Reid, Obama and Race

Once again, I'd like to briefly address a should-be-a-non-issue issue, in this case the revelation that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid once referred to Obama as "light-skinned" and said he didn't have a "Negro dialect", with the further implication that these facts made him more electable. Republicans and other public figures have denounced Reid's comments as racist and though Reid has apologized and Obama himself has dismissed the matter, some have called for Reid to resign. Republicans have accused the Democrats of hypocrisy, comparing their muted reaction to Reid's remarks to their strong criticism of former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's praise of Strom Thurmond.

I can't say that I'm a huge fan of Reid myself. For one thing, his efforts on behalf of the public option as part of health care reform were half-hearted at best. But while some might object to his use of the old-fashioned term Negro, all of what he said was true. What is worth discussing is why it is true, and what can be done to change it. While racism against African-Americans in general has not disappeared, despite Obama's election, it is also clearly the case that darker-skinned African-Americans with a more pronounced dialect (though it seems some dislike this term too, it is the correct one linguistically speaking) are more likely to be discriminated against. This is not by any means a new phenomenon, either, ultimately going back to the days of slavery. Back in the 1950s, blues singer Big Bill Broonzy commented on it in his song "Get Back - Black, Brown, and White", with the lines "If you's white, it's alright, if you's brown, stick around, but if you's black, oh, brother, get back, get back, get back."

The comparison to the Trent Lott case is far-fetched. In Lott's case, he expressed regret that South Carolina's long-term Senator Strom Thurmond failed in his 1948 presidential bid. This was an issue because Thurmond ran specifically as a segregationist, so Lott's comments were naturally interpreted as condoning segregation (a side note: the Daily Show's America textbook has a picture of Thurmond in the midst of his record-length filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, with the caption "The leading segregationist of his day, Thrumond's racist rhetoric so appalled the state of South Carolina that it reelected him to the Senate seven times"). Lott denied this, stating that, to his knowledge, Thurmond had renounced his segregationist views (though not all would accept that claim) and that he only said that Thurmond should have been president to make the old man happy (the occasion was Thurmond's 100th birthday party). In fairness to Lott, it is certainly possible that he really did not intend to condone segregation (though he is on record as making indisputably homophobic remarks), but nevertheless his remarks did (even if unintentionally) imply as much, so there can be no comparison with Reid's remarks, which did not in any way imply support for racism, just an acknowledgement of its existence.

Here's a piece on the web which makes essentially the same points: http://www.suntimes.com/news/mitchell/1985462,CST-NWS-mitch12.article , and another which discusses the accuracy of Reid's remarks: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/senator-harry-reids-racial-remarks-truth-studies-critics/story?id=9535416&page=2

This whole brouhaha does remind me of a problem that has bugged me a little in the past, though in some ways I'm afraid even mentioning it might be taken by some the wrong way. That problem is how we define people as African-American. As most people know, the majority of African-Americans don't have purely African ancestry. Most of them have at least some European (white) ancestry as well. My question is, why do we still define people who evidently are no more than half African in ancestry as African-American or as "black"? Should Colin Powell, for instance, be considered African-American or European-American? In truth, he is clearly both, but generally he is labelled as African-American. Obama, of course, is biracial, being the son of a European-American (white) mother and an African father. His racial identity is often accurately given as biracial, but if he is identified as belonging to either race, he is always identified as African-American or black, never as European-American or white. Tiger Woods, who is also biracial, though in his case his other primary ancestry is Asian, was even criticized by some in the black community for emphasizing that he didn't consider himself exclusively African-American but also Asian-American.

This is all a bit ironic, given that it was the racist whites in the 19th century who established the "rule" that a person who had even a discernible amount of black ancestry should be considered black. While I'm certainly not saying that white people should attempt to "claim" Obama or Colin Powell or Douglas Wilder as one of their own, it doesn't seem logical to categorically label them as exclusively African-American either. They are biracial or of mixed race. Of course, to some degree, everyone is of mixed race. I recently learned that one of my own distant ancestors was probably partly of African descent, though that is so far back that if it is true I would still be less than 1% black. For that matter, though, if you go far enough back, everyone is of African ancestry, as that's where the human race came from. This all goes to prove that race shouldn't really matter, except as a neutral way to describe someone, like tall or short. Unfortunately, it still does matter, and until all African-Americans and other minorities can get completely equal treatment, we still have work to do.

While racism remains an important issue (as is discrimination in general, the problem at issue in the current Prop 8 trial), Reid's remarks in and of themselves don't deserve all the attention they are getting. For an issue that is not getting as much attention but is ultimately much more important, the following opinion piece is informative: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-youn10-2010jan10,0,1203910.story . Hopefully people will start paying more attention to this issue rather than what Reid said, so maybe something can be done to prevent the US from becoming even more of a pawn of big business than it already is.