Not at all surprising, one of the most trenchant analyses of the "Gates imbroglio" comes from Shelby Steele:

Take a moment and consider this incredibly provocative and penetrating paragraph:

"But this is not really the point. Many a Southern belle would have known she was being ogled by an uppity black man. She would have known that a cultural narrative—heated up by the nuclear taboos of sex and race—put the power of life and death at her disposal. But when would she have actually pulled the cultural trigger and set into motion those forces that would surely end in the annihilation of a black man? The great question in the Gates story is why he put himself so quickly into the cultural narrative, why he screamed 'racial profiling' more quickly than a Southern belle might have once screamed 'rape?'”

Read the entire essay here via WSJ Opinion Journal.