Wow. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested last Thursday. In Cambridge. For disorderly conduct. Grey-haired and bespectacled, the fifty-eight-year-old Gates, who now walks with a cane, flew into a "tumultuous" tirade at police responding to a neighbor's tip about a possible break-in (he had gotten locked outside of his home on Harvard campus).

His lawyer is Charles Ogletree. The pair play the race card for a living. This couldn't be a more perfect example of our life and times. Lately I've been thinking we still have no common understanding or language for discussing race, racism, blackness, whiteness, minority-ness, dominance and submission, signifier and signified.

You've gotta read the arrest report. I think I would fly into a "tumultuous" tirade too, although I highly doubt he did. There's no way a black man, and an educated one at that, would go off on a white cop with a pistol. Really don't understand how some folks think that's even in the realm of the possible. Goes to show how privilege breeds ignorance.