Obama's New Reverend Wright  He may not be as controversial as
Jeremiah Wright, but Skip Gates has become Obama’s latest
racially polarizing friend. Adam Hanft rereads Professor Gates’
analysis of the Wright controversy through the lens of the
professor’s arrest.  Read other takes on Gates' arrest from
Daily Beast writers.  Memory can heal and haunt. All of us are
the manufactured sums of the tribal stories we’ve absorbed, that
were handed down to us as implacable lessons, and that we
overheard as children, tracking the whispers of anxious adults
in the night. Barack Obama is. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is.
Benjamin Netanyahu is. You and I are.  When Gates saw the cop
enter his house, he suddenly became a proxy for history.  That’s
the teaching moment of the Gates incident. His emotional
explosion was, I think, less about the immediate incident and
the behavior of that particular cop. It feels to me like a very
personal reaction to a long history of police terrorism of black
Americans, resulting in an eruption tha