At the White House, President Obama played host Thursday to the prominent African American scholar Henry Louis Gates and the white police officer who arrested him, two weeks after their incident made national headlines. Before the gathering, Obama reflected on his own retracted comments that the police officer had “acted stupidly.”

President Obama: “This is not a university seminar. It is not a summit. It’s an attempt to have some personal interaction when an issue has become so hyped and so symbolic that you loose sight of just the fact that these are people involved, including myself, all of whom are imperfect. And hopefully, instead of ginning up anger and hyperbole, you know, everybody can just spend a little bit of time with some self-reflection and recognizing that other people have different points of view.”

After the meeting, both Gates and the officer, James Crowley, said they had agreed to meet again. At a news conference, Crowley said he was seeking to look “forward.”

Sgt. James Crowley: “This was a positive step in moving forward, as opposed to reliving the events of the past couple of weeks, in an effort to move not just the city of Cambridge or two individuals past this event, but the whole country to move beyond this. I think what you had today was two gentlemen agreed to disagree on a particular issue. I don’t think that we spent too much time dwelling on the past. We spent a lot of time discussing the future.”

Gates, meanwhile, issued a statement after meeting Crowley, saying, “It is incumbent upon Sergeant Crowley and me to utilize the great opportunity that fate has given us to foster greater sympathy among the American public for the daily perils of policing on the one hand, and for the genuine fears of racial profiling on the other hand.”