"Through one Canadian ancestor, Louis Boucher de Grandpre, who was born in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, the pope is related to... Angelina Jolie, Hillary Clinton, Justin Bieber, Jack Kerouac and Madonna."

The NYT informs in an article that seems mostly concerned with whether the Pope is — in some sense — black.

We're told the article is written "by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in collaboration with American Ancestors and the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami."

The article contains an amazing — and amazingly wrong — assertion: "Every one of us descends from an astounding number of recent ancestors: two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, 16 great great grandparents, 32 third great grandparents and 64 fourth great grandparents — that’s 126 unique ancestors through two parents. Go back to our 12th great grandparents, and everyone has a whopping 32,766 forebears."

As if the 32,766 positions on the family tree are always — and for everyone — going to be 32,766 different individuals! I think it's unlikely that anyone has 32,766 different individuals on a family tree going back to the 12th great grandparents.

The terms for this very well known issue is "pedigree collapse."

"The College Board purged the names of many Black writers and scholars associated with critical race theory, the queer experience and Black feminism. "

"It ushered out some politically fraught topics, like Black Lives Matter, from the formal curriculum. And it added something new: 'Black conservatism' is now offered as an idea for a research project. When it announced the A.P. course in August, the College Board clearly believed it was providing a class whose time had come, and it was celebrated by eminent scholars like Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard as an affirmation of the importance of African American studies. But the course, which is meant to be for all students of diverse backgrounds, quickly ran into a political buzz saw after an early draft leaked to conservative publications like The Florida Standard and National Review...."

From "The College Board Strips Down Its A.P. Curriculum for African American Studies/After criticism from Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, the official course looks different: No more critical race theory, and the study of contemporary topics — like Black Lives Matter — is optional" (NYT).

"At a time when our society is deeply divided and when a surge of antisemitic, anti-Asian, Islamophobic and anti-Black racism threatens the social fabric, it feels urgent..."

"... that we develop new language for discussing the relationship between identity, ancestry, history and science. DNA analysis could help create that language by offering more nuanced ways of looking at individual origins and a more unifying narrative about our shared heritage.... [But race will not] magically disappear anytime soon.... [T]he social reality of race is undeniable. And genetics — or, for that matter, any science — has the potential to be misused, co-opted by racist ideologies and employed to bolster harmful narratives about racial purity or biological superiority. But if we can, at the very least, embrace the understanding that race (a toxic social construction) and ancestry (a shared genetic history) are not only distinct but also fundamentally opposed — and teach that in our classrooms — it could go a long way toward freeing us from some of the binds in which scientific racism have trapped us."

That's from "We Need a New Language for Talking About Race" by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Andrew S. Curran (NYT). Gates and Curran have a new book, “Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter From the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race.'"

I added the boldface.

"I felt enraged. I felt flabbergasted. I felt confused... I can’t say that I’m a loyal customer of Prada. I don’t think I would have gone into the store had I not been assaulted by the images."

Said Chinyere Ezie, a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, quoted in "Seriously, Prada, what were you thinking?: Why the fashion industry keeps bumbling into racist imagery" (by Robin Givhan in WaPo).

But she went in. She took pictures. And then she did “a reality check.” She showed the pictures she’d taken to her mother and her co-workers. “Am I missing something?” she asked them. No. They saw racism, too.

Ezie juxtaposed her pictures from the Prada store with historical images of Sambo and shared them on Twitter and her Facebook page. “I didn’t want to have to grieve in silence,” she says. “I didn’t want to have to swallow this bitter pill of racism alone.”

Her post made its way through the social media biosphere, stirring outrage....

Here's Ezie's photo, showing the shop window in NYC with the enlarged display figurine:



And here's Prada's photo of product that's for sale, a small charm in a set of fanciful characters that mostly seem like aliens or robots:



I can think of 3 questions:

1. Did the designer of the charm intend — sneakily and with deniability — to insert a racist depiction of a human being in this collection of characters? or...

2. Is this only a case of imagining something like a monkey from outer space and never noticing that other people could see a resemblance to old-fashioned racist cartoon images intended to demean black people and could feel offended? (That is, no one, anywhere within the company in the entire process of manufacturing this $550 gift item ever said Wait a minute, some people might think....), or...

3. Is this a case where the only racism is in the mind of the beholder who looks at a silly fanciful space monkey and decides that it looks like a black person? (Isn't that a little like Roseanne Barr looking at Valerie Jarrett and getting the idea that she looks like an ape?)

Oddly, all 3 options seem implausible. Yet something happened! I guess #2 is the least implausible, but why would a big company like Prada not be more savvy commercially? I'll break that down into 3 theories:

A. They really are dumb about things that are not strictly in the domain of fashion, or...

B. There is great deference to the designer and a culture of not expressing doubt once a design is conceived. (That is, people within the company noticed but understood their role to be to demonstrate faith in the product and not naysay), or...

C. The problem was noticed but the idea became: Let it go. If anyone — maybe some sensitive constitutional rights lawyer — gets offended, we'll say oops, sorry, and withdraw that one, but we'll get so much press for these charms, and people will look at the whole set and see that they really are delightful and buy the others and anyone who's already bought the controversial and now withdrawn monkey will have an extremely valuable item, perhaps to sell on eBay to a real racist or to one of those black people — like Henry Louis Gates Jr. — who collect racist memorabilia.

If Theory C works for you, rethink the plausibility of Theory 1 — it really was intentional.

PBS might drop Henry Louis Gates for doing a show about Ben Affleck that avoided the unpretty news that he had slave-owning ancestors.

A PBS internal review has concluded that Gates (the eminent Harvard professor) used "improper judgment" helping the big movie star avoid an unpleasant confrontation with the information that might be seen as harmful to his image. I don't really see why it would hurt him, since we are not our ancestors, and Affleck could have used the occasion to show us the right way to respond to the legacy of slavery.

If he'd handled it well, it would have been to his credit. Affleck didn't know his email would be leaked, but we now know he just said he was "embarrassed." Embarrassed. That's so pathetic. So weak. To hear that his reaction was embarrassment and that he would prevail upon Gates to censor the information to spare him embarrassment... that's embarrassing.

UPDATE: "PBS will not run the show’s third season until staffing changes are made, including hiring a fact checker...."

"Ben Affleck has admitted he was 'embarrassed' about a slave-owning ancestor..."

"... and said that’s why he lobbied television chiefs to hide his story in a documentary about his heritage."

The Hollywood star said he regretted trying to influence what went into the programme and was now glad that his family history would be part of the discussion about the impact of slavery in America....

Affleck spoke out after hacked emails from film studio Sony Pictures Entertainment, leaked online, revealed that he had asked producers of the television programme Finding Your Roots to suppress details of the ancestor. The revelations have provoked a censorship scandal in the US: the programme’s producer, Henry Louis Gates, a history professor at Harvard, had to issue a statement insisting he retained “editorial control.”

Affleck's efforts to control PR are what you'd expect from an actor. The focus should be on Gates. He's the one with the serious obligations here.

"Why Obama won’t give the Ferguson speech his supporters want."

A headline for an Ezra Klein piece that really should have the second and third words reversed. It's a good question, but Ezra only poses as capable of answering it. I can think of 10 other answers to the question, but I'm writing this on an iPad.

ADDED: I've returned to my desktop, as you can see by the addition of tags, so I feel I should make good on my assertion that I have 10 other answers. I'll publish them as I proceed, beginning with one that is a tag.

1. Obama is bland. It's a tag on this blog that I've been using since April 21, 2009: "Yes. As in his campaign, Obama is very bland. For some reason — possibly vaguely racist — Americans liked the bland. But at some point, bland is not what you want." I have 55 posts with that tag. His fans may not want to believe it, but I've been observing it all along, and it's part of why I voted for him in 2008. I don't like demagogues.

2. Ezra speaks of Obama's 2008 "Race Speech" as the sort of speech that his opponents long for, but go back and read it. It's studded with lines like "The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons," and "Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity...." We may remember that speech as extremely powerful, but it was assurance of Obama's moderation. Supporters want what they feel they got in the past but their memory of the past is distorted.

3. The "Race Speech" was crucial to Obama's 2008 campaign. A lot of work went into crafting that speech: "... Obama dictated a lengthy draft of this speech to [Jon] Favreau, who edited the speech the next day. Obama stayed up until 3:00 a.m. Sunday night working on the speech, and continued to work on it Monday and in the early hours of Tuesday." Favreau isn't there anymore, and I don't think Obama has the time or motivation to put that much personal effort into a speech about Ferguson.

4. The Jeremiah Wright crisis in 2008 required a direct, decisive response from the candidate. There was no option of standing back and seeing whether things might work out all right without his intrusion and interference. But when he has the option to lead from behind, that's his style.

5. Obama doesn't want a replay of the Skip Gates fiasco, where he blurted out that the police "acted stupidly," when he didn't really know the the facts, and it turned out that what the police did was not stupid at all. In the case of the Ferguson incident, we don't know the facts. Today, I'm seeing: "Police sources tell me more than a dozen witnesses have corroborated cop's version of events in shooting #Ferguson." (Ezra Klein brings up Skip Gates, but doesn't mention that Obama got the facts wrong because he spoke too soon, only that "the White House no longer believes Obama can bridge divides.")

6. Michael Brown was no Trayvon Martin. Obama said "Trayvon could have been my son." And "Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago." But he can't (won't) say that about Brown. Yes, he could talk more generally about how racial profiling — real or feared — makes people feel and that's what the protests in Ferguson express and that matters even if Michael Brown strong-armed a shopkeeper and even if he threatened the police officer who killed him. But that's not the speech Obama supporters supposedly want. There is no cherubic boy with Skittles and iced tea. There's a very large, adult man with stolen cigars. It's harder to say deeply empathic things about Brown. And Obama cannot make that personal I-am-Trayvon kind of statement.

7. Obama must help his party in the Fall elections. I think this is the key graphic, the fight for the U.S. Senate. The toss-up states are Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisana, Michigan, and North Carolina. Whatever Obama says now must be calibrated for the effect in these states. Will emotive racial politics carry the Democratic Party through to November? Perhaps that seems like a risky bet.

8. Obama's tired.

9. "On December 11, 2006, I quoted Obama saying: 'I think to some degree I’ve become a shorthand or symbol or stand-in for a spirit....' I liked him for saying that. It was honest. I thought he'd have become something specific, and I'm amused to see that I added: 'Wouldn't it be funny if he didn't?'" I wrote that on February 18, 2008 in a post titled "Why I'm voting for Obama in the Wisconsin primary." It must get wearisome being America's shorthand or symbol or stand-in for so long, wearisome for all of us, and he knows it. Maybe not speaking is the best expression at this point in our long journey.

10. A truly brilliant speech about Ferguson — if he had the will and the time to craft the perfect statement — would not be what his supporters want, but something more difficult, challenging, and surprising.

The phrase "the Color Line."

The NYT has an opinion piece titled "Cousins, Across the Color Line," about present-day Americans of different races who trace their ancestry to the same white person, for example, those who see themselves as descendants of Thomas Jefferson.

At one point, Gayle [who is black and considers herself a descendant of Jefferson] asked me [a white woman who also considers herself a Jefferson descendant] if I was looking for absolution for what my family did, and we both agreed the word was imperfect. I think instead we are both looking for some present-tense reconciliation. We acknowledge our desire to feel connected to our shared history, and appreciate the fact that we can sit together, looking at the mystery of the past and trying to articulate what it means....

There is something radical in knowing Gayle....

The author, Tess Taylor, doesn't use the term "color line" in her text, though she does mention  reaching "across racial lines." The word "line" is also used in the essay to refer to ancestral lines, but put that to the side. I want to examine the inference, in the headline, that if a black and a white person today are connecting, they are crossing something called "the color line."

"The United States is not a nation of black and white people. Any fool can see that white people are not really white, and that black people are not black."

Wrote Albert Murray in his 1970 book "The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture."

America, he maintained, “even in its most rigidly segregated precincts,” was a “nation of multicolored people,” or Omni-Americans: “part Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian — and part Negro.”

The book also challenged what Mr. Murray called the “social science fiction” pronouncements of writers like James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who he said had exaggerated racial and ethnic differences in postulating a pathology of black life. As Mr. Murray put it, they had simply countered “the folklore of white supremacy” with “the fakelore of black pathology.”

Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote a New Yorker article called "King of Cats" about Murray (and Murray's close friend Ralph Ellison), which said:

"Both men were militant integrationists, and they shared an almost messianic view of the importance of art.... In their ardent belief that Negro culture was a constitutive part of American culture, they had defied an entrenched literary mainstream, which preferred to regard black culture as so much exotica — amusing perhaps, but eminently dispensable. Now they were also defying a new black vanguard, which regarded authentic black culture as separate from the rest of American culture — something that was created, and could be appreciated, in splendid isolation."

Murray died last Sunday at the age of 97. The quotes above come from the NYT obituary. You can read the New Yorker article, from 1996, here.

ADDED: Speaking of culture, why wasn't this man in the forefront of American culture all these years?

Obama — trying to be "careful" — addresses the Trayvon Martin killing.

I think he handled this extremely well, stressing that we need to diligently investigate the facts and expressing empathy toward the parents of the dead young man. (I'm avoiding writing "boy," but I see many people including Obama are calling this 17-year-old a "boy," presumably out of empathy, but in my mind, there is discordance with the old problem of overusing the term "boy," and I just can't write it.)

Obama didn't bring up the topic himself:

Mr. Obama was asked about his feelings regarding the case during the announcement of a new president for the World Bank in the Rose Garden Friday morning.

The president often appears perturbed when he gets off-topic questions at ceremonial events, but on Friday, he seemed eager to address the case....

So he knew it would be asked or at least anticipated it. (At most: his people planted it.)

... which has quickly developed into an urgent cause in the African American community. He cautioned that his comments would be limited because the Justice Department is investigating. But he talked at length about his personal feelings about the case.

He said:  “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids” and “You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

He did a much better job here than he did in the Henry Louis Gates incident, where he made assumptions and blurted out "it's fair to say... that the Cambridge police acted stupidly." It wasn't fair to say.

I was struck earlier this morning by what Glenn Reynolds wrote (before Obama made his statement):

... I am puzzled by one thing: Dem groups are flogging this because they think it’s good for them, but how can it help Obama — who ran as a post-racial figure who would help America put its racial divisions to bed, a sort of anti-Al Sharpton — to have Al Sharpton leading protests and Louis Farrakhan threatening violence?

Sure, it stirs up the base, or part of it anyway — how Florida Latino voters respond may be different — but doesn’t it just add to the unfavorable contrast between Obama 2008 and Obama in 2012? Or are Sharpton, et al., basically tossing Obama’s interests aside to pursue their own? And is that some sort of indicator itself?

These are all good questions, and they explain why Obama needed to step in and try to take control of the discourse around this volatile topic. To my ear, his words have a calming, moderating effect, but we don't all hear him the same way, I've noticed time and again.

"Obama is searching for a narrative. He had an election narrative but hasn’t found the vocabulary for governing."

Henry Louis Gates Jr. analyzing — in scholarly lingo — why Obama's politics don't seem to work as well as they did back in '08.

Gates wonders how more combative politicians, like Lyndon Johnson, would have responded to the slights Obama has received from Congress. (“He would have grabbed these people by the balls and said, ‘I am the president of the goddamned United States!’ ”)

I remember when Richard Nixon had a thing of saying "I am the President." It didn't work too well.

But that isn’t Obama’s, or Gates’s own, style, he says: “What people forget is that the most radical thing about Obama is that he was the first black man in history to imagine that he could become president, who was able to make other Americans believe it as well. Other than that, he is a centrist, just like I try to be. He’s been bridging divisions his whole life.”

I hear Al Sharpton screaming. And Jesse Jackson. I think they imagined that they could become President.



That's my photo, by the way, of my button, acquired, with serious intentions, in 1988. But Gates didn't mean "Obama is... the first black man in history to imagine that he could become president." It was a qualified statement. The next clause is inextricably linked: "who was able to make other Americans believe it as well." I think Jesse Jackson would still be steamed. And you know what Jackson says when he's steamed. Speaking of balls.

Looking for that old photograph got me to a post from January 2007, which linked to this old conversation in which I talk about the button and talk about how various black leaders reacted to Obama's initial announcement that he was running for President. And here's the January 14, 2007 post that the conversation is based on. It's got an Al Sharpton quote about Obama:

 "Right now we’re hearing a lot of media razzle-dazzle. I’m not hearing a lot of meat, or a lot of content. I think when the meat hits the fire, we’ll find out if it’s just fat, or if there’s some real meat there."

And I said:

In a political culture in which the media have long consulted [Sharpton and other black leaders] and preserved a place for them in the debate, now it seems that Obama will be given that place, and Obama is likely to say things that are far more mellow and conciliatory to the majority of Americans. They have to be asking -- and we should ask too -- whether that is why Americans like Obama so much. Looking at the problem from this angle, we should see that it's not simply a matter of personal jealousy, it is a real fear that their message is being effectively excised from the national debate.

And it was excised, wasn't it? As I said in the conversation linked above, Obama was bland. That's what people liked at the time.



I say "Obama is bland," and Bob Wright blurts it out: "That's the reason you can imagine him becoming President."

"Just to be clear, the president is not backing off in any way from the comments he made last night. It is not his role as president to pass judgment on every local project."

Said Obama spokesman Bill Burton.

What's the worst thing about Burton's statement?
	It disrespects Ground Zero to characterize it as just another "local project."
	The President really did change his position, and it's a lie to deny that.
	The President dips into local matters when he wants to, such as Skip Gates and the Cambridge cop.
	It's legalistic hair-splitting again instead of saying something clear that people can understand.
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: I almost feel sorry for Obama and the Democrats for their misfortune that this is the issue that has come to the fore at this time.

At least one Republican, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, seized on the confusion. “Mr. President, should they or should they not build a mosque steps away from where radical Islamists killed 3,000 people? Please tell us your position. We all know that they have the right to do it, but should they? And, no, this is not above your pay grade,” Palin wrote on Facebook....

Democratic aides say that, at the very least, the president has again knocked his party's candidates off local messages and forced them to talk about a national issue that doesn't appear likely to play well with important swing voters.

These officials planned to spend this weekend talking about Social Security’s 75th anniversary....

"The main reaction is 'Why? Why now?’" said one House Democratic leadership aide. "It's just another day off message. There have been a lot of days off message.

The chief of staff to one politically vulnerable House Democrat said it "probably alienates a lot of independent voters" and "it's not a good issue to be talking about right now."

He said he suspects "there are a lot of (Democrats) who are spooked in tough districts today" and "a lot of Republicans licking their chops right now."

Almost. The Democrats would love to do the same thing to the Republicans. They wouldn't hesitate to exploit something that captures the public's attention and provides leverage for the political arguments they like to make. Remember the Mark Foley incident in 2006.

Another occasion for the "Obama is like Nixon" tag.

Politico reports:

“I don't think it will be offensive at all when [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is] convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him,” Obama told NBC’s Chuck Todd.

When Todd asked Obama if he was interfering in the trial process by declaring that Mohammed will be executed, Obama, a former constitutional law professor, insisted that he wasn’t trying to dictate the result.

“What I said was, people will not be offended if that's the outcome. I'm not pre-judging, I'm not going to be in that courtroom, that's the job of prosecutors, the judge and the jury,” Obama said. “What I'm absolutely clear about is that I have complete confidence in the American people and our legal traditions and the prosecutors, the tough prosecutors from New York who specialize in terrorism."

Journey back to 1970:

Nixon Calls Manson Guilty, Later Withdraws Remark; Refers to Coast Murder Trial in Talk in Denver, Then Says in Washington He Didn't Mean to Prejudge Case

...

President Nixon asserted today that Charles Manson, a hippie cultist now on trial in California, "was guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders without reason."

But, faced with criticism that he had prejudged the outcome of the Manson trial, Mr. Nixon issued a statement ... saying that "the last thing I would do is prejudice the legal rights of any person, in any circumstances."

***

Googling, I saw that this isn't the first time someone has compared something Obama did to the old Nixon/Manson screwup. Back in July, the comparison was made after Obama said the "police acted stupidly" in arresting Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

From that July article:

Robert Dallek, a presidential historian, said in an interview that Nixon’s comments, while seemingly a gaffe, reinforced his stance in the prevailing cultural wars and seemed calculated. “He was playing to the whole idea that conservatives stand for law and order and Democrats were permissive and indulgent toward criminals,” Mr. Dallek said.

So, what do you think?

When Obama said KSM will be convicted and executed, what was he doing?
	Making a gaffe.
	Trying to send the message that he's tough on terrorism.
pollcode.com free polls

Are we having a conversation yet?

"I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place."

Conversation?

Man, "conversation" has become one of those Orwellian words. There it is in Obama's NYT interview, where he's saying something that invites the relabeling that Sarah Palin so effectively slapped on it — "death panels."

It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that's part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It's not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that's part of what I suspect you'll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

Conversations! Damn! As if the government does not have power! Oh, but it's "not determinative," you say. It's just "some guidance." He said that, see? Ugh! Spare me! We're right to be afraid now, while the man is burbling about conversation. You know damned well he's about to say and now the time for conversation is over, and we must pass legislation. Before, he was all quick, shut up, it's an emergency, pass the legislation. People freaked, so then he deemed the period of freakage part of the conversation, and there, it has occurred, and now: shut up, pass the legislation. Oh, yeah, here it is, in today's NYT, an op-ed by Barack Obama:

Our nation is now engaged in a great debate about the future of health care in America. And over the past few weeks, much of the media attention has been focused on the loudest voices. What we haven’t heard are the voices of the millions upon millions of Americans who quietly struggle every day with a system that often works better for the health-insurance companies than it does for them....

It's "debate" now, not "conversation," because the wrong people are doing the talking. The real conversation is what those people who aren't talking would say.

The long and vigorous debate about health care that’s been taking place over the past few months is a good thing. It’s what America’s all about.

But let’s make sure that we talk with one another, and not over one another. We are bound to disagree, but let’s disagree over issues that are real, and not wild misrepresentations that bear no resemblance to anything that anyone has actually proposed. This is a complicated and critical issue, and it deserves a serious debate.

Okay! Let's pick it all apart and examine everything. Have you read the great WSJ op-ed by Whole Foods CEO John Mackey? He had some serious ideas on some real issues, but wait, how dare he speak! How dare he get in the way of the Democrats' ramming legislation through Congress. The Democrats know what the millions upon millions of silent Americans really think, so he and those other loud voices need to quiet down, right? That's what I call conversation — when everyone shuts up and lets me give them what they'd say they want if only they weren't so silent.

Obama predictably insists that we do something now:

In the coming weeks, the cynics and the naysayers will continue to exploit fear and concerns for political gain. But for all the scare tactics out there, what’s truly scary — truly risky — is the prospect of doing nothing....

Why isn't doing the wrong thing a lot scarier than doing nothing? Don't we need to be careful and get it right? If I say that, am I a "cynic" or a "naysayer"? And don't cynics and naysayers belong in the conversation too? Obama's answer is, apparently, no, they are not the real Americans. The real Americans are silent, and I represent what they think.

Obama's final fillip:

In the end, this isn’t about politics.

Oh, come on! But this post is already too long, and it's about the rhetorical use of "conversation." "This isn’t about politics" is at least as common and at least as disingenuous, but we'll have to have our conversation about this isn’t about politics some other day.

***

And yet, I must keep this postscript, while we're talking about "conversation":

Remember Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign announcement?

I'm not just starting a campaign, though, I'm beginning a conversation -- with you, with America. Because we all need to be part of the discussion... And let's definitely talk about how every American can have quality affordable health care.... So let's talk. Let's chat. Let's start a dialogue about your ideas and mine.... So let the conversation begin. I have a feeling it's going to be very interesting....

Ha ha. Yeah, it was interesting. We sure enjoyed chatting with you. Now, what does your husband think? Oh, yes, he was all about conversation too:

Over the coming year I want to lead the American people in a great and unprecedented conversation about race... We have talked at each other and about each other for a long time. It's high time we all began talking with each other....

I'm sure you enjoyed that chat... which is still going on....

About those angry mobs at the townhall meetings...

They dress like hell.

They are wearing T-shirts, baseball caps, promotional polo shirts and sundresses with bra straps sliding down their arm. They wear fuchsia bandannas and American-flag hankies wrapped around their skulls like sweatbands. A lot of them look as though they could be attending a sporting event and, as it turns out, the congressman is the opposing player they have decided to heckle. If not for the prohibition on signs and banners inside these meetings, one could well expect to see some of these volatile worker bees wearing face paint and foam fingers, albeit the highlighted digit would be one expressing foul displeasure rather than competitive rank or skill level....

Robin Givhan's contempt for reform opponents oozes from the first half of her column, which probably entertains many of her readers, but keep reading. The most interesting thing is the contrast between these people and the member of Congress who shows up in a suit. Why don't these opponents wear suits and thereby project authority?

Would they garner more respect? Would they compel more lawmakers to rethink their positions rather than merely repeat, again and again -- in a voice that has the tone of an impatient kindergarten teacher -- the same core points?

On the other hand, why doesn't the member of Congress dress down?

Washington's power brokers have suited up to underscore their authority and the seriousness of the subject matter. And bully for them. But their attire also says: I am the boss of you.All those howling citizens -- in their T-shirts and ball caps and baggy shorts -- are saying: No, you're not.

The closed-minded confrontational quality of these meetings was understood and fixed in place as the various participants got dressed in the morning.

Now, speaking of suits, Robin Givhan did not do a column on Obama's beer summit with Henry Louis Gates Jr. and James Crowley (and Joe Biden).What's with wearing suits to drink beer at a picnic table, and what did it mean that Obama and Biden had taken their jackets off and Gates and Crowley were left to swelter in the summer heat? This was a topic set up so squarely for Givhan that I'm forced to think that she actively avoided it. Why?

***

Givhan is especially interested in men's suits. I've done 2 Bloggingheads diavlogs with her, and both times — 2 years ago and 1 year ago — she rhapsodized about the man's suit — "The suit is the triumph of civilization":

Why was Biden at the beer summit? For racial balancing?

That's what Tunku Varadarajan thinks. (Link via Instapundit.)

I venture that in Obama's careful calibration of his post-racial America there is always a fear of white fear. He is exquisitely sensitive to white — particularly non-elite white — impressions of his occupancy of the White House. He is eager not to disconcert Middle America, and had blundered only days before in his intervention in the Gates-Crowley affair. This ruffled many whites: They were taken aback, disquieted and were reminded, perhaps, of Obama's remarks about bitter and intolerant small-town voters who cling to their faith and guns, made before the Pennsylvania primary....

I was not privy to the reasoning behind the decision to draw Biden into the meeting. But I do know that his presence altered the racial chemistry in a crucial way. And in doing so, it allowed President Obama to ensure that he didn't compound those racial fears — incipient, unsettling —that he'd stoked days before when he "acted stupidly."

What bothered me about Biden's presence — as I hinted here — is that it underscored the fact that the President was on Gates's side with respect to the disputed facts of the incident. It reminded us that it wouldn't have worked to have Obama bringing the 2 men together, because Obama had thrown away his potential as a mediator even as he now wants to pose as a mediator. That was all very incoherent, as was the silly remedy of bringing in Biden.

Well, Biden is next in line for the Presidency, and Obama had (stupidly) vacated the presidential seat for an issue that supposedly demanded presidential attention. (It didn't, but if it did, Obama had disqualified himself to act upon it.) Biden was needed so it wouldn't be 2 men who thought one thing happened against 1 man who thought something else, and then it seemed — Varadarajan saw it this way — that the 2 against 1 problem was 2 black men against 1 white man — that they require (or think we require) racial balancing.

Racial profiling in NYC: "We looked for *white* people."

"That's all you really had to do. Cruise Broadway or Amsterdam Ave. or Riverside Drive in an unmarked car, spot the white guy driving the vehicle with the Jersey plate slow and deliberate, watch him park and shuffle to the sale location, watch him walk back to the vehicle with the pep in his step shortly thereafter and bingo. Most times you had a collar. That's what you were paying us for, wasn't it? The good people of Washington Heights have a right to live in a neighborhood free of cretins driving over the George Washington Bridge to Manhattan for the sole purpose of buying drugs, don't they? Is that not good police work? Of course it is."

Let's cut Obama some slack about this photograph.

Thomas Lifson says:

Sergeant Crowley, the sole class act in this trio, helps the handicapped Professor Gates down the stairs, while Barack Obama, heedless of the infirmities of his friend and fellow victim of self-defined racial profiling, strides ahead on his own. So who is compassionate? And who is so self-involved and arrogant that he is oblivious?

But here's the thing. Remember this? Obama had to worry that if he turned around to help Gates, somebody was going to be able to take a photograph of him looking at Crowley's ass.

Gates's daughter gets catty about Crowley's daughter: "she was wearing an appropriately heavy and charmingly untrained amount of green eyeliner."

Elizabeth Gates poses as empathetic as she swipes a paw at the policeman's daughter:

As our family rounded the corner to the White House library and I first caught sight of Sgt. Crowley’s lovely daughter; she was wearing an appropriately heavy and charmingly untrained amount of green eyeliner on her lower lashes, and I saw my former self in her.

Now, can the 2 girls get a picnic-table summit with — hmmm — Michelle Obama? Let's begin a great national conversation about how women judge and maybe even hate other women. In the fourth chair — the Biden seat — Hillary! Instead of beer, various girlie drinks — maybe Focus Vitamin Water or something. Cosmos for the older ladies.

"The national conversation over the past week about my arrest has been rowdy, not to say tumultuous and unruly."

"But we’ve learned that we can have our differences without demonizing one another. There’s reason to hope that many people have emerged with greater sympathy for the daily perils of policing, on the one hand, and for the genuine fears about racial profiling, on the other hand. Having spent my academic career trying to bridge differences and promote understanding among Americans, I can report that it is far more comfortable being the commentator than being commented upon. At this point, I am hopeful that we can all move on, and that this experience will prove an occasion for education, not recrimination."

Professor Gates, nicely put. I especially like the phrase "genuine fears about racial profiling," which — perhaps — gracefully concedes that his own fears made him interpret the incident as something that it was not, while at the same time asking us to feel real sympathy for those fears.

Gates also acknowledges the police officer's fear. Both men had fears, and, quite apart from whether the yelling or the arrest was justified, it is good for us to understand these different fears that come from different places. I would guess that the disjunction between the stories the 2 men told may be accounted for by the different nature of the fears that filtered their perceptions.

If that is so, and if we want to move forward, then more important than figuring out what really happened is for us all to see how way things look through another person's fears. Maybe we can see that in time to avert the next ugly confrontation.