I did not mean to imply that people getting angry at Gates (for trying to provoke police into doing something wrong) is escalating the problem.

I also agree that it’s not easy today to know right from wrong (if it ever was simple). I think in this case there’s a confusing mixture of not only race and class, but also of attitude. Regardless of skin color, people who think police officers deserve respect have no sympathy for Gates’ behavior, and may even be eager to scapegoat Gates out of exasperation with people defending militant disrespect toward the police (which IMO is escalating, not helping, the problem of determining whether police are too brutal).

This episode gives him creds he lacks on black street. Now he can say, “I, too’ have shared police abuse, the humiliation, the blotch on my reputation.” With elitist peers, this will increase his stature. display him as a victim rather than just a pampered academic. Since he ha recently declared his horror at finding out, through DNA test that he is 75% white, this is a boost that he needed.

This is the only logical explanation for the scale of his outrageous rant.

Sounds to me like a great deal of self-congratulation. I believe some qualification is in order. Racism is certainly last year’s fashion but though we don’t display it in public, last year’s fashion still fills our closets.

Black employment remains heavily concentrated in government, non-profit institutions, and the lowest rungs of the private sector. Housing–white people’s willingness to live among black people–remains firmly segregated. And this segregation is glaring even in ultra-liberal neighborhoods like the Upper West Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York and Palo Alto in Northern California.

The happy picture of racial harmony with blacks and whites deeply and intimately involved in each other’ lives on an equal footing exists mainly in the movies and on television. When a liberal screenwriter writes in a black business executive or a black scientist he imagines himself heroic for broadening white minds, creating positive role models for black kids and promoting racial amity in our society. In fact, by presenting anomalies as ordinary, common and even prevalent, he is insulting truth and art and trafficking in fashionable false propaganda for dollars.

Roger is proud that he has written screenplays for Richard Pryor and Whoopi Goldberg. This along with his employing black talent at PJM establishes his race-friendly bona fides and gives him the right to blame blacks for complaining about racism which, in his benighted view, is largely a thing of the past. Roger has spent so much time falsifying race relations on screen that he has lost sight of reality.

How many successful black screenwriters can Roger name? When was the last time he had to compete with a black for a job? Does Roger imagine there are no black writers so minimally talented as to be able to churn out the abysmal trash we all see on our screens every day? Roger profits from the absence of black competition as German academics once profited from the racist mass-dismissal of their Jewish colleagues.

On reflection, suggesting that blacks are nostalgic for racism is the crudest form of blaming the victim for his own victimization. Roger’s attitude is analogous to that of people who complain that Jews are too obsessed by the holocaust. Too quick to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

Perhaps it’s formerly liberal whites who are nostalgic for racism. Time was, earlier in the civil rights movement, that a front office Negro understood his role. Under Reagan the African American director of HUD sat in his fancy office all day watching television. Now come the like of Gates and Obama who insist on being more than window dressing and robustly fulfilling their job descriptions. Terribly frustrating and annoying. It isn’t how their roles were scripted.

Regarding Gates and Crowley, I would suggest that there are far fewer black professors nostalgic for racism than there are cops nostalgic for a time when billy-clubs and blackjacks ruled the streets, policemen got more respect and black people stayed uptown where they belong.

Suggesting

Barack the Magic Nero!

I don’t know if that was intentional, but it does seem to be the emerging truth.

As my girlfriend would say “As IF!”

What a narcissist! Barack the Magic Nero! He can heal anything with his touch! sarc/ Brother!