How does the Henry Louis Gates incident rob the nation of a much longer dialogue?
Unless one has been dead for about a week, it is hard to have missed the news that black Harvard academic Henry Louis Gates was arrested at his home in Cambridge, Mass., after a woman reported that she saw a burglary taking place at his house in the early afternoon. The incident finally amounts to a minor but irritating experience that shows once again how magnetized our media is to trivial experiences had by the rich, be they pop superstars or unknown professors. In that line, I do not think that Chicago Sun-Times reporter Lynn Sweet or any other reporter would have asked the President at a press conference about health care what he thinks about or intends to do about the ongoing slaughter and callous treatment of black people by street gangs and freelance criminals.
