This is the conclusion of Shelby Steele’s excellent WSJ article on the Gates/Crowley/Obama affair. To get the full impact, please read the entire article here.
But then Skip Gates was tired. What was President Barack Obama?s
excuse? Why did he step into the same cultural narrative that Mr. Gates
had tried and failed with?Where race is concerned, I sometimes think of the president as the
Peter Sellers character in ?Dr. Strangelove.? Sellers plays a closet
Nazi whose left arm?quite involuntarily?keeps springing up into the
Heil Hitler salute. We see him in his wheelchair, his right arm?the
good and decent arm?struggling to keep the Nazi arm down so that no one
will know the truth of his inner life. These wrestling matches between
the good and bad arms were hysterically funny.When I saw Mr. Obama?with every escape route available to him?wade
right into the Gates affair at the end of his health-care news
conference, I knew that his demon arm had momentarily won out over his
good arm. It broke completely free?into full salute?in the ?acted
stupidly? comment that he made in reference to the Cambridge police?s
handling of the matter. Here was the implication that whites were such
clumsy and incorrigible racists that even the most highly achieved
blacks lived in constant peril of racial humiliation. This was a
cultural narrative, a politics, and in the end it was a bigotry. It let
white Americans see a president who doubted them.Mr. Obama?s ?post-racialism? was a promise to operate outside of
tired cultural narratives. But he has a demon arm of reflexive
racialism?identity politics, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and now Skip Gates.
You can only put a demon like this to death by finding out what you
really believe. We should hold Mr. Obama to his post-racialism, and he
should get to know himself well enough to tell us what he really means
by it. As for the odd triad of Messrs. Gates, Crowley and Obama, only
Mr. Crowley seems to have functioned outside his cultural narrative.
