Senate majority leader Harry Reid has inadvertently stepped into the cesspool of misunderstanding and bad faith that is the state of race relations in America. In what he thought was an off the record interview, Senator Reid said that Obama could be elected President because he was “light skinned” and didn’t speak with a “negro dialect.” Which begs the obvious question, what is a negro dialect? Are we talking Jim from Huckleberry Finn here, or Flavor Flav after a three day bender in Vegas? Is it a form of Ebonics, the pseudo language that actually made inroads into the K-12 system in California, or is it Jive Talk, amply demonstrated by June Cleaver in the movie Airplane.
Moving on from the question of “negro dialects,” a topic my blinding whiteness does not allow me to comment on, Mr. Reid’s statement is important for three reasons. First, and most obvious, is the double standard as applied to speech. If a conservative had said this he would be driven from the public square, with members of his own party leading the charge. But the left gets a pass, rallying around their comrade and giving him the benefit of the doubt, insisting that he meant nothing by the comment, it was but a poor choice of words.
The second point of importance is how tone deaf Mr. Reid is, and how little respect he has for his fellow Americans. In the good Senators estimation, the American public is incurably racist, and would never elect a dark-skinned black man as President. This is a slur on the good nature of the people of this nation, a people that have made great strides in race relations in the last 60 years. I believe what Mr. Reid was driving at was that Republicans would never vote for a black man, but to come to that conclusion you would have to ignore the great respect conservatives hold for such prominent African-Americans as Secretary Condoleezza Rice, General Colin Powell, Thomas Sowell, Justice Clarence Thomas, and Bill Cosby, just to name a few. These men and women are held in high esteem by the right because of their ideas, not the color of their skin. It is the left that judges individuals based on race, class, and gender, not the right. Indeed, many conservatives, the so called ObamaCons, voted for the President because they believed he was a center-right candidate who could unite this country. The fact that they were wrong does not diminish their support.
The third point are the defenses being offered for Mr. Reid. The left has trotted out three primary lines of defense, the first is that he may have chosen his words poorly, but he was only speaking an obvious truth. I’ll concede that yes, at one point in time light skinned minorities faired better in America than their darker peers, and in some ways that pattern continues to the present day. It is also true that someone who speaks with a thick southern patois filled with profanity and slang will not be elected President, whether that person is black or white. The ability to communicate well is one of the most important skills of a chief executive, something Obama is praised for and Bush was castigated for.
The second line of defense is that a 70 year old grandfather using the word negro is not offensive. Again, I’ll concede the point. At one point in time the word negro was a respectable way to address an African-American. Changes in language should not be taken in bad faith; after all, we still have the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the United Negro College Fund. It would be absurd to label these organizations racist because of names chosen generations ago.
The third progressive talking point is that Reid’s record on social issues absolves him of any guilt regarding his poor choice of words, and it is this defense that does not hold up. In this line of thinking, because Reid has supported minimum wage increases, affirmative actions quotas, increases in the welfare state, etc., in the pursuit of “social justice,” he is to be given a pass. Implicit in this reasoning is that his support for these policies has improved the relative position of African-Americans in the United States, with the obvious corollary that Republican opposition has therefore diminished the black community. But, as with so many progressive talking points, it is a lie.
Let’s look at the 3 examples of the “social justice” policies mentioned above. Minimum wage hikes have a disparate effect on minority communities and the young, lowering the chances of finding an entry level job and increasing unemployment in the inner cities. Affirmative action is an institutionalized form of racism, causing the color of your skin to matter more in matters of hiring and school enrollment than the content of your character. And finally, one has only to look at cities such as Detroit, that have been under Progressive control for generations, to see the damaging effects of the welfare state.
A strong argument could be made that Reid’s commitment to the progressive cause has damaged the African-American community, and by extension, the nation. The specific remark may not have been racist, but the progressive cause is institutionally so, and ol’ dingy Harry has been singing that song for a long, long time. It is past time that the voters of Nevada showed the good Senator the door, perhaps with a gold watch for his service.
Clint Patterson is a writer and martial art instructor who lives in western Colorado. cpatterson@quantumconservative.com.
