The Harry Reid incident fills me with despair

[judyserenity]

For those of your not in the US, or who haven't been following the news, there's been a controversy surrounding Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.  A book came out recently which mentioned that, in 2006, Reid described Barack Obama as "a light-skinned African-American 'with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.'"  This has led to calls (

Comments

[splodgenoodles]

I suspect this less about people being upset that Reid raised this, and more about political point scoring. In order to call him racist, they have to misrepresent definitions of racism.

A really good way of silencing political opponents is to misrepresent their standpoint, so that they spend time simply bogged down in semantics. In other words, you force them to follow your lead.

It is a profoundly insincere method, but I think the US republicans have shown themselves quite willing to use it.

[judyserenity]

I agree completely that the Republicans are using this situation for political gain, and deliberately trying to misrepresent Reid. The thing is, if die-hard Republicans were the only ones saying that Reid's comments were racist, the controversy would have blown over already. The claim that the comments were racist seems to be resonating with a lot of ordinary Americans, including some African-Americans.

[sageofgodalming]

Interesting post and discussion here (though it's about to go off into futility).

[judyserenity]

Thanks for the link. Some of the folks there seem to think that it truly should be taboo to talk about race issues, while others think that we need to talk about them.

[sageofgodalming]

I don't see how the US will ever resolve its racial problems if talking about race is taboo.

But that's kind of the point, isn't it? More generally, if the GOP is allowed to dictate the terms of the conversation, they will succeed in their aim of ensuring that none of America's problems will be solved.

If I were being charitable, I'd say that's because they want to get the credit for solving them themselves when they get back into power, but the evidence of the past decade suggests that's not the case, either.

Given that's the case, it follows that anything worth saying will be construed as rude and outside the bounds of civilised discussion. See also, guns, bitter, Henry Gates, etc.

[judyserenity]

if the GOP is allowed to dictate the terms of the conversation, they will succeed in their aim of ensuring that none of America's problems will be solved.

David, how can you say that the GOP doesn't want to solve America's problems? They are working so hard on so many "problems" -- such as the fact that many Americans believe in evolution, public school children aren't taught that Christianity is the only true religion, abortion is still legal and so is homosexuality, impoverished families are still eligible for food stamps, and not everyone in the US owns a gun yet.

I understand the game the GOP is playing with Reid's remarks. What I don't understand is why so many African-Americans agree with them. I haven't seen any actual surveys, but quite a few Blacks seem to feel the remarks were, indeed, racist. Would they rather Reid had said that there is no such thing as racism in the US anymore?

[happy_potterer]

I don't know the full context of his remark. Without it, "unless he wanted to have one" sounds to me like a pejorative way to describe code-switching; it implies, as people in the dominant culture often do, that code-switching is manipulative, even dishonest. Maybe that is what some African-Americans object to.

As I say, I haven't looked at the context. So my internal jury is out on whether he was being racist, but the comparison to Lott is ludicrous. You'd think the GOP would be embarrassed to remind anyone of him and of Thurmond.

[judyserenity]

I don't know if people objected to the code-switching part -- it's possible, although I don't think I've heard anyone mention that specifically.

I figure that just about everyone code-switches, so I didn't part much attention to that part of Reid's comment.