Culture Wars - (original story posted here)
Gates’s Daughter: Beer Summit Made ‘Little Sense’
By Garance Franke-Ruta
The daughter of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., Elizabeth Gates, had some harsh words in the Daily Beast Friday for the so-called “Beer Summit” Thursday at the White House, involving her father, President Obama, Vice President Biden and Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley, who arrested Henry Gates for disorderly conduct earlier this month.
Elizabeth Gates, who joined her father at the White House, writes in “What I Saw at the Beer Summit” that the gathering “seemed to make little sense at all.”
“It wasn’t because the president was wrong in offering up a few cold ones to my father, Henry Louis Gates, and the now infamous Sgt. James Crowley in an attempt to tame the media blitz around my father’s arrest — it was because like most issues that make their way to TMZ, the reference point had shifted. The debate over Red Stripe and Blue Moon had somehow overshadowed the fact that this story began with a black Harvard professor and a white cop from Natick, Mass.,” she writes.
“… It was clear that this day wasn’t going to be the beginning of a serious discussion on human relations but rather a circus-like ending of a misunderstanding between a couple of very decent men.”
Later in her piece, she says Crowley “isn’t the first officer to fudge a police report” and calls her father and Crowley “simply pawns in the rebirth of unfashionable intolerance in a world that likes to think our dashing brown-skinned 44th president has emerged to make nice with the past, present, and future.”
“It’s an impossible task for the president,” she concludes, “and speaks more to our nation’s vulnerable value system than the unfortunately common situation my father and the Cambridge police found themselves embroiled in. As my father said on the plane yesterday morning on our way to the White House, ‘there are approximately 800,000 black men in prison and on July 16, 2009, I simply became one of them.’ “
