Gates: 'Thank God' for Cops

The beer meeting at the White House has come and gone, but Henry Louis Gates offers a postscript: "I thank God that I live in a country in which police officers put their lives at risk to protect us every day," he writes in the Root, where he is editor in chief. The Harvard professor also thanks President Obama for bringing him and Sgt. Crowley together. "Our country is blessed to have such a leader," he writes.

For Gates, he and Crowley have become "metaphors, really" in a national racial narrative. Now, he writes, the two must "utilize the great opportunity that fate has given us to foster greater sympathy among the American public for the daily perils of policing on the one hand, and for the genuine fears of racial profiling on the other hand." (More Henry Louis Gates Jr stories.)