While watching Barack Obama’s health care press conference last night, I wasn’t surprised when he took a question regarding the arrest and subsequent media uproar surrounding his good friend, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. An esteemed African-American studies professor at Harvard, Gates was arrested by Cambridge, MA, police after a neighbor called to report a supposed break-in by two black males. Turns out, Gates was struggling with a sticky lock on his own front door.

President Obama called the actions of the police officer "stupid" for arresting Gates in his own home. On racial profiling, he said the following:

"…I think we know separate and apart from this incident that there’s a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact."