from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News

Race, Class and Henry Louis Gates in Obama's America

Posted: 03 Aug 2009 11:32 PM PDT

In the wake of the Gates arrest heard 'round the world, the
media, Obama and of course Henry Louis Gates himself, have done their best
to position this as a black and white incident, the collision of two men
divided by race. But in fact the arrest of Henry Louis Gates was not about
two men divided by race, but two men divided by class.

Henry Louis Gates was not arrested because he was
black. He was arrested because he was a famous man who felt entitled to
tell off a middle class police officer, warning him, "You don't know who
you're messing with." Those are not the words of a powerless victim of
America's racial oppression. They're the words of an important man who was
warning the low paid city employee he was dealing with, that he was too
prominent to be touched.

And indeed the remaining narrative, which
moved from a media firestorm over a simple arrest, to a supportive
statement from the White House, proved Gates right. Crowley indeed didn't
"know who he was messing with". He was messing not with a black man, but
with a rich and important man. A man who was above the law.

Had
Gates been arrested because he was a black man, there would have been no
media response and no attention from the White House. Had Henry Louis
Gates been a plumber or an associate professor whose name wasn't listed in
Who's Who in America, with three names, and a list of titles and awards
long enough to choke a whale-- his arrest would never have made the news.
Nor would Gates have acted the way he did.

Once arrested, Gates and
his defenders cynically used race as a smokescreen to conceal the real
issue, which was class. Henry Louis Gates was not the victim of racism, he
was the beneficiary of it. And all the media's huffing and puffing about
race in America cannot successfully transform a wealthy and prominent man
who felt free to warn a police sergeant, "You don't know who you're
messing with" into a victim.

Gates' arrest elicited sympathy from
Obama, not because Gates shares a race with him, but because Henry Louis
Gates shares a class with him. Like Gates, Obama has cynically done his
best to exploit a racial guilt that has nothing to do, not only with him,
but not even with his ancestors, to provide cover for his arrogance and
sense of entitlement. Like the collision between Obama and Palin, the
collision between Gates and Crowley, was a blatant clash of class, not
race.

So too when Obama felt free enough to complain to his fellow
upper class elitists at a San Francisco fundraiser about the middle class
and lower class folks, "get bitter, they cling to guns or religion", it
was not a racial complaint, it was a typically upper class liberal
complaint. That same sense of class entitlement would feed the Obama
campaign's fury against Sarah Palin for stepping outside her class, and
proceed to portray her as ignorant white trash. So too Obama's media cult
and Gates were eager enough to portray Crowley as thuggish and racist,
only halting when they realized that their narrative had been disproven
and was actually producing a backlash.

When black officers blasted
Gates and in turn Obama, it ripped away the mask of race, and revealed the
underlying issue of class. It was no longer one white man and one black
man, but the middle class hardworking police officers pitted against the
wealthy and powerful Henry Louis Gates and Barack Obama. And that was a
dangerous narrative, particularly after Obama had run up a tremendous
deficit bailing out Wall Street banks and car companies.

Obama's
condescending gambit of a beer summit was meant to appeal to what he
thought were the sensibilities of the middle class white men he had
offended. Of course that in turn served as a forum for Elizabeth Gates,
Henry Louis Gates' daughter to pen an essay snidely commenting on
Crowley's daughter's eyeliner, "she was wearing an appropriately heavy
and charmingly untrained amount of green eyeliner on her lower
lashes", again a comment denoting a class putdown, rather than a
racial putdown.

In the famous photo of Crowley helping Gates walk,
Americans may have seen compassion, but Gates only saw a lower class city
employee providing service to a prominent civic figure. It is how Gates
truly saw the conflict all along.

While American liberals insist on
exploiting the arrest to argue that race remains a serious issue for
Americans, the fact that large numbers of Americans were willing to vote
for a black man into the top post in the nation suggests otherwise. It is
not race that haunts America, but class. Yet what class is Henry Louis
Gates?

Gates is not a captain of industry. He did not make money or
gain fame inventing anything that people needed, or marketing a product
that millions of Americans want. Instead Gates is a racial profiteer. A
cleaner more academic version of Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, running an
institute named after W.E. Du Bois, a well known Communist who supported
virtually every atrocity the USSR carried out, and was even willing to
back Imperial Japan's massacres in China, in the name of race.

That
is something which Gates has in common with Obama. Neither of the two men
honestly came by their fame, fortune and positions. They came by them by
exploiting racial guilt, not for any larger benefit, but for their own
class standing. Behind all the twaddle about role models, is the elitism
of two men, neither of whom have worked for a living, but who built up
images of themselves as representing a race, in order to partake of the
benefits of a class.

The rise of Obama, like the rise of Gates, is
a story not of race, but of political parasitism. It is also the larger
story of an America in which hard work no longer matters, in which it is
safe to sneer at the middle class values of a Crowley or a Palin, because
they represent an old fashioned dedication to achievement and duty, that
is no longer meant to be relevant in the "New America".

In the
"New America" you don't get recognized for hard work. You get recognized
for being the squeaky wheel. For turning yourself into a brand. For
finding an identity and marketing it for all you can. Race, gender, sexual
identity, ethnicity are only counters in a larger game of media politics
that everyone can play, but only a few can succeed at.

It's not about the 9 to 5 anymore. It's about the
12 to 3 in a four day week. It's about the triumph over the middle class
by people who excel at talking, but not at working. It's about playing
divide and conquer with a multicultural America, certain that no matter
how it goes, you will always pocket the winnings. It's not just about
class, it's about the new class. The one that doesn't earn money, but has
it transferred over from the coffers of the taxpayer. It's not about
America. It's about the New America. It's about the Obama's
America.

And if you're "unfortunate" enough to still believe in
hard work and doing your job as best as you can, you don't belong in it
anymore. Here have a beer. Then help Henry Louis Gates, Jr, down the
stairs.