. I cried for many nights," he said.

Crowley, 42, said he's not a racist, despite how some have cast his actions in the Gates case. "Those who know me know I'm not," he said.

As a campus police officer who is trained in CPR, did he think he had the option to refuse to give mouth-to-mouth to Lewis? Are we supposed to think he was so heroic that he was willing to touch his mouth to the lips of a black man in front of all those people? Honestly, this only raises some seriously uncomfortable questions about Crowley's thinking if he's using this to somehow "prove" he isn't racist. [...]

The real issue here, and it will likely not be discussed nearly as much as the race angle, is the class angle. Professor Gates, during his angry tête-à-tête with Crowley, tossed down the "don't you know who I am" card (to be precise, in the report it says Gates told him he had "no idea who he was messing with"). [...]

Now that is no excuse for Crowley's incomprehensible arrest of Gates for yelling at him after the prof had already provided two forms of ID to prove who he is and that he lived in the residence, it's simply another factor that must be considered in this mess -- something that will obviously receive less play in the press than race, since class is also a third rail topic much of the time.

Please go read the whole thing. I just provided snippets.