The beer summit: Was there a lesson?

“Reagan-Gorbachev this wasn’t,” said Darryl Owens in the Orlando Sentinel. Still, there was some satisfaction in seeing Henry Louis Gates Jr. and James Crowley drinking up amicably at last week’s White House “beer summit.” Crowley, a white police sergeant, arrested Gates, the renowned black Harvard professor, inside Gates’ Cambridge, Mass., home a few weeks back, while investigating reports of a possible burglary. In the ensuing uproar, “America’s festering racial dysfunction” burst into the open. President Obama added to the anger by saying that police had “acted stupidly,” but then offered a conciliatory “teachable moment’’—a casual conversation over beers, with Gates, Crowley, Obama, and Joe Biden. So what did we learn?

We learned that frank conversation between individuals—not agenda-driven organizations—may be the best way of defusing racial animus, said Gregory Rodriguez in the Los Angeles Times. After their families met inside the White House and the two men chatted amiably, Crowley said that Gates “has the credentials to enlighten me a bit.” Gates called Crowley “a really likable guy” and spoke highly of cops who put their lives on the line every day. The white cop and the black professor have pledged to take in a Red Sox game together, and keep meeting and talking. That will accomplish a lot more than “race leaders and representatives speaking on behalf of millions of their fellow whatevers.”

No, that’s not what we learned, said Bob Herbert in The New York Times. What we learned is that even the president of the U.S. isn’t allowed to state an obvious truth: Police treat black people as guilty until proven innocent. After Obama criticized the arrest, he was so widely and harshly criticized that he backed down and tried to mollify whites with this “feel good” meeting. But a staged chat over beer doesn’t change the fact that Gates was arrested for the offense of “being angry while black.” This isn’t Iran; people can, and should, challenge unjust actions by the police. Gates was right to object when Crowley demanded Gates’ ID in his own home; this is a country where police routinely harass, arrest, assault, and even shoot black men “for no good reason.” The hell with being nice. The only way to stop the abuse is for black people “to rant and to rave, to demonstrate and to lobby, to march and confront and to sue.”

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Oh, please, said Michael Moynihan in The Weekly Standard. This is also a country where the president is black, the governor of Massachusetts is black, the mayor of Cambridge is black, and one of the cops present during Gates’ arrest is black. That black cop, not incidentally, fully backs Crowley, who teaches a police course in racial sensitivity. So how long will the professional grievance peddlers shout “racism”? As long as the Left and African-American academics continue to obsess about ancient racial grievances, any “dialogue” is just so much wasted breath.

I’m not so pessimistic, said Ta-Nehisi Coates in TheAtlantic.com. At the same time, I doubt that staged events like beer summits, with the president or some other authority figure lecturing us as if we were children, will do much to help. “I’ve had many ‘teachable moments’ around race in the past 15 years,” and most of them came from just interacting with—and listening to—people of all races, and then going home and quietly thinking about what I’d seen and heard. You want a teachable moment? Just step outside your door and take your blinkers off. “It’s all out there.”