Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates won’t have to travel far to research his planned PBS documentary on racial profiling — he can start in his own back yard.
Gates, whose arrest for disorderly conduct at his home on July 16 made national news, is hardly the first African-American at Harvard to have a run-in with local lawmen.
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The scholarly Gates yesterday said he was willing to accept President Obama’s offer to join him and Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley for a beer if it would help turn his arrest into a national lesson on race relations.
Gates has claimed he was the target of racial profiling, while Crowley contends it was the professor who injected race-baiting into the encounter.
“I am pleased that he [Obama], too, is eager to use my experience as a teaching moment, and if meeting Sgt. Crowley for a beer will further that end, then I would be happy to oblige,” Gates wrote in an e-mail to the Web site The Root.
“My unfortunate experience will only have a larger meaning if we can all use this to diminish racial profiling . . . I look forward to studying the history of racial profiling in a new documentary for PBS,” he added.
Gates might want to interview fellow black Harvard professor S. Allen Counter, a neuroscientist who has taught at the Ivy League school for the past 25 years.
Two Harvard University Police Department officers stopped the esteemed professor as he walked across campus in 2004, thinking he resembled a robbery suspect.
Counter said the officers threatened to arrest him when he couldn’t provide identification, and he claimed that he had been racially profiled.
His experience added to the racial tension percolating on the bucolic campus.
Even Obama witnessed the divide between black and white during his time as a Harvard law student in the early 1990s. In his second year, 70 of his classmates staged a sit-in to protest the lack of minority faculty members.
While Obama opted not to weigh in then, the controversy led to a black professor quitting in solidarity and an appearance by the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
More than a decade later, cries of racism persisted.
In 2006, a white student called the cops on a group of black freshmen playing sports on a campus quad, apparently unable to fathom that the students were enrolled in the prestigious school and had every right to be there.
That same year, reports surfaced of Harvard police showing up at a party for black students and demanding to see their IDs.
Last year, the university had to deal with tensions over a young black high-school student working at Harvard for the summer, who was mistaken by campus security for a bicycle thief.
Cops got into an obscenity-filled exchange with the young man, according to published reports, even after he made it clear he owned the bike and was simply trying to remove his jammed lock.
That incident prompted Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust to appoint a committee to review the Harvard Police Department’s diversity training.
gotis@nypost.com