A Beer at the White House

In France everything ends with songs. In the United States, does everything eventually end with a beer?

Barack Obama’s opinion on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., an African-American professor at Harvard, by a white officer is controversial.

Barack Obama seemed upset by the “stupid” behavior of the police officer. He called his countrymen to be aware of the consequences of racial profiling.

Obama smartly invited the two to smoke a peace pipe at the White House, and therewith offers his country an image of a reconciled nation. Is the role of the president to identify what causes tension and reduce that tension, if necessary by using cultural symbols?

Obama shows day after day that he remains very sensitive to the plight of minorities, but he does it in the best possible way: defending the public interest and showing that minority rights are not antithetical to the general interest. Equality for blacks is the same as equality for whites. It is equality for all … whites and blacks!