If people here insist on continuing to bring up this Harry Reid garbage, then so be it, but I'm not going to sit around while liberals undermine decades of progress on race issues.
In 2010 you don't have to be a segregationist to be a racist. Being insensitive and not caring about how what you say impacts people of color is in itself racist. Deal with it.
I get it. Many people will never really understand that when whites are insensitive or obtuse to race issues, that in itself is a form of racism. Many of these people simply haven't given it enough thought or talked about these things with people schooled on race issues. But that's not Harry Reid. Harry Reid knew better.
White people in America don't get to have an opinion on which black people talk like black people, when they talk like black people, or anything else regarding how black a particular black person might be.
We can argue all day long about whether Obama is black enough, talks black enough, or chooses how he talks based on his audience.
THAT'S NOT THE POINT.
The point is that white people don't get to talk about it. They don't get to voice an opinion on it, because voicing an opinion on it is an insensitive and therefore racist thing for a white person to do in America.
White people do not use the word "negro" to refer to blacks. Blacks can use whatever word they want to refer to themselves or to each other. Whether that is appropriate is a debate for the black community to have. Whites like Harry Reid don't enter into it. They don't get to have an opinion on the matter.
That's how this works.
Those who don't care about how these statements by whites make black people feel are insensitive and that insensitivity is a form of racism.
There is no such thing as being "colorblind." That's just replacing one form of ignorance with another, and simplemindedly ignoring cultural differences.
There is no such thing as "overcoming" racism. Racism will always exist in a society as large and diverse as ours. The degree to which it dominates people's behavior will only ever be a greyscale.
Everyone is "a little bit racist."
The degree to which you are "a racist" is only determined by how sensitive you are to your own prejudices and to the way your comments about race make other people feel.
What Harry Reid said was racist. The theme of his comment was racist. His use of the word "negro" was racist.
Is Harry Reid "a racist?" Yes.
Is he a bigger racist than Trent Lott? Of course not.
He's not even a bigger racist than John Cornyn, Sarah Palin, or John McCain... all of whom have made comments or done things that are more insensitive to minorities than what Reid said.
People who equate what Reid said with what Lott said are racists. They're simply excusing their own racism with false equivalencies.
These issues really aren't that difficult to work through. Put yourself in other people's shoes and see whether what you're saying is offensive to them.
Unless you've been living in the backwoods of Appalachia all your life, completely cut off from any semblance of diversity, none of us has any excuse to be as insensitive and unable to see these issues through the eyes of minorities as this community evidently is.
I'm incredibly disappointed by the phony excuses being made to defend Reid. The only excuse that is appropriate is that his comments were not as bad as what most Republicans say everyday. I understand why people here are trying to sweep this under the carpet. I understand the politics of it.
But the fact remains that what Reid said and did was racist. It was so insensitive to black people that it went over the line and became racist.
That's a fact liberals need to deal with and quickly, because the longer we keep excusing it, the longer its going to remain in the news... because in the end our defense of Reid's statements is hypocritical, and liberal hypocrisy is pretty rare... rare enough that it is actually news.