Obama's Beer Summit and Race in America

It was designed to create a teachable moment about race in America. But the much-ballyhooed "beer summit" at the White House last week seemed to go flatter than a week-old glass of lager. When the main antagonists—the black professor and the white cop—got together for 40 minutes on the South Lawn at President Obama's invitation, the media were kept in a roped-off pen 50 feet away, out of earshot. No questions were allowed, and Obama seemed eager to move on to other issues. He had told reporters earlier in the day that the "beer summit" was "a clever term, but this is not a summit, guys. This is three folks having a drink at the end of the day and hopefully giving people the opportunity to listen to each other."

President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden sat at a round, white picnic table sipping from mugs of beer and chomping on pretzels and peanuts with the two central figures in the drama, Harvard scholar Henry Gates Jr. and Cambridge, Mass., Police Sgt. James Crowley. Obama and Biden were in shirt sleeves; Gates and Crowley kept their suit jackets on. Crowley told a news conference later that there were no apologies and "no tension." "Two gentlemen agreed to disagree on a particular issue," he said, adding that he and Gates agreed to stay in touch by phone and meet again in the future. Gates issued a statement extolling free speech and thanking Obama for bringing them together. "The national conversation over the past week about my arrest has been rowdy, not to say tumultuous and unruly," Gates said. "But we've learned that we can have our differences without demonizing one another. There's reason to hope that many people have emerged with greater sympathy for the daily perils of policing, on the one hand, and for the genuine fears about racial profiling, on the other hand."

The drama started July 16 when Gates was arrested for disorderly conduct after police came to his home to investigate a possible break-in. Obama intensified the controversy when he said the police had "acted stupidly." To smooth things over, he invited Gates and Crowley to share brews. But in the end, despite considerable media hype, the beer summit seemed awkward and inconclusive, echoing America's larger conversation about race.

• See pictures of the beer summit.
• See pictures of Obama behind the scenes.
• Read 10 Things You Didn't Know About Henry Gates.