Senator Reid has nothing to apologize for

By Brigitte L. Nacos

It is amazing how the most bigotted right-wing pack has the nerve to attack Senator Reid and how he has been pressured into apologizing for a remark he made early in the 2008 campaign, namely, that then Senator Barack Obama could become the country’s first black president because he was “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

While strangely using the language of the past, in content this was a reasonable assessment by someone who has no problems with racial and ethnic differences but is fully aware of the realities of prejudice and bigotry and,yes, racism in society. 

Reid has a strong pro-civil rights record and was among the earliest supporters of Obama. What he expressed was simply the concern that America is far from post-racial. Look at elected and appointed African-American public officials and corporate successes and you will see that lighter-skinned minorities have the edge. Just think of trailblazers like Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. This all is rooted deeply in the past.

Not Reid but the conservative elite and the populist dividers should be blamed. Instead, a media--including the allegedly liberal media--that crave controversy echo the right-wing’s accusations of Reid’s “controversial” statement and run with comparisons to Trent Lott’s past embarrassments. When Lott boasted his support for one-time presidential candidate Strom Thurmond, a segregationist, he seemed to indicated that a Thurmond presidency would have meant a different course of history—presumably a derailment of the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King's role.

Harvard law professor Lani Guinier is the only one who got it right, when she said according to the New York Times that Mr. Lott “seemed to be expressing nostalgia for the segregationist platform of Mr. Thurmond’s 1948 presidential campaign, while Mr. Reid comments seemed to be addressing ‘an unfortunate truth about the present.’” Too bad that we do not see and hear Lani Guinier more in a media that give readily access to the practitioners of attack politics.

It is now clear that we do not have to wait for Sarah Palin to settle in at Fox News for a media removed from the fair and balanced label.

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