"Liberals Ought Not To Applaud Such Stereotyping -- They Should Be Fighting it"

Patterico writes (emphasis in original), “The Officer Didn’t Stereotype Henry Louis Gates — Henry Louis Gates Stereotyped the Officer”:

Henry Louis Gates stereotyped Sgt. Crowley. He formed an opinion about Sgt. Crowley based on evidence that was far too limited to justify the conclusion. He formed that opinion based on prejudices he had collected over the course of his life about the group to which Sgt. Crowley belonged. That opinion — that Sgt. Crowley was a racist who needed to be educated about racial profiling — turned out to be wrong.

Gates’s mental process was the same mental process that a racist uses to decide that someone like Gates is less than human. It’s an ignorant way of looking at the world, hardly befitting a Harvard professor. Liberals ought not to applaud such stereotyping. They should be fighting it.

It’s a shame that they don’t. And I don’t think they ever will.

Definitely read the whole thing.

Update: As Michael Barone has noted on a couple of occasions, there’s a definite sense of nostalgia amongst the left these days. Roger L. Simon focuses on one element of that phenomenon,  “Gates and Obama’s nostalgia for racism.” Roger adds that “as a sixties civil rights worker, I can empathize with the nostalgia. In those days it was very easy to tell right from wrong and feel good about your actions. These days it’s a lot more complicated.”