Is that it aint gonna stop. Not anytime soon. Regardless of the number of African Amercian scholar freinds of the President(Henry Louis Gates Jr.) getting treated to beer at the white house in the company of the cops who pissed off the President for putting his learned freind in handcuffs; regardless of a wise latina supreme court justice who successfully defended herself against accusations of being racist in her confirmation hearings.
You see, its all in the numbers. If 8 out of 10 prison inmates and more than half the bums in New York City or most other places in the US are black, and ALL the help in restaurants and homes are latinos/latinas - racial stereotypes will remain. Racism is a reality in this country. News reports say the President will not reveal details of the beer-talk with Mr. Gates and Mr. Crowley. Good. Why bother? I am not interested in the conversation as much as I am in the Mr. President's reasons to have this conversation at all. Is one conversation going make me less jittery about moping around in the Bronx at midnight (yes, this was attempted with consequences that were not fun)? Its nice of Mr. President to get all worked up about his bud being shackled- but what about this kid ? She was supposedly yanked out of undergraduate studies, from Harvard no less, for allegedly abetting a crime. No proof has been provided to support the assertion of the police. Mr Gates is atleast an established professor/scholar (in African American studies- may have been more interesting if his choice of subject was a tad less predictable, just a tad), this kid's future is potentially in the gutter. Beer pong any one ?
The truth is that until a sizable portion of the colored folk are uplifted in America negative/potentially deterimental stereotyping on the basis of race will persist even in ways that cannot be overlooked. Unfortunately until then, all conversations to address racial stereotyping - with or without beer- are rhetorical too.
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