It’s past time for Americans to have a conversation about race, a panel of cultural and academic luminaries agreed at a crowded Martha’s Vineyard Performing Arts Center on Wednesday. What the rules of that conversation are, who the participants are and where the conversation will take place is less certain.

Just a year ago, we had what President Obama called a “teachable moment” in race relations. That was in the wake of the arrest of Henry Louis (Skip) Gates Jr., a well known Vineyard summer resident.

You remember it, of course. Professor Gates, probably the nation’s foremost black academic, was arrested in his own home after Cambridge police responded to a suspected break-in.

Henry Louis (Skip) Gates Jr. uses the quiet entrance, through the corridors of the Martha's Vineyard Regional High School to a backstage area of the performing arts center, no doubt the sort of precaution he regularly takes since his arrest and high profile beer with the President last month.

But as he enters, he bellows with a theatrical gesture of his walking cane in the direction of his friend and legal counsel, Charles J. Ogletree Jr., the man he calls Tree.