Reid's Obama Blunder and What It Means
By Adriane Lentz-Smith
What do we talk about when we talk about race? Or, more pointedly, what do we talk about when we talk about the foolish things that people sometimes say? Reporters Mark Halperin and John Heilemann have garnered much attention for their new book on the 2008 presidential campaign, Game Change, largely for quoting Harry Reid’s ill-considered remarks about then-Senator Barack Obama. An Obama supporter, Reid viewed the candidate’s light skin as an asset and his ability to speak “with no Negro dialect” as an even greater one.
Critics have called Reid’s comment racist, and it is. It is racist in the same way that Joe Biden’s campaign gaffe was racist, complimenting Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.” Both remarks betray a limited sense of African Americans as a community or as individuals. A sense constrained by low expectations and an inane failure to consider that black folks might occupy a spectrum of accomplishment and ability as broad and varied as that of any other peoples. Articulate? One would hope that the former editor of the Harvard Law Review could string together a lucid sentence. Negro dialect? I had not realized there was one; did we expect the presidential candidate to don a straw hat and tell us a story about Brer Rabbit and the briar patch? Statements that paint Obama as an Exceptional Negro say more about the ignorance of the speakers than they do about Obama himself.
Yet all expressions of racism are not equivalent. Republicans have made hay of Reid’s remark and the Democrats’ responses to it. If Trent Lott had to resign as Senate Majority Leader because of his unseemly remarks about black people, they argue, so too should Reid. However, where Reid and Biden revealed the extent to which they had absorbed white supremacy in the form of images, assumptions, and expectations, Lott expressed regret for the passing of white supremacy as a political and economic program. In celebrating Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday, Lott commented that Mississippi had voted for the Thurmond in 1948, the year he broke off from the Democrats and ran for president as a Dixiecrat in order to protect Jim Crow. “And if the rest of the country had followed our lead,” Lott added, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.” No federal civil rights legislation, presumably, and no enforcement of the decisions of the Warren court if ever it had come to that.
Read the Full Essay @ History News Network
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Adriane Lentz-Smith is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of History at Duke University. Her most recent book is Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Harvard University Press, 2009).
By Adriane Lentz-Smith
What do we talk about when we talk about race? Or, more pointedly, what do we talk about when we talk about the foolish things that people sometimes say? Reporters Mark Halperin and John Heilemann have garnered much attention for their new book on the 2008 presidential campaign, Game Change, largely for quoting Harry Reid’s ill-considered remarks about then-Senator Barack Obama. An Obama supporter, Reid viewed the candidate’s light skin as an asset and his ability to speak “with no Negro dialect” as an even greater one.
Critics have called Reid’s comment racist, and it is. It is racist in the same way that Joe Biden’s campaign gaffe was racist, complimenting Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.” Both remarks betray a limited sense of African Americans as a community or as individuals. A sense constrained by low expectations and an inane failure to consider that black folks might occupy a spectrum of accomplishment and ability as broad and varied as that of any other peoples. Articulate? One would hope that the former editor of the Harvard Law Review could string together a lucid sentence. Negro dialect? I had not realized there was one; did we expect the presidential candidate to don a straw hat and tell us a story about Brer Rabbit and the briar patch? Statements that paint Obama as an Exceptional Negro say more about the ignorance of the speakers than they do about Obama himself.
Yet all expressions of racism are not equivalent. Republicans have made hay of Reid’s remark and the Democrats’ responses to it. If Trent Lott had to resign as Senate Majority Leader because of his unseemly remarks about black people, they argue, so too should Reid. However, where Reid and Biden revealed the extent to which they had absorbed white supremacy in the form of images, assumptions, and expectations, Lott expressed regret for the passing of white supremacy as a political and economic program. In celebrating Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday, Lott commented that Mississippi had voted for the Thurmond in 1948, the year he broke off from the Democrats and ran for president as a Dixiecrat in order to protect Jim Crow. “And if the rest of the country had followed our lead,” Lott added, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.” No federal civil rights legislation, presumably, and no enforcement of the decisions of the Warren court if ever it had come to that.
Read the Full Essay @ History News Network
***
Adriane Lentz-Smith is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of History at Duke University. Her most recent book is Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Harvard University Press, 2009).
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