i wish i had something clear to say on the skip gates matter.

i can certainly speak to the excellence of his scholarship, which i availed myself of in act like you know. the person who comes through in his writings - scholarly, personal, etc. - is certainly affable and admirable. he is as good as any academic in the fields he essays: with a coherent point of view and a fine prose style. he is a first-rate scholar and thinker. his understanding of race is serious, nuanced, and right, basically: treating race both as a fact and as a social construction of extreme interesting complexity. his writing is non-reductive, but congenial in a way to liberation movements, but itself manifesting considerable scholarly detachment from the whole configuration of race. that is, he's a post-modern scholar of race, foucauldian in his way, and perhaps the very best and most thoughtful.

he grew up in rural west virginia, and has written beautifully about that. it's funny that he went all "yo mama"; he himself wrote beautifully about the dozens.

this run-in might be "reverse-profiling" in which gates was what appeared to be insanely sensitive to the police presence. in that situation, you greet the officer in a friendly way and explain the sit. you greet him like a white homeowner greets a cop, with the happy presumption that we're all on the same side. i'll give you lessons; this is literally something i've tried to teach my kids; the catechism in status and playing things cool (which is how i might put it to gates: wwmd: what would miles do?) the "do you know who i am?" approach is never the right one, because it's an insult to everyone who is not-you, e.g. the cop himself: sheer hubris doesn't help anything, and if your bellowing could be mistaken for drunkenness etc, that doesn't make for a successful interchange. the only response to "do you know who i am?" is: i don't give a fuck who you are.

on the other hand, that's also the stance one might take up as an officer, as in "excuse me, sir." you'd think that the very last thing a cambridge cop is going to want is an altercation with an eminent harvard prof, and how these cops manufactured this incident is worth asking. and i obviously am not going to dismiss the "black man in america" argument: that's the origin of gates's response even if there was no racism on the other side. and here's a problem: how,  if you are a white officer, do you know whether racial attitudes played a role in how you responded, even if you mean well? "would i have responded the same to a white guy?" is a hard question, unless you are explicitly in your own self-image a racist. the locked-out-of-your-own-house scenario is surely one that cops see every day. on most days, it's happy laughs all around when it's done. we'll get more info - obviously, more than we will ever want - on what actually happened.

obama should have been a bit more reticent. he's backpedaling on live tv right now. it's interesting that the right instantly denied that it was a case of racial "profiling," while the left (including obama) asserted it. neither had to wait and actually find out. it shows the status of facts in our political culture.

guess i had some stuff to say after all.