Jackson: "Big Subject" for a Small Meeting

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said he hopes that the upcoming White House meeting between two men embroiled in a controversial arrest incident will move beyond the specifics of the case and toward a national discussion on ending racial profiling.

Appearing on CBS' "The Early Show," Rev. Jackson said that the Thursday meeting of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley, brokered by President Barack Obama, should be bigger than the meeting of men caught in the national spotlight.

"It's a big subject for a small meeting," Rev. Jackson told "Early Show" anchor Harry Smith. "If Rosa Parks and James Blake, the bus driver, had met at the White House and did not deal with the issue of the accommodations, it would have been personal and not politics. And so, this issue of Dr. Gates being a victim of excessive force and bad judgment is a much bigger subject."

Rev. Jackson said that the 1955 arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., raised the public debate about disparities in public accommodations and the right to vote. He said the Gates case "should open up the issue of pervasiveness of race profiling, of the subprime lending struggle.

"I wish at some point the president would meet with Countrywide and Wells Fargo, for example; most of these subprime housing lending was driven by race profiling."

Rev. Jackson said racial profiling is evident not just in police profiling but in sentencing disparities by judges.

"This is a teachable moment," he said, for America to address the issue of profiling. "Racial profiling is deadly, it's costly, expensive and really bad for your health."

"Will it always be this way, or will there be a time in America when we're color blind, when we are class blind, when we're gender blind, when we're disability blind?" asked Smith.

"No one desires to be blind," Rev. Jackson replied. "We should be conscious and we should be caring."

He noted that the woman who originally placed the 911 call did not say anything about a black man entering a home. "The overreaction is a matter to be dealt with in days to come."

Rev. Jackson said the president tried to reduce an "explosive situation" by addressing the arrest and then inviting the men at the center of the controversy to Washington.

"I hope this kicks off a real concern about how to close what President Obama calls a structural inequality. That means enforcing civil rights law. It really means stopping racial profiling, as it comes to enforcing and funding civil rights law, contract compliance, affirmative action.

"And what makes this issue so explosive is that it is so pervasive, it is so illegal and so immoral, and it must be stopped."

Rev. Jackson said he hoped the discussion would move beyond the meeting of the president with Dr. Gates and Sgt. Crowley and towards ending racial profiling.

"Each agency of government has a real role to play in ending institutional, structural, expensive racial profiling," he said.