On July 25, Nation writer Melissa Harris-Lacewell stopped by Ana Marie Cox’s The Inside Story on Air America to make sense of the recent media uproar over the racial implications of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s recent arrest. Addressing the “great national yearning to be past race,” Harris-Lacewell underscored the importance of considering Gates’s arrest through a combination of factors.  She explained that the “central debate” surrounding “Gates-gate” must determine whether the arresting officer was motivated by Gates’s “disruptive behavior, racial animus and bias or was he just trying to teach any old professor who thought he was better than the ‘working guy policeman’ a lesson.”

You can listen to the entire discussion here: