The Washington Post‘s Krissah Williams has a great piece based on an interview with Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., following his bogus arrest last week for breaking into his own home. The killer quote in this piece comes when Gates is talking about the large white police officer who entered his home and arrested him.

“I weigh 150 lbs and I’m 5′ 7”. I’m going to give flack to a big white guy with a gun. I might wolf later, but I won’t wolf then.”

Strikes me that a little editing may be in order here: Sounds as if the second sentence in that quote needs a question mark. But priceless stuff, regardless of punctuation issues.

Anyhow, Gates is using the incident, which he quite reasonably connects with racism, to fire up some research. “I hope to make a documentary about racial profiling for PBS…[The idea] had never crossed my mind but it has now.”

How did Washington Post get the first interview with Gates? Not quite sure on this end, but the self-disclosure in the Post story provides perhaps a hint:

What follows is Gates’s first public account of his arrest. He spoke to The Post in an hour-long phone interview while resting on Martha’s Vineyard. Gates is a founder of the Root.com, (www.theroot.com), a Web site owned by The Washington Post Co.