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The peculiar class solidarity of Barack Obama and "Skip" Gates
Sean Bell and Oscar Grant were shot down like dogs, but that was none of Barack Obama's concern. But when a local cop racially profiled Dr. Henry Louis Gates as if he were just another Black man, Obama's world shook. "To be subsumed within the Black mass means class death. No one was safe!"
What compelled President Barack Obama, the great practitioner of the art of dodging racial issues, to put precious political capital at risk in defense of Dr. Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, whose run-in with a Cambridge policeman threatened neither the Harvard professor's life nor freedom? At no time in his candidacy or brief tenure as president had Obama displayed the slightest inclination to voluntarily come to the defense of Black folks in general or to interpose himself between white power and any individual African American. In this sense, he has been studiously "race-neutral"–or some would say, downright hostile to Blacks in the mass.
Surely, Obama is skilled enough to have easily parried a reporter's question on the Gates affair. U.S. presidents, including this one, routinely deflect questions bearing directly on critical issues of war and peace. Why was the apparent racial profiling of Dr. Gates an occasion for Obama to characterize a local police action, and the police officer himself, as "stupid"–thus bringing down the certain wrath of the white public he has so assiduously courted?