Word: blacking
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...were also the old standbys - Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. But by and large, this was not the sort of group you'd expect to see leading a Jena Six rally. Gates himself is more a Cosby conservative than a rabble-rouser; he once wrote, "Are white racists forcing black teenagers to drop out of school or to have babies?" And though he studies race for a living, he's not particularly interested in being divisive or controversial. In short, he's one of the last people you'd expect to be led off his front porch in bracelets after...
...There has been a temptation to use the Gates arrest as a metaphor for the plight of all black people. And yet much of what we think of as "black issues" doesn't really affect most black people. We too easily conflate the words disproportionate and majority. While a disproportionate number of black males are in prison, the majority of us have no experience with hard time. Black people are overrepresented in the ranks of impoverished Americans - but most of us are not poor. Affirmative action may ignite all sorts of racial tensions - but a lot of black people will...
...Mistreatment by the police, however, remains a shared experience for many African Americans. And it's members of the black upper class - people like Gates and Obama and Ford, black America's most credentialed social stratum - who are most sensitive to overzealous policing and racial profiling. When it comes to encounters with law enforcement, they are uniquely aware of how quickly their accolades can be rendered irrelevant. (Read "The Gates Case: When Disorderly Conduct Is a Cop's Judgment Call...
...would never occur to me, or most black people I know, to offer a police officer a lecture on race or to say, as Gates is alleged to have said, "You don't know who you're messing with." For the most part, we're trained by our mothers to hand over ID, answer all questions politely and keep our hands where they can be seen. But for blacks who've made it to the upper echelons of American society, those old lessons chafe, and you tire of wearing the mask of deference. Moreover, members of the black upper class...
...grab a beer." That was the invitation extended by President Obama, who is seeking to dial down the racial tension surrounding black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s July 16 arrest by a white police officer. On July 30, Gates and the arresting officer, Sergeant James Crowley, will meet with Obama at the White House to have a beer and discuss the maybe-racist-maybe-not incident in which the three men find themselves entangled. Anticipatory news reports of the drinking session have included a seemingly bizarre fact: the White House only serves domestic, or American-made, beer...