Filibuster Cartoons
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So some guy who wrote some book caught Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, saying some rather undelicate things back in 2008 about why he figured Barack Obama was such an electable candidate. I haven’t been able to find a media source with the full quote, but evidently Reid said that white voters would accept Obama because he was comparatively “light-skinned” and spoke with “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”
Now that the book is heading to market, a brouhaha has predictably ensued, with those who have something to gain from exploiting Reid’s embarrassment (ie; Republicans) exploiting away. The chairman of the GOP has called for Reid to resign, and other prominent conservatives have been generating all sorts of blustery outrage about what a double standard it would be to allow a liberal politician to get away with saying such things when we’d almost certainly crucify a right-winger who said anything comparable.
But other than his admittedly insensitive use of the word “negro,” was there anything really that vile about what Reid said? It’s obviously true that an enormous part of Obama’s appeal was that he was articulate and handsome, and, rightly or wrongly, a lot of us tend to think fairer-skinned African-Americans without accents embody these qualities better than pitch-skinned ones with low, drawly voices. That’s a controversial matter unto itself, obviously, but why do we insist on punishing people for reminding us of awkward facts?
