The post-racial president used the beer summit as a way to deflect attention from his disasterous health care proposals and other bad news of the week. I'm sorry that Sergeant Crowley decided to even participate in this charade.
Barack Obama, the clean, articulate black guy with a Harvard law degree, showed, yet again how he's never run any sort of enterprise and that being POTUS is on the job training for him. Unlike Pam Spaulding, who lives in some alternate universe where only highly educated black people are harassed by police officers when the person is obnoxious, I live in the real world where police officers get pissed off at attitudinal persons of interest. One thing about being a white girl, I just can't cry "racism" when a cop threatens to up my speeding ticket because he didn't like the way I asked him what he pulled me over for.
I happen to agree with Radley Balko that the real lesson from Gates-gate is about police abuse of power and our own misplaced deference to authority. Like virtually every person in the U.S. (except Barack Obama and Henry Louis Gates, apparently) my parents taught me that when a police officer pulled me over, I should be cooperative and helpful, never questioning what the officer was doing or why. This worked fairly well for me over the years, and I never had a bad run-in with an officer using this technique.
But my attitude towards police power changed once I went to law school and saw the bizarre lengths the courts would go through to justify police snooping, interrogation and intimidation, all in the name of the infamous War on Drugs. I came home one day and told my husband that I'd decided they should legalize drugs just so police could no longer detain a person until they defecated under supervision. It seemed to me that the lengths police would go to under the War on Drugs justification was intolerable.
But, of course, the problem with Henry Louis Gates, Barack Obama, and Sergeant Crowley is not about drugs and it isn't about race. It's about class. This is where Pam Spaulding swallows the "I'm a Harvard man" line hook, line and sinker.
I just want to point out that the fact that we’re talking about a beer summit confirms the role of class in this whole brouhaha, an issue I raised earlier (”Why class does matter in the Gates arrest debate”). They are not sitting down to share a bottle of wine; the decision to “lower the class bar” by using the alcoholic beverage of the working (class) man is quite purposeful. Beer is a social signifier that Gates, Obama, and Crowley are on the same level as regular guys shooting the sh*t. Palin aligned herself with “Joe Six Pack” for the same reason—to indicate she’s down with the working class American.
Of course this is all artifice; Crowley is sitting down with the President of the United States and a superstar scholar from Harvard. Gates and Obama are way above Crowley’s station in their professional and social spheres. However, what the Gates incident has taught us is that if you take Barack Obama, Henry Louis Gates or any prominent black man out of context—they can still easily and quickly drop well beneath Crowley’s station given the right (or more accurately, wrong) circumstances. In the often-disappointing real world colored by perception and stereotypes, it’s a rude awakening. If the President and Prof. Gates are anonymized into the average black man, it is still a world of driving while black, voting while black, shopping while black, hailing a cab while black, and now, being in your own home while black that they would experience.
Spaulding has the problem exactly backwards. First, the reason it's a "beer summit" as opposed to a "wine summit" is that the phrase Obama bandied about (most famously regarding Sean Hannity), that he was a guy you could "have a beer with" because he wasn't a scary black man, he was just an ordinary guy. It's true that "having a beer with" someone connotes a down-to-earth quality that "having a glass of Chardonnay with" just doesn't show.
The elitism, however, is on the part of Obama, Gates and Spaudling, in assuming that being from Harvard (or, as Spaudling puts it, "the President of the United States and a superstar scholar from Harvard") puts them in a higher class than a police officer called to the scene of a potential crime. Gates screaming, "Don't you know who I am?" is no different than any snob who thinks s/he should be treated better than the riff raff. Is this a case of IOKIYAB?
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