Understocked

understockedFrom xkcd

As one comedian observed, “Alcohol doesn’t resolve racial incidents, alcohol starts racial incidents.”

The Privilege Card

I worked my way through college as a security guard for a company that specialized in security for the campus area of a major flagship university. The area was simply stuffed with the children of the wealthy and connected, most of whom belonged to sororities and fraternities. Most of the security and police work revolved around controlling the excesses of the frats. I got to see how the police had to deal with people quick to claim immunity because of their membership or parentage. I saw how irritated the police got every time they had to talk to one of those little snots.

So, when I read the police report on the Gates incident I understood immediately that Gates’s mistake wasn’t  “being a black man in America,” it was this:

I then overheard Gates asking the person on the other end of his telephone call to “get the chief” and “what’s the chief’s name?” … Gates then turned to me and told me that I had no idea who I was “messing” with and I had not heard the last of it.

I can only imagine how many hundreds of times the Cambridge police have heard some arrogant little snot of a Harvard frat boy utter variants on that same claim to privilege. The Cambridge police also well know that frats only claim privilege when they know they’re in the wrong and they need to weasel out the consequences. When Gates played the privilege card like a frat snot, Officer Crowley immediately suspected that Gates was up to something and was trying to intimidate the officer into backing off and not investigating further.

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What Defines a Man?

While reading this articlee [h/t Instapundit] a thought gelled that had been forming in my mind throughout the Gates affair.

It appears that for leftists in America today, Obama is still more defined by being black than he is by being the President of the United States. They seem to assume that we all should see him as a black man before we see him in any other role. What more can a person possibly accomplish before others see him as just an individual defined by his accomplishments? He has attained the highest office in the most powerful country the world has ever seen, yet they still see his skin color first and foremost.

Sadly, Obama seems to see himself that way too.

We still have a lot of work to do.