WASHINGTON -- Just about everyone in the country seems to be kicking around the lessons supposedly surrounding "the" confrontation of the first half year of Barack Obama's term.

No, we are not discussing Hillary Clinton up against North Korea's Kim Jong Il, a dumpy and ignorant little brute who had the nerve to describe her as a middle-aged housewife. Nor Joe Biden, visiting in the formerly Soviet Georgia and not hesitating to tell the Russians that they face a hopeless future.

To the contrary, as we all surely know by now, the news is in our very own Cambridge, Mass., at Harvard University, with one of our great professors, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and one of our finest police professionals, Sgt. James Crowley. The fact that, after more than a week, this curious and really accidental little saga of "race relations in our times" remains in the news, supposedly re-emphasizing the presence of those OLD lessons for us, should give us pause for reflection. But what exactly are those lessons that are dominating the discourse?

First, everyone knows that the "coppers" -- that's what we call our police in Chicago -- treat black people, particularly men, differently from white people. They "racially profile," which is essentially putting into practice an expectation that blacks are more likely to engage in crime and ill-thought-out behavior.

Second, black children are taught from birth not to taunt the police; it is a form of self-preservation, and so these children will most likely be acquiescent and passive in the face of authority.

Third, yes, everyone sees the reality that while many black American men and women have judiciously and studiously worked to get ahead, there is little evidence of really massive social change. Of course, America has an immensely talented black presidential couple, but they might merely go down in history as the man and woman who only tested the OLD rules!

Now there is only one problem with these supposedly timeless rules: They no longer apply in the least to today's America. In fact, I would argue that this event was simply sui generis -- singular, with little or no significance for our times. So allow me, please, to offer some new observations.

First, police in America today, while there are surely still "rogue cops" among them, are far more carefully trained in race relations than in those earlier years. The number of African-American police officers has jumped exponentially. In the Cambridge case, one should pause to remember, the cops were not jumping into some untested situation; there was a worried call from a neighbor, and there had been no fewer than 23 break-ins in the neighborhood in recent months. Hardly "Bull" Connor and the Old South!

Second, it is easy for outspoken intellectuals like Henry Gates to talk too much. They do it all the time. Most of his talk is flat-out brilliant. I watched his PBS series on advanced ancient African kingdoms, ones that I have myself sought out in, for instance, the Egypto-Cushite ruins of Meroe in the northern Sudan, and wondered, with some awe, why no one had dramatized these histories before?

I was myself stopped by not-very-pleasant police in Fairfax, Va., several years ago when, in an unfamiliar neighborhood, I made a wrong turn in the dark on an unlighted street. The cops suspected me of drinking -- I had indeed drunk one glass of red wine and two cups of black coffee -- and so they were palpably disappointed at having to let me go. (Was it because I was a white woman alone at 8 p.m. on a Saturday night?) But I didn't say a word.

Third and most wonderfully important, today our president and his first lady are not at all unrepresentative of America today. In a brilliant article last week in The New York Times, writer Helene Cooper delineates how these African-Americans are the "children of 1969 -- the year that America's most prestigious universities began aggressively recruiting blacks and Latinos to their nearly all-white campuses."

Thus, America -- very deliberately, and not without thought and not without pain -- integrated America from the top down, out of both personal morality and public utility.

Helene Cooper writes informedly of how this generation of African-Americans was not only a "diverse elite," but how they thus came to have, as human beings, a "double consciousness." But I think that is too limited an explanation for our world today, and today we ALL have multiple consciousnesses. That is the way being educated into an open society and world works.

So, what now? "Dialogue" over race? Good God, no! That would be only another excuse for more pointing and blaming and eternally remembering.

You see, Americans think that differences among people are unnatural -- when, in fact, they are abysmally and, for most peoples of the world, eternally natural. As a correspondent covering the world for many years, I have seen over and over again how every human society takes the slightest differences (sometimes length of hair or height) among people and makes them into causes for destruction and annihilation.

So, yes, let us use this experience -- not to quarrel further, but instead to understand that America's attempts to integrate its society, while certainly not perfect, are, given human nature, perfectly wondrous. Indeed, THAT is the "teachable moment."