Beer and Sympathy

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
President Obama, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley in the Rose Garden, July 30, 2009.

Taxi drivers provide a perverse service to the racial conversation when they refuse to pick up black people. Clearly it would be better if they stopped, so that we wouldn't be left hailing the night air like fools or relying on white friends to sneak one past the censor like supplicants.

But if anyone is going to experience racial hardship, let it be the cab riders. For if you can afford to take a cab, then it is probably not a bad thing to be reminded that racism brooks no exceptions--up to and including the ability to pay. Racism discriminates against people on the grounds of race. Just like it says on the packet. It can be as arbitrary in its choice of victim as it is systemic in its execution. And while it never works alone (but rather in cahoots with class, gender and a host of other rogue characters), it has political license to operate independently.

It's a basic lesson at relatively low cost. And yet the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, suggests we are doomed to keep repeating the lesson. Barack Obama was right when he referred to the arrest as a "teachable moment," but given the brouhaha that has followed, it seems that even a moment involving the nation's most prominent black intellectual teaches us nothing.

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