BEER AND SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL
['wheatpaste mugshot' from Wayne & Wax's flickr]
riffing on Lamin’s last post, I feel compelled to quote the most salient, on-point appraisal of the Skipgate affair I’ve seen. From Adam Serwer:
Gates isn’t being invited to the White House because he’s black and Ivy League. Gates is being invited to the White House because Sgt. James Crowley has become the latest totem of burgeoning white resentment against the president, which happens to be a matter so urgent that Obama felt obligated to make a dramatic gesture of reconciliation — lest racial resentment swallow his presidency. . . This is an example of white privilege — and how even a country that elects a black man president still demands that he assuage feelings of white resentment when they grow strong enough. Totems of black resentment, which Gates is not, get called racists and race hustlers. They do not get invited to the White House.
August 5th, 2009. obama, politricks, race | 1 comment »
August 6th, 2009 at 5:52 am
Gates is up his own ass though. And the fact that residents (blacks and white) in his own Cambridge neighborhood don’t know each other, never went over and knocked, introduced themselves, speaks more about American race relations than this whole debacle does on its own.