RACIAL POLITICS: Sobering up on beer

DIFFICULT ISSUE, SIMPLE SOLUTION

President Obama sat down for a beer at the White House Thursday night with a top African-American professor and the police officer who arrested him earlier this month. They were joined by a previously unannounced guest, Vice President Joe Biden. Sgt. James Crowley and Henry Louis Gates Jr., both dressed in suits, sat down with Obama and Biden, who both had their white dress shirt sleeves rolled up.

Video from the meeting showed mugs of beer being delivered to the men, who sat at a round table at the edge of the White House’s Rose Garden, munching peanuts and pretzels from silver bowls.

Cambridge police sergeant Jim Crowley and Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard scholar he arrested after responding to a report of a possible break-in at Mr Gates’s home, will sit down with Mr Obama on Thursday for a conciliatory beer.

Admittedly, it is tempting to view the invitation as the ultimate conflation of the age of Obama and the age of Oprah. Aside from the choice of beverage, there is something very daytime television, something very soft focus, something very soft sofa, about this attempt to defuse the controversy.

An older woman approached Whalen, worried that she’d just witnessed two men breaking into a home. That’s when Whalen, a first-generation Portuguese-American, called 911 from her cell phone — alerting police to 17 Ware St. — the home, as it turns out, of renowned Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Whalen’s call — now clearly the well-intentioned act of a passerby — ignited a firestorm over race and police relations, a national debate that went all the way to the White House. It was a call she says she never expected to be “analyzed by an entire nation.”

Gates was arrested by Cambridge police Sgt. James Crowley for disorderly conduct, a charge that was later dropped. Exactly what happened inside Gates’ home may never be known, but it seems clear that the key players in this saga brought their own personal history with race to the moment. That was true of Gates and Crowley, as well as the nation’s first African-American president.

All three will meet for a beer today at the White House to help chill the furor over Gates’ arrest and, in Obama’s words, try to turn the events of the past two weeks into a “teachable moment.”

Mr Gates was held for disorderly conduct, after he allegedly criticised police behaviour during the incident at the scholar’s home on 16 July. President Obama – a friend of Mr Gates – got involved in the case, saying the police had acted “stupidily”.

Yet startling and novel as Mr Obama’s attempts to defuse the controversy are, he is merely upholding a long tradition. Presidential racial politics have often been conducted with gestures, symbols and photo opportunities, and this is but the latest example of a well-worn genre.

By extending this invitation, Mr Obama also appears to be signalling that neither Prof Gates nor Sgt Crowley was wholly in the right or wholly in the wrong. The beer at the White House, then, marks an attempt to balance white fears about black lawlessness, whether real or imagined, with black middle-class grievances about white racism, whether real or imagined.

Will having a beer with President would put the Professor Henry Gates and Sgt Crowley issue to rest for good?