The 'Beer Summit'

Now that the dust has settled on that all important 'beer summit' perhaps I can venture a few comments about race and what I see as its relationship to the incident at Cambridge. Professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. of Harvard was arrested by police officer James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Force in a now celebrated incident at the professor's home. Clearly, the incident was blown out of proportion and generated way too much news coverage. Over time this incident will be forgotten and have little or no impact on race in the United States either positively or negatively. Yet I believe it highlighted a number of racial realities that are usually papered over. Does the President regret having stepped into this issue? My hunch is that he regrets it not at all, even if it may have lost him some support among one or two percent of white voters.

Let me start off by saying I am a white male. I share what I believe to be typical white male reactions to such an incident. I believe the President should not have stepped into this case, especially without knowing all the facts. I believe it was a mistake to use the word stupidly, if only because it could be and was misconstrued as saying that the Cambridge police were stupid. He was actually saying that it was not a very bright course of action to arrest a black man in his own home. To take it one step further lest there be any doubt about my white male credentials, I might also say that I was shocked and troubled over the jury verdict in the O. J. Simpson case.

President Barack Obama is a black male. I believe the incident represents the reality that black and white American males see potentially racial issues in very different ways. I can never fully understand a black man's perspective on such an issue even though I have spent more that 30 years working in the black community. But I believe the President responded at his news conference as an authentic black male. He has experienced racial profiling in his own life and had no question that this was an example of such racial profiling again. It made him angry, and he expressed his anger and frustration.

I can only come up with one meaningful example of racial discrimination that I experienced in my own life, and I can tell you it left an indelible impression. I was on a family trip to a southern state that will remain unnamed. My oriental children and their oriental cousin were denied the use of some of the recreational facilities at the place where we were staying. I was outraged, yelled a lot and received some rather pointed threats from workers there. This has not been a common occurrence in my life, but it is a daily occurrence in the life of African American males. It does not predispose one to be trusting and generous in one's assumptions about others.

It is possible that my assessment of the situation with my family as racial was incorrect. It is also possible that Professor Gates was wrong in characterizing the situation with Officer Crowley as racial. Yet, I have no doubt that what my chidren experienced was racially motivated. African American males in this country experience such indignities on a regular basis. Is it surprising that their collective first reaction to such an event is to assume the worst? Clearly white and black America view similar situations from entirely different perspectives, but there are important reasons why this is so. It is in understanding these realities and differences on both sides, that we might begin a real dialogue on race in this country. The President as president had to dial back the rhetoric and that is a good thing, because he is the leader of the free world. But at that moment we did get to see a genuine reaction to an ongoing situation that is a reality for black men all over this country.

Will we ever be able to have a meeting of the minds on such an issue? Can we ever understand and accept each other on this issue? I believe Sergeant Crowley believed he was right and Professor Gates believed he was right. Did the 'beer summit' change any of that? I don't know. But all of us could benefit from a greater effort to understand what another person's experience might be. A person's experience makes a difference. Again, I believe that for one brief moment President Barack Obama showed us just a bit of what it means to be an African American male in the United States of America.