BREITBART: Obama’s accidental gift on race

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Less than a month after being confirmed as the nation’s attorney General, Eric H. Holder Jr. called out the American people as “essentially a nation of cowards” for refusing to talk openly about race.

So, thank you, professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and President Obama, for starting the long-awaited national discussion on black and white identity - while averting our attention from the cockamamie scheme to nationalize health care.

And kudos to the professor and the president for choosing Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department as the representative of the Caucasian-American side of this difficult and much-needed historic debate.

Poetry was at work as the archetypal racist white cop who, according to the admittedly fact-challenged president, “stupidly” arrested his “friend.” Sgt. Crowley waged a swift and effective public relations campaign that quashed the racism meme that Mr. Gates was recklessly pushing.

Sgt. Crowley, as it happens, is the Cambridge police force’s hand-picked racial profiling expert and was selected by a former black police commissioner. He also performed CPR on black basketball star Reggie Lewis, whose widow praised the public servant for doing everything he could to save her husband. Sgt. Crowley’s own police department immediately jumped to his defense in a picture-perfect multiracial photo op and press conference.

Even though Mr. Gates and Sgt. Crowley are poised to put their individual grievances to rest - over a beer negotiated by the president of the United States - the scope of the problem that brought them international attention lingers, underscoring the need for continued robust public dialogue.

We’re finally talking, Mr. Holder and Mr. Obama. Why stop now?

Of course, the attorney general is essentially right in his assessment. Much of America is petrified to bring up race, especially in public forums - the media, in particular. But for exactly the opposite reasons Mr. Holder, the Obama administration and the brain trust of modern liberalism assert.

Americans, especially nonblacks, are deeply fearful that the dynamic is predicated on an un-American premise: presumed guilt. Innocence, under the extra-constitutional reign of political correctness, liberalism’s brand of soft Shariah law, must be proved ex post facto.

Think not? Ask the Duke lacrosse team, which had 88 of the school’s professors sign a petition that presumed their guilt before their side of the story was known. Even though the white athletes were exonerated and the liberal district attorney who pushed the case was dethroned, disbarred and disgraced, the professoriate that assigned guilt to its own students still refuses to apologize.

Those signatories constituted 90 percent of Duke’s African and African-American Studies Department, the subject-matter domain of Mr. Gates, Michael Eric Dyson, Cornel West and other tenure-wielding, highfalutin, iambic-pentameter-filibustering race baiters, and 60 percent of Duke’s women’s studies department, another hotbed of victimology posing as intellectualism.

While the media was front and center in preparing for the public executions of the three Duke lacrosse players, they scurried away when they were proved innocent. The Democratic Media Complex, in its pursuit of Orwellian hate-crime legislation, reparations and sundry non-ameliorative resolutions to America’s troubled racial past, pursues its victims with blood lust. But it cannot act in good faith to redeem those it has destroyed in countless rushes to judgment. (Richard Jewell, R.I.P.)

The mainstream media choose to flaunt story lines that make white America appear guilty of continued institutional racism, while black racism against whites is ignored as an acceptable disposition given our nation’s history. This double standard provides a game board on which the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton can thrive in perpetuity and ensures racial progress is slowed.

And that is why the Case of Sergeant Crowley vs. Professor Gates is so important. As is expected from professional race baiters, Mr. Gates instigated a public brouhaha over race. And Mr. Obama, a man who attended the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s racist sermons for 20 years, used the bully pulpit to grant his friend a national platform to condemn a man for doing his job.

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