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'Undaunted in your quest to prove that the best way to win the long struggle to end profiling is by assuming that all white cops are racists, you demonstrate that oppression has to have been experienced to be understood. And who better understands the nightmare of minority oppression in America than a university professor who earns a high six-figure salary and has summers off?"

http://dougpowers.com/2009/07/25/obama-invites-gates-crowley-over-for-beer-and-racial-sensitivity-training/

And who better understands the nightmare of minority oppression in America than a university professor who earns a high six-figure salary and has summers off?"

Skippy's life is pure hell.

By 1996, the Gateses had moved into a $890,000 house on tony Francis Avenue. Coyly dubbed the Writer's Block, or Smart Street, it is home to Cambridge's haute literary intelligentsia. Among Gates's new neighbors were Julia Child, John Kenneth Galbraith, and historian Justin Kaplan and his wife, novelist Anne Bernays. Even within the privileged confines of Harvard, Gates was atop the crème de la crème brulee.

Sharon was thrilled to escape the suburbs. After an inflammatory condition forced her to give up her pottery career, she had started her own business as a landscape designer and made new friends. The girls, Maggie and Liza, were now safely ensconced in private schools. Summers were spent on Martha's Vineyard. Over spring break, the family vacationed in the Caribbean. Life chez Gates was a far cry from grimy Piedmont.

As an intellectual superstar, Gates was said to be earning as much as a million dollars a year from his various projects, an astronomical figure for an academic, several times as much as the salary of Harvard president Neil Rudenstine—and even more than that educational entrepreneur across the river, John Silber, made during his heyday.

Gates's life had become more like that of a movie star than an academic. He earned his frequent flier miles on the Concorde and stayed at the exclusive and stately Berkeley Hotel when he was in London for the BBC. In Hollywood, it was lunch with Jodie Foster, his former student at Yale. Then, perhaps, it was off to Washington, D.C., for the premiere of Spielberg's Amistad, or to Chicago for the opening night of his friend Anthony Davis's operatic version of the Amistad story.

Gates still delights in his celebrity and all its perks to a degree some colleagues find unseemly—"an endless and irritating childlike wonder," one calls it. "He's always the wide-eyed kid at the candy store. Wouldn't you think he'd get used to this stuff? But, no, that lunch with Jodie is still a huge, huge thing for him."

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