Some Observations on the Gates Incident

It seems as though the the story of Skip Gates' arrest outside of his home will continue to have legs for the present. Whether or not President Obama's beer with them will help bring the story around to a truly teachable moment remains to be seen. We have run the gamut from outrage to indifference to being jaded--within and without the Black communities of the U.S. and beyond.

Frankly, I wish I could say that I am totally surprised and caught off guard by the unfolding story. I am afraid that far too many folk believed that electing a Black man who went to great pains not to raise issues of race and ethnicity in his campaign meant that we had reached a new place in our national consciousness and actions. While the election of a Black man is no small matter, we never had the conversation on race that he called for around the Reverend Jeremiah Wright debacle (there are genuine elements of a high tech lynching there). Instead, most of us moved on and did not engage in the thick discourse required to get at any meaningful dialogue on race and racism in this country. We have celebrated in ways that fail to fully acknowledge the work we still have before us.

I am not interested in being held captive to our history as a nation, but I do believe that we need to use it as a teaching tool for how we can craft a better present and a more just future. What has disturbed me about all the reports and "experts" that have been drawn on to dissect, inadequately to my mind, the Gates Incident that no one has talked to or at least put on record where youth are with this. How are they reading the story and what insights might we gain from them? Until we turn this into an intergenerational conversation, we will fail to take full advantage of this latest opportunity to begin to deal with each other in ways that help us step into the richness of our diversity instead of continuing to see our diversity as some sort of wierd shame house.

This is not an easy story to tease through and I suspect that like most incidents where race may be a strong but unacknowledged factor, there are no clear heroes or victims. Until we can reach a point of genuine and deep dialogue, perhaps sharing a beer is the best we can hope for. However, my hope is that as we work with students, members of our religious communities, and other folks of good will that we will find a way to recognize that hard conversations are not only punishment for our sins, they are openings to spaces of grace and redemption.