Stanley Crouch on Gates incident: "Nothing to do with racism"

Here's a must-read by a smart black man. I always like reading Stanley Crouch—who interestingly enough has a connection to H. L. Gates, Jr. as a colleague in the Fletcher Foundation—because he's a great writer and an independent thinker. Siding with Bill Cosby in his recent criticisms of black culture, Crouch has boldly denounced "gangsta" hip-hop and Al Sharpton-style race baiting. This makes his comparison of first black President Barack Obama to rappers and second-rate black comedians all the more poignant. Excerpt:

President Obama put his big foot in it when he chose to give an uninformed opinion using words far below his expected eloquent shrewdness to describe the minor mishap. The grand irony is that Obama, who once appeared so far above the kind of overstatement one expects from a rapper talking about race politics, spoke on the amateurish level we perhaps thought was behind us, because Obama seemed to perfectly understand the restraint demanded of his enormous power and influence. Every second-rate black comedian has a routine in which black Americans get a chance for "payback" and take the white folks to task for all of the wrongs that they might not have committed but that they did not spurn whenever they resulted in skin-color privilege. The president stumbled into a version of that kind of routine when he allowed the issue to overshadow a discussion of his health-care agenda.

From his last paragraph, it seems as if Crouch is an ardent supporter of Obama. I hope his expressed opinion aids in the dismissal of any suggestion that criticism of Obama's poorly chosen words on the Gates matter is tantamount to "flopping to the floor" in support of a white cop by those less enthralled by the current prez.