Almost 20 years ago a cover story in the New York Times Magazine noted: "With a phone in his Mercedes-Benz, a literary agent in New York and an impressive network of contacts in the academy, publishing and the arts, he sometimes seems more like a mogul than a scholar." Gates has been a smashing success at exploiting the guilt of a liberal white society and badgering them to make amends through him. To be fair, he is charming and accomplished in public and an antidote to the harsh race-baiting of figures like the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. But the tendency to treat Gates as a major thinker — "Black America's foremost intellectual" (Guardian) and "unquestionably one of the great public intellectuals" (New Yorker) — is vastly to overrate a pop cultural phenomenon, a public performer happy to comment on gangsta rap and the O.J. Simpson trial, to write a book on Oprah Winfrey's family history, and to discover lost novels not in dusty archives, but in auction catalogues.

Gates certainly worries over his intellectual standing. In 2002 he said, "I've always thought of myself as both a literary historian and a literary critic, someone who loves archives and someone who is dedicated to resurrecting texts that have dropped out of sight." He was trying to place himself in the tradition of our best literary scholars, who worked to elucidate and deepen the American canon, figures like Lionel Trilling, who insisted on the moral aspects of literature and opposed critics who emphasised ideological criteria. Yet Gates added: "One of the reasons I started writing for the New Yorker was that I'm addicted to writing, but I couldn't really do the kind of archival research that I wanted to do, particularly in the first four or five years that I was [at Harvard] because it was such hard work building the department. I started writing for the New Yorker because I didn't have to go to the library to do that." Skip Gates, cultural mogul and academic empire-builder, is just too busy for  scholarship. 

In an attempt to defuse a situation rapidly threatening to spin out of control, Obama invited Gates and the arresting officer to the White House for a "beer summit" which received massive media coverage. Gates has promised "to devote my considerable resources, intellectual and otherwise, to making sure this doesn't happen again". And just what does devoting those "considerable resources" entail? "I'm thinking about making a documentary film about racial profiling," he said.