My commentary on race relations post "Gates-Gate" is legitimized by having once been arrested, at gunpoint, under almost the exact same circumstances as those surrounding the famous professor. More on that later.

First, in the wake of the Cambridge hullabaloo involving Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Cambridge police department, and President Barack Obama, the nation's baby boomer press has dived headlong (again) into the debate they most love to hate: race.

Make no mistake about it, they love this debate. Remember when all discussion of Obama's nascent presidential candidacy was, embarrassingly, always prefaced with his racial pedigree? ("I heard his mother was white..."). Or how the month long controversy our African American Attorney General, Eric Holder, sparked when he pointedly called out Americans for too often being "cowards" about race?

Or what about the complete lack of controversy surrounding the Republican Vice Presidential Nominee's then-soon-to-be-son-in-law Levi Johnson's myspace page, which read "I'm a fuckin' redneck who likes to hang out with the boys...shoot some shit. Ya fuck with me I'll kick ass"? Very few people cared to describe just how thoroughly the press would loose their collective shit if Barack Obama's girls were of age and in a relationship with an African American teenager who described himself with even half the aggression of the Alaskan hockey stud.

But make no mistake about it, they also hate this debate. How else could you describe the infantile standards of our race discussions, even, or especially, among the elite? We all got a taste of this during the Sotomayor confirmation hearings from GOP Senator Jeff Sessions. As CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin argued on air "What's worth noting about what Jeff Sessions -- the line of questioning, was that being a white man, that's normal. Everybody else has biases and prejudices ... but the white man, they don't have any ethnicity, they don't have any gender, they're just like the normal folks, and I thought that was a little jarring."

Indeed, that is jarring, but Sotomayor herself reinforced the exact same sentiment in her now famous "wise Latina" speech. The issue with the speech can be broken into three parts. First, Sotomayor proclaimed her superior intellectual mettle. Second, she credited this superiority to her race. Third, she did not explain this association vis-a-vis all races, genders, or generations, but with enormous specificity to white men. Thus the stupidity of the Senator from Alabama extends all the way to a Berkeley graduation ceremony. Holder had it wrong. We're not a nation of cowards, we're a nation of idiots.

Or perhaps we're a nation of stark generational divides. From the perspective of a Millennial, this much seems pretty cut-and-dry: Generally speaking, our grandparents were born into an overtly racist society and, like all generations before them, they more-or-less accepted it. Our parents, the baby boomers, we're raised into this overtly racist society. However, unlike our grandparents, they saw it as unjust and they actively supported political movements to fix it, in numbers that their parents did not. However, having been raised in the racist society, the depth of this commitment among white baby boomers varied greatly, and some were just as passionate about continuing segregation as others were about passing the Civil Rights Act. The civil rights struggle that ensued brought all these emotions to the fore, sometimes violently so, scarring all those who took part with memories for a lifetime.

Which brings us to today, where the children of these baby boomers were essentially raised to believe that racism was wrong, even in the cases of parents who were unable to completely shake elements from their racist past. This generation's perspective on race did not have to be transformed by social movement; we could all recognize equality as a no-brainer even as we acknowledged that, as a nation, were not there yet.

This generation's liberalized attitude towards race was further promoted by a consortium of economic and technological factors beyond the control of themselves or their parents. First, arts and entertainment was democratized and internationalized. This generation's hit music is now as likely to come from a British Sri Lankan as it is a homegrown guitar hero, and the Best Picture award as likely to go to an Indian film as it is to Spielberg. Second, immigration has ensured that social circles in this generation would be almost impossible without some level of diversity. And third, this generation was raised with technology that allowed cultural intercourse in ways previously unimaginable.

While Senator Sessions (62), Sonia Sotomayor (55), Henry Louis Gates (58), Sergeant James Crowley (42), and the rest of the mainstream media continue to reference the time-capsule that is their shared experience of the 1960's and 1970's in regards to contemporary race discussions, I find myself utterly bewildered.  

I haven't read the arrest report, nor do I intend to. I haven't interviewed Gates, or Sergeant Crowley, nor do I intend to (nor do I pretend I could if I wanted to, I don't have that many followers). So, while I can't offer much insight on the specifics of Gates-Gate, I can tell you about an incident that occurred when I was a scrawny 16 year old. One that bears striking similarities to the case of Henry Louis Gates Jr., except, of course, that I am blaring white.

It's early July, 2000, on a weekend. I am 16 years old. My best friend and I are returning from a successful day the beach (by successful I mean what any 16 year old boy means: tasty waves and new phone numbers). We had planned to meet up with some girls from the beach to go see a movie later that night. On our way to the theater, I made a fateful decision to stop by my mom's house to reply to nature's call. She, however, was not home and I, unfortunately, had forgotten my set of keys.

So I did what you do in these situations: I broke in.

I popped out the screen from the living room window, slid the glass open, hopped in, then unlocked the door to let my buddy in. I used the bathroom, washed my hands, and made a phone call. As we leave, we gently closed the window, replaced the screen, and locked the door behind us. All told, the maneuver took 8 minutes, tops.

We scurried across the hall and turned to descend the staircase back towards the parking lot, eager to meet the girls at the theater on time (my memory has fogged a bit, but I'm pretty sure we were describing our ultimate hopes for the evening in rather lurid detail, and at a rather high decibel). Halfway down the stairwell we were confronted: three squad cars and no fewer than six officers, guns drawn, standing between us and my best friend's forest green Camero (its true), like Frodo between Gollum and the tortuous ecstasy of the Ring.

"Freeze! Get your hands up!"

A moment of panic ensued, as both my buddy and I were under the sudden belief that the day's lovely progression had gone far enough, and that fate was determined to stonewall our hormones even if it meant dropping us into the middle of a gun fight between San Luis Obispo's finest and whatever manner of criminal must have been at our rear to warrant the current situation. With hands in the air, I glanced behind me to find the armed man. Nothing.

"I'm talking to YOU motherfucker! On the ground!"

Within moments we were hand-cuffed and face-down on a grimy parking lot at my mom's shitty apartment complex, boots at our backs, guns at our heads.

"Is anyone else in the building?!"

"No officer. This is a some sort of mistake. That's my m--"

"I repeat: Is there anyone else in the building?!"

"No. It's my mom's house. I was just using the bathroom".

"Because if we go in there and find someone else..."

Of course, nobody was in the house. They came back down, chatted some stuff over the transmitter, asked us a few questions, and then let us go. But not before my buddy, like Professor Gates, asked for an apology. First, we got a scowl. Then, like Gates, an abrupt "no".