Ward Connerly on Harry Reid’s Comments
If you’ve been living in a Wi-Fi-bereft cave for the last few days, you probably missed the Harry Reid uproar. The senator said something rather innocuous about our biracial president during the campaign. He described Barack Obama as a “light-skinned” black man with “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”
As expected, bedlam broke out. Now I, as a black woman, was not offended by Reid’s remarks. People on the right, however, are calling for Reid’s resignation as Senate Majority Leader. They cite the left’s hypocritical reaction to Trent Lott’s remarks about Senator Strom, which I’ve blogged about several times. An excerpt of a book review:
On December 5, 2002, Republican senator Trent Lott toasted 100-year-old Republican senator Strom Thurmond, a former segregationist, at a private birthday party, saying that if the rest of the country had voted for Thurmond for president as he had (Thurmond ran in 1948 as a Dixiecrat), “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.”
About a year and a half later, on the Senate floor (and on taxpayers’ time), Democrat Chris Dodd said that Democrat Robert Byrd (who said on cable TV a few years earlier that he’d seen a lot of “white niggers” in his time), a former segregationist and KKK recruiter, would have been “a great senator” during America’s founding, crafting of the Constitution, and the Civil War.
The backlash against Lott was fierce. He apologized and groveled on Black Entertainment Television (BET) but was eventually drummed out of his leadership post. The backlash against Dodd? Non-existent. He neither prostrated himself before the PC gods nor played the fool on BET.
Republicans are upset because of the double standard. If a Republican had said what Reid said, he’d be toast. But Reid’s a Democrat, with the backing of the Congressional Black Caucus. He can’t be touched.
The American Civil Rights Institute’s Ward Connerly wrote about the topic in the Wall Street Journal. I agree with Connerly about the substance of Reid’s comment, and not just because I blog for ACRI:
“For my part, I am having a difficult time determining what it was that Mr. Reid said that was so offensive…Was it because he suggested that lighter-skinned blacks fare better in American life than their darker brothers and sisters? If so, ask blacks whether they find this to be true. Even the lighter-skinned ones, if they are honest with themselves, will agree that there is a different level of acceptance.
“Was it because he used the politically incorrect term ‘negro’? If so, it should be noted that there are many blacks of my generation who continue to embrace this term. In fact, ‘negro’ is an option along with ‘black’ and ‘African-American’ on the 2010 Census.
…
“Or, finally, could it be viewed as offensive that Mr. Reid suggested that blacks often have a distinctive way of speaking? If that is, indeed, the offense, then I will offend a lot of individuals when I assert that I can tell in probably 90% of the cases whether an individual is black merely by talking to him on the telephone.
“In short, this incident does not rise to the level that it prompts me to join the parade of those who urge Mr. Reid to resign because of it. There are far more substantive matters over which the Senate majority leader’s performance should be judged—and I find his performance seriously flawed on any number of them.”
Republicans usually are the ones groveling and apologizing for “offending” someone at the mere mention of race, while the left typically gets a pass. That’s politics and plain old human nature. With the Congressional Black Caucus behind him, Harry Reid won’t lose his leadership post. And I don’t think what he said rises to that level, just as I didn’t think Lott’s comments warranted his stepping down.
Can we move on to substantive issues?
