'Equality in the Age of Obama:' Gates

by Mark Silva

Out on Martha's Vineyard, where President Barack Obama and his family will spend a week's vacation, tourism isn't all they are talking about.

At a forum billed as "Achieving Equality in the Age of Obama,'' Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr., the scholar of black culture from Harvard whose arrest at his home by the Cambridge police stirred a national debate about racial profiling and presidential criticism, raised some new questions this week about how far the nation which elected its first African-American president last year has really come.

The setting was the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown, an edifice erected by whaling captains in 1843 and a model of Greek revival architecture on an island that has its own rich heritage as a retreat for African-Americans, scholars and writers among them.

"If you had told me this time last year, when we were all pretty emotionally up and excited, even though George W. Bush was still our president, that we would actually feel worse a year later, when Barack Obama was our president, about questions of race in America, I would have told you you were lying,'' Princeton University professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell said at Gates' forum, as reported by the venerable weekly Vineyard Gazette, nearly as old as the Edgartown church.

This island is Gates' home away from home, and he thanked friends who had helped him get off the fogbound retreat for a beer at the White House with Sgt. James Crowley, the officer who arrested him after a call to police that two men were forcing their way into Gates' home - the professor had come home from a long trip to China to find his door jammed. The police later rescinded the arrest, but Obama, at a nationally televised news conference, accused them of "acting stupidly'' in the affair - words which the president later acknowledged could have been better chosen.

The president, professor and policeman patched up their differences over a Bud Light, a Sam Adams and a Blue Moon at the White House."

How bad would that have been,'' if Gates had missed the beer summit, the professor said, as the Gazette reports, if "Officer James Crowley had been there and we'd been up here at the Inkwell, sipping chardonnay, covered by Fox News. That was not going to be too good."

But "this isn't about me,'' Gates told his Whaling Church audience. "I was in jail for a total of four hours . . . what about the people in jail for four days, or four months, or four years? It's about fairness under the law, race-neutral application of the law...

"There are one million black men in jail or prison and on July 16 this summer I became one of them,'' the professor said. "what about all those men and women who languish unfairly in prison every day, who are racially profiled every day, who have no recourse, no hope of salvation no way to break that cycle?

""I hope to use my experience to work to address the overwhelming problem of the massive number of African Americans who are hopelessly caught in the web of the criminal justice system, a disastrous problem that is destroying the very fabric of our community,'' he said.

Panelist Lawrence Bobo, another Harvard professor, told the story by the numbers: One in 100 Americans are behind bars, but one in 15 African-Americans are imprisoned or jailed - one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.

Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond noted that the United States has five per cent of the world's population, but 25 per cent of the world's prison population.

New York Times columnist Charles Blow, on the panel at Gates' forum, said he should never have invited Officer Crowley to the White House rapprochement. "That created in my mind an awful tableaux which was that not even a black president can get away with speaking out of turn against white authority, and [Officer Crowley] did not have to be contrite... To put it behind you, that to me was not the message of post-racial reconciliation that I needed from that situation.''

Harris-Lacewell told the aidoemce: "For me, one of the most exquisite benefits of the stupid Skip Gates arrest in his home, is the lie that it gives to the notion that respectability will make you safe."

Moderator Charlayne Hunter-Gault asked each panelist if the election of Obama as president had made America "post-racial."

Bobo cited three Vineyard bumper stickers: "I'll show as much respect to your president as you showed mine," "Had enough change yet?" and "Don't blame me, I voted for the old white guy."