THE CAMBRIDGE CONFRONTATION - SGT CROWLEY AND PROFESSOR GATES: AN OPEN INVITATION TO THE REAL "TEACHABLE MOMENT"

July 30, 2009

 

THE CAMBRIDGE CONFRONTATION - SGT CROWLEY AND PROFESSOR GATES: AN OPEN INVITATION TO THE REAL "TEACHABLE MOMENT"

In 2007, Sergeant James Crowley and a colleague from the Cambridge, MA police department traveled cross-country to participate in a 3- day workshop on Racial Profiling at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. This Perspectives on Profiling™ workshop uses highly interactive virtual learning technology to train law enforcement professionals to address difficult questions and concerns over racial profiling and then bring the training back to their colleagues. Outstanding participants are invited back for more advanced training and in 2008, Sgt. Crowley returned.

In 1994, Professor Henry Louis Gates was invited by the Wiesenthal Center to deliver its Third Annual "State of Antisemitism" Lecture in New York. In his remarks, Professor Gates said this: "We must acknowledge our diversity even while we identify with each other… In short, place a priority in our shared humanity and identify not as a n****r … nor kike but as man, permitted to be man." Professor Gates was invited because of a 1992 New York Times op/ed in which he courageously took on and condemned an "academic"

book by Louis Farrakhan that charged Jews played a central role in the Slave Trade between Africa and the Americas. Gates acknowledged that he drew on the Center’s groundbreaking study, "Farrakhan’s Reign of Historical Error," for his work.

In the wake of the huge controversy that put these two men at odds, the Wiesenthal Center and its Museum of Tolerance, are seizing on what President Obama is calling "a teachable moment," by inviting media to get a glimpse into how their Tools for Tolerance® training programs, especially Perspectives on Profiling™, work and to see how the workshops, exercises and the immersive interactive experience of the Museum of Tolerance are used to train the over 100,000 law enforcement professionals from the United States and abroad who have passed through our doors so far.

For more information, please contact Marcial Laviña in the Center's Public Relations Department, 310-772-2455.