Why do I allege that America has played the race card? Because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s private musings about race have now come out of the closet. Reid said what many Americans think: President Barack Obama is light skinned and has no “Negro dialect” unless he wants to. Reid is spot on.
If he misunderstood anything, he misunderstood the optics of racial politics. The Republicans will compare him to Trent Lott, who was forced to resign when he said, “the United States would have avoided “all these problems” if then-segregationist Strom Thurmond had been elected president in 1948. Reid is no Lott. And, perhaps we would not have had all of these problems, if Reid had not aired America’s dirty racial laundry.
First, while I don’t know what a “Negro dialect” is, I know many Blacks identify with and embrace the term, Negro without chagrin. I know many Blacks use one dialect when in the presence in the Blacks and another when in the presence of Whites. “It’s like that and that’s the way it is.”
Second, the reality is in America color matters regardless of whether liberal elites, conveniently Black scholars and opportunistic conservatives wish to acknowledge that it does.
