This is what is likely to come of the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his home by a white police officer: nothing.

The July 16 arrest of the African American scholar by a Cambridge, Mass., police officer looks a little more complicated and a lot more nuanced today than it did when the story broke last week. But it has sparked another conversation on race in America that, I suspect, will end as quickly as it began, with no clearer understanding of the roots of the racial reactions that fueled it. I'll explain why in a minute.

We've made enormous strides in the 46 years since the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. expounded on a dream of racial equality. America in 1963 envisioned neither a prominent, wealthy and powerful black professor at Harvard nor a black president of the United States.

"I am standing here as testimony to the progress that's been made," President Obama said at the end of his news conference Wednesday night when asked about the confrontation in Cambridge. But then he added, "And yet the fact of the matter is, is that, you know, (race) still haunts us." It certainly haunted Obama.

Two days after the president said he thought the police "acted stupidly" in the Gates affair, he stood in the White House briefing room to ask everyone -- himself included -- to "take a step back" from the heated rhetoric from all sides. He acknowledged that he "could have calibrated those words differently" and that the controversy shows that "these are issues that still very sensitive here in America."

Obama's comments were all the more noteworthy because he rarely speaks directly about race. Throughout the presidential campaign, he downplayed it. Only when the impertinent rantings of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright threatened to send his Oval Office ambitions the way of the Hindenburg did Obama speak up. He did so with a forthrightness that earned him plaudits for talking to the American people like adults about one of the country's enduring ailments. It was a teachable moment -- but, like most lessons, it was largely forgotten.

We've been down this road many times: a racial flare-up; talk for a week or so; then a rush to move on. Aside from the revelation of incendiary sermons by Wright (2008), there were the stiff sentences meted out to the Jena 6 in Louisiana (2007); the drowning of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina (2005); the death of unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo in a hail of 41 police bullets in New York (1999); the dragging death of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas (1998); the New York police assault of Abner Louima with a plunger handle (1997); the Million Man March (1995); the arrest, trial and acquittal of O.J. Simpson on charges that he murdered his white ex-wife and her friend (1994-95); the beating of Rodney "can't we all just get along" King by Los Angeles police officers (1991); the riots after the acquittal of those officers (1992) -- plus myriad local conflicts, such as the case of more than 60 black kids being booted from a private swim club near Philadelphia this month. All of these events sparked national soul-searching on race. And then nothing.

The cure for this corrosive cancer won't come through a government program or the courts. It won't come through documentaries like the ones that Gates says he wants to do on the criminal justice system or terrific movies such as "Crash," the 2006 Oscar winner for best picture. This is a matter of the heart, an intensely personal exercise that demands we talk to each other -- one on one, face to face. Perhaps over a beer, as Obama, Sgt. James Crowley and Gates plan to do at the White House. But this requires trust.

Do we as a nation trust one another enough to have this complicated and uncomfortable conversation openly and honestly? Sadly, for now, the answer is no.

The writer is a member of The Washington Post's editorial page staff.

(July 27, 2009)