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Forget the beer, Obama and Gates should do a ride-along with Sgt. Crowley

President Obama, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Sgt. James Crowley walk into a bar... Sounds like the perfect setup for a bad joke, right? And it sure does look like a setup, too; one aimed directly at Sgt. Crowley.

So why then is the main focus on what beer will they drink? (h/t Memeorandum)

To me the venue is all wrong. Henry Gates lives in the rarified upper echelons of Harvard University. As President of the United States, Barack Obama is a member of an even more exclusive club. They both see someone like Sgt. Crowley as an anachronism in their worlds; a "do-er" and a "react-er" rather than a "thinker".

Professor Gates brought the full bore of his academic elite condescension to bear without ever considering how James Crowley might interpret his actions. President Obama jumped in head first with both left feet by labeling Sgt. Crowley's behavior "stupid" before he had admittedly tried to obtain all the facts.

So to make up for their rush to judgement, they're going to down a few beers and pretend they're just 3 guys sitting in a bar. Except they're not; they're two guys from the Ivory Tower, sitting in a room that Sgt. Crowley could never imagine himself belonging in.

If Henry Gates and Barack Obama really want to understand where Sgt. Crowley is coming from, if they truly intend to bridge the divide between their assumptions and his work-a-day world, they should forget about trying to act like one of the guys by inviting him over for a beer.

Instead, they should do a ride-along with Sgt. Crowley for a day. They'll see stuff that'll curl their hair. And they'll quickly gain a huge amount of respect for the artful balancing act every inner city police officer has to maintain on a daily basis. It's one thing to academically sit in judgement of "systemic racism". It's quite another to wade through the filth of crime, misery, and human weakness that Sgt. Crowley encounters in the course of his patrols.

It would do Henry Gates and President Obama a world of good to witness the world through Sgt. Crowley's eyes. It might even help our nation to finally have that "honest conversation on race" we keep hearing so much about.

Posted at 15:34 by Chris Wysocki   [/obama_watch]   Comments | Archived | Perm Link |
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