What We Talk About When We Talk About Professor Henry Louis Gates

If you are reading this blog you are not shocked (shocked!) to discover there is still racial injustice in the criminal justice system. So for CLAWSTERS, who are pretty well steeped in this stuff, here are some off beat conversation starters.

**The sit-down over beer in the Rose Garden. Who drank what? (Crowley had Blue Moon, Gates had Red Stripe, the President had Bud Light.)

**Soothe it with alcohol? (See David Letterman commenting on it being the first kegger in the White House since the Bush Twins, and adding "alcohol usually cools things off — have you noticed that?")

**Is it true that Crowley is one of the only non-racist cops on the Boston police force? (See Maureen Dowd on how the daughter-of-a-cop crowd feels).

**So what did happen to Crowley? (See Former Federal Defender Inga Parsons and Slate's Christopher Hitchens explaining why the problem is more about cop anger management than race.)

**And should we all be going out for beers? (See Jon Stewart simulating the historic Rose Garden beer summit at a local happy hour.)

**Finally, where did race fit in in that uniquely Cambridge scenario? (See Vintage Chris Rock on how it ain't always about being black ("If O.J. drove a bus, he wouldn't even be O.J.—he'd have been Orenthal the bus-driving murderer") and the Black Take (from the Daily Show's Senior Black Correspondent, Larry Wilmore) that Professor Gates just forgot he was black.

Justice Ginsburg on Being the Lone Woman on the Supreme Court

Fresh out of law school in 1989, I worked out west for a boutique litigation firm of 10 muy macho male lawyers. I was young and uncomfortable in my Casual Corner suits, not yet savvy enough to handle the minority status. Instead, I fled east, chasing some fantasy that there was no such thing as minority status in New York.

So, it was with interest I read this article entitled "The Place of Women on the Court" (recent NYT Magazine) in which Justice Ginsburg talks about being the One Woman of the Nine on the Supreme Court. She also talks candidly about Justice-to-be Sotomayor's path, and sounds downright Claw-like discussing Sotomayor's much-aligned remarks about being Latina and a woman. [In 2001 Sotomayor said: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”] Here's how Justice Ginsburg responds to those critics:

I thought it was ridiculous for them to make a big deal out of that. Think of how many times you’ve said something that you didn’t get out quite right, and you would edit your statement if you could. I’m sure she meant no more than what I mean when I say: Yes, women bring a different life experience to the table. All of our differences make the conference better. That I’m a woman, that’s part of it, that I’m Jewish, that’s part of it, that I grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., and I went to summer camp in the Adirondacks, all these things are part of me.

God bless her! I wish J.Ginsburg had been there to mentor me back when I was the lone woman on that muy macho litigation team...