Was there a better way to conduct Gates-Crowley debate?

Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley closed a major chapter in “Gates-gate” with Thursday night’s meeting with President Obama in the Rose Garden (though there may yet be an epilogue). But for some of those drawn into the vortex of the national debate over race relations, the episode continues to have both personal and political reverberations.
The take-away for some: A no-holds-barred exchange about race and society is still difficult in America – and can be punishing for those perceived to be impolitic.
To be sure, Dr. Gates’s July 16 arrest for disorderly conduct was followed by an onslaught of candid discussion on the airwaves, over the Internet, and across kitchen tables. But the main problem, social critics say, is that racially defined “scripts” still take over the debate – and get amplified by the Internet opinion storm – with the media often serving as the punishing arm if the script is ignored or breached.
Some say a free-for-all debate is not, in the end, what’s needed. Respectful dialogue – in contrast to all the shouting and finger-pointing that went on – is the only way to truly reduce prejudices on both sides, say those who hold this view.
“The best way to defuse, diminish, and ultimately dismantle the power of [prejudice] is to show even excessive respect in potential situations of conflict,” writes the Rev. Jim Wallis, author of “God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It,” in an e-mail.
But the media’s power to amplify, combined with lingering black rage and white guilt over the historic treatment of African-Americans, appeared to catch some debate participants off guard. The lesson may well be: Be careful what you say.
President Obama himself found this out. His poll numbers have taken a beating in the days since he called it like he saw it, calling police out for acting “stupidly”for arresting a man on his own front porch, a point on which many constitutional scholars back him up.
The nonpartisan Pew Research Center survey released this week found that 41 percent of Americans disapprove of Obama’s handling of the Gates arrest, compared with 29 percent who approve. Of white respondents, half disapprove, with support for the president falling most quickly among working-class whites – a key constituency.