This week’s Washington Times column:

Well, that was pathetic. And it wasn’t an accident. The fix was in from the beginning.

Last week’s lackluster “Beer Summit” featuring Sgt. James Crowley, professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was orchestrated to end a national discussion on race, not begin one. That’s why there were no microphones, even though each participant showed himself to be perfectly qualified, astoundingly articulate and camera-ready for an illuminating and much-needed public debate.

The problem for the White House was the more the esteemed professor talked, the more trouble he created for his friend, the president. The clever photo-op sans audio was crafted to yank the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research off the stage, lest anyone begin to question what is being taught at Harvard these days.

Conversely, the more Sgt. Crowley weighed in, and his brave black co-workers spoke out, the more obvious it became that a national discussion featuring this cast of characters may not end with the results the professor and the president wanted. (more…)

Event in progress…we go LIVE  to Washington, D.C.

…reporting live on this historic occasion.  A crisis of epic proportions may have been averted…by an invitation from the White House to simply sit down …and have a beer.  This creatively innovative and charmingly elegant President has thrown the old book out and is writing his own.  It’s the audacity of hope and change we can believe in.  It’s a new deal and a new dawning of how business gets done today – over beers.  It has been hinted by White House sources that if today’s summit goes well, possibly other summits may be in the offing.  My source in the Administration said a possible Vodka Fest with Vladimir Putin, a Hookah Pipe Sit-Down with Ahmadinejad, and even a Sake/Mao-tai/RiceCake pow wow with Kim Jong-Il are being floated as of this broadcast with the State Department, Keith Olbermann and Oprah Winfrey.

And now, the President’s helicopter has landed.  The President’s contingent of roughly three thousand security personnel are assuming their perimeters, extension perimeters and contingency perimeters.

Sgt. Crowley and Professor Gates await the President beside the picnic table arranged for this seminal benchmark in race relations in America.

The beer is on ice – a large keg bearing the Presidential Seal. (more…)

This week’s Washington Times column:

Less than a month after being confirmed as the nation’s attorney General, Eric H. Holder Jr. called out the American people as “essentially a nation of cowards” for refusing to talk openly about race.

So, thank you, professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and President Obama, for starting the long-awaited national discussion on black and white identity – while averting our attention from the cockamamie scheme to nationalize health care.

And kudos to the professor and the president for choosing Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department as the representative of the Caucasian-American side of this difficult and much-needed historic debate.

Poetry was at work as the archetypal racist white cop who, according to the admittedly fact-challenged president, “stupidly” arrested his “friend.” Sgt. Crowley waged a swift and effective public relations campaign that quashed the racism meme that Mr. Gates was recklessly pushing.

(more…)

As racial theorists like to say, “it’s all about context.”  Well, here is some recent Harvard context which may be illuminating.  I will let readers debate and decide.

Two months ago, a young African American man was shot by (allegedly) another African American man in the basement of Kirkland House, a Harvard campus dorm.  Neither was a Harvard student.

Text messages sent by the victim, along with a pound of marijuana and approximately $1000 found with his body, suggest that he was a drug dealer.  The alleged shooter, up from New York, was (and possibly remains?) the long term boyfriend of a Harvard co-ed.  Meanwhile, a second female student, who was suspected to have given the shooter a Harvard access card and had past disciplinary problems, was banned from campus and denied graduation with her class.  All of which, of course, roiled the campus and inflamed racial tensions.

The second female student told the Boston Globe, “I do believe I am being singled out…  The honest answer to that is that I’m black and I’m poor and I’m from New York and I walk a certain way and I keep my clothes a certain way… It’s something that labels me as different from everyone else.” (more…)