The ugly truth

God bless George Will. Yesterday on the Sunday morning talk shows, a GOP talking point emerged: that Sen. Harry Reid’s racially charged comments about then-candidate Barack Obama are just exactly like that time that Sen. Trent Lott also stuck his foot in his mouth, and so therefore Reid should step down from his Senate Majority Leader post, as Lott did.

To which my favorite conservative-but-not-partisan pundit responded, “I don't think there's a scintilla of racism in what Harry Reid said.”

For the record, this is what Reid said, as reported in the new book Game Change: “[Reid] was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama -- a ‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,’ as he said privately.”

Tacky. But the ugly truth is that Reid was right. Many whites (and not a few blacks, for that matter) still associate light skin and “talking white” as being better than dark skin or what Reid called “Negro dialect.” Now, thinking that white=good and black=inferior is racist. Noting the fact that some voters still think this way (and that therefore this candidate may have an advantage that other black candidates do not) isn’t racist. And that’s what Reid did. (I guess that’s too much subtlety for Liz Cheney to grasp.)

Contrast that to Trent Lott, who, at Sen. Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party in 2002, got carried away and said: "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.”

I don’t know if Lott is a bigot; I’ve never met the man. But I do know that when Thurmond ran for president in 1948, it was as a Dixiecrat. The Dixiecrats were Democrats from Southern states who broke away to form their own party after President Truman issued an executive order to integrate the military. Their slogan was “Segregation Forever!” Lott was probably just trying to make an old Senate colleague feel good, but in doing so he appeared to praise Thurmond’s old, discredited and failed white supremacist worldview. Lott’s sin was obliviousness that some of us take issue with our social liberation being referred to as “all these problems.”

At the time, I did think that Lott should step down from his leadership post in the Senate – not because he’s racist (again, not my place to say), but because someone that privilege-blind has no place directing policy for a nation as diverse as ours. Reid, on the other hand, at least is aware that race-based bigotry still exists in this country.

(Now, if Reid wants to step down as majority leader for any number of other reasons, that’s cool with me.)