What I Saw at the Beer Summit, by Elizabeth Gates ("Skip" Gates's daughter)

jefferson_dem

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Fri Jul-31-09 07:29 AM
Original message

What I Saw at the Beer Summit, by Elizabeth Gates ("Skip" Gates's daughter)

What I Saw at the Beer Summit
by Elizabeth Gates

The Daily Beast’s Elizabeth Gates joined her father, Skip, Sgt. Crowley, and the president to raise a beer and bury the hatchet. An inside report from the peace talks.

In a world in which the conversation on race has traditionally taken a back seat to both logic and reason, it’s no wonder that yesterday’s so-called “Beer Summit” at the White House seemed to make little sense at all. It wasn’t because the President was wrong in offering up a few cold ones to my father, Henry Louis Gates, and the now infamous Sergeant James Crowley in an attempt to tame the media blitz around my father’s arrest—it was because like most issues that make their way to TMZ, the reference point had shifted. The debate over Red Stripe and Blue Moon had somehow overshadowed the fact that this story began with a black Harvard professor and a white cop from Natick, Mass—and as CNN’s countdown clock to the event taunted viewers like a time bomb, it was clear that this day wasn’t going to be the beginning of a serious discussion on human relations but rather a circus-like ending of a misunderstanding between a couple of very decent men.

I can’t say that I was shocked.

My father cut right through the thick tension of hurried salutations and offered the Sgt. his hand and joked, “You looked bigger the last time I saw you.”
As our family rounded the corner to the White House library and I first caught sight of Sergeant Crowley’s lovely 14-year old daughter—who was wearing an appropriately heavy and charmingly untrained amount of green eyeliner on her lower lashes—we were instantly transported from the post-racial myth of America in 2008 to the reality of 2009. There they stood, a pleasant family of five, listening patiently to the overzealous tour guide boast about the fully functioning fireplace to the left of the doorframe.

As soon as my father’s foot crossed the threshold of the room, the storm of mediators immediately rushed to introduce us, but true to form, my father cut right through the thick tension of hurried salutations and offered the Sgt. his hand and joked, “You looked bigger the last time I saw you.” Crowley’s cheeks flushed red as a smile dashed across his lips, and his young son, whose cheeks had long since flushed the same muted crimson, looked up at his father and smiled. This wasn’t a family raised on hate. At that moment, right there in the library, they were just like us: a young family groomed to perfection, waiting to learn how to get those damn cameramen off their lawn and to put this sensationalized hell behind them.

Moments later, the Sergeant and my father were escorted to the Rose Garden where the press sat waiting “at least 40 feet away” while the rest of our us continued on with our tour. As we walked by a set of French doors that gave a clear view of this highly anticipated talk, and I saw Mr. Obama’s lean body coolly draped over a lawn chair I wondered what these four men—President Obama, Vice President Biden, Sgt. Crowley and my father—could possibly say to heal this situation and what the press was actually waiting for. Would my father and Sgt. Crowley be reduced to who they were on that fateful day in my father’s house on Ware Street and give us all a glimpse of what really happened? Or could it be that this small collection of men were actually devising some master plan to rid the world of all racist tendencies right there in the Presidential Rose Garden over a few brewskis? No. That would have been impossible to achieve—even on Obama’s best day and even if my father had actually finished his Sam Adams.

<SNIP>

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-07-31/what-i-saw-at-the-beer-summit/