Obama on one end of Martha's Vineyard, black intellectuals on the other

I was searching the web today to see if Obama actually had played golf with Skip Gates on Sunday, and came across this article at The Root (a web magazine founded by Gates).

Elite Playlands, Obama Sightings and Serious Discussions
The president and his family vacationed at one end of Martha's Vineyard. Black intellectuals and academics gathered at the opposite end to talk about religion, crime and justice. Two interlocking worlds kept apart on a small island by the common issue of race.

The first black president of the United States and his family hunkered down at one end of a small island, and some of the best and brightest African Americans gathered at the other end: so close, but yet so far away. Maybe it reflects the breadth and range -- and the limitations -- of what it means to be black in America.

On Thursday night last week, several hundred casually -- and often elegantly -- dressed African Americans (with a generous mix of people of other races) crowded into the 170-year-old Old Whaling Church in Edgartown on Martha's Vineyard for a serious discussion. The event was the latest incarnation of an event that has become a summer feature on the resort island seven miles off Massachusetts' Cape Cod.

On the far side of the 67,700-acre island, President Barack Obama and his family vacationed, with one outing for books drawing an enthusiastic crowd of supporters (after all, this is Massachusetts) that applauded when the heavily guarded president and his daughters came out of the Bunch of Grapes bookstore, waving and smiling. In his current mode of shunning the issue of race, the president would have been unlikely to join the discussion taking place less than 10 miles away.

For each of the past few years, Harvard professor (and The Root's editor-in-chief) Henry Louis Gates Jr. and his W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research have enticed a cross-section of scholars, journalists and pundits to take time out from their busy schedules or their coincidental vacations on the island to talk about a big issue. This week it was about the phenomenon of the growing incarceration of black men.

Follow the link to read the rest of the article.