Executive Leadership, Race and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Wow.  

Anyone who thinks we, as a country, have resolved our history with race relations, think again. Could it be that we ALL have a sensitivity to our inheritance - a long history of racial bias and abuse - regardless of the progress we have made in recent years or if we are on the "white" or "black" side? And we each have our own unique bundle of biases and hot buttons based on our personal history. Some say it's ALWAYS about race. Some say it's NOT always about race.

President Obama, our executive leadership, was "quick" to react and label the incident "stupid" - racial profiling - and just as "quick" to apologize when others, namely the Cambridge Police Department, got insulted. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "overreacted" after a long trip and perhaps "felt accosted, wrongly accused" in his own home. "Should" he have just let it go and gone to unpack?

Officer Sargent James Crowley "overreacted" and decided to arrest Mr. Gates after his "tirade". "Should" he have just let it go and chalked it up to Mr. Gates being tired and oversensitive?Could all these perspectives be true....? .... AND it is clear that race is still a not-yet healed wound all too ready to surface spiraling out of control and causing unintended repurcussions. We can be human. Temperance and wisdom go out the window when it hits home.

As a white female, I never really understood what it felt like to be a minority by skin color until, as a young adult, I lived in Kingston, Jamaica, the West Indies, a country with many shades of skin tones - not many of them white. Then I got it at a different level of understanding.

I say, sometimes it IS about race and sometimes it is NOT about race. Can both be true? Enough said. Go have a beer.