Critics of President Obama – Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele foremost among them – see no small amount of hypocrisy in Mr. Obama’s forgiveness of Senate majority leader Harry Reid.
Senator Reid is quoted in a new book by two journalists about the 2008 campaign, “Game Change,” as saying privately that the US would be “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.’ ”
When the quotes came to light Saturday, Reid apologized to Obama, and Obama accepted. Mr. Steele and other say that is political relativism, with Democrats evading punishment for comments that would have sunk Republicans.
Reid’s importance to healthcare reform speaks to the political expediency of forgiveness – Obama has had few more earnest or effective allies on Capitol Hill. Yet some black commentators have a different take: For them, what Reid said is not all that shocking.
'Too black'
Boyce Watkins, a professor of finance and social commentator at Syracuse University, doesn’t see Reid’s statement as a matter of individual racism, but as a calculation of political fact.
Reid “wasn't necessarily giving his own opinion. Rather, he was giving his assessment of the preferences of the American public,” writes Dr. Watkins on the website, theGrio.
Reid is “a bellwether of public opinion and an accurate reflection of the ‘political pulse’ of the white American voting population,” he adds.
Watkins's conclusion: It “reminds many African-Americans across the country that if our speech patterns or appearance are 'too black' (whatever that means) or too different from what some consider acceptable, we are going to be deemed inferior.”
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