Cross-posted at The Politicizer
More than anything else, the Harry Reid controversy reveals the way in which the political arena debases our country’s understanding of race.
Ah, the "race card." That idiomatic expression that reared its ugly head during the O.J. Simpson trial has become an unfortunate staple of our country’s dominant understanding of race. From O.J.in the mid-1990s to last year’s controversy surrounding Henry Louis Gates, Black Americans are seldom able to highlight contemporary manifestations of racism without being charged with "playing the race card." Forget the research that demonstrates how qualified black and Latino students are significantly less likely to be placed in honors classes. Be damned with a 2005 report by our own Justice Department that found black motorists to be considerably more vulnerable to being stopped and searched by the police. This is post-racial America where the widespread condemnation of an indisputably racist past absolves us from discussing how racism functions in the Age of Obama.
In a country where most people consider racism a dying feature of our past, the "race card" is about as effective as a pair of twos in a game of poker. It almost goes without saying that this game, wherein false allegations of racism are strategically manufactured, is rarely played by Black Americans. In the bruising, day-to-day struggles that characterize our partisan atmosphere, however, disingenuous racial politicking reigns over Washington. Recognizing that an overwhelming majority of Americans conceive a notion of racism that is solely rooted in our explicitly racist past, Democrats and Republicans appeal to remnants of various stigmas that have formed in reaction to a bygone era of institutionalized racism.
In other words, the political establishment is exceptionally cognizant of the type of racial progress our country has achieved. Gone are the days when a white restaurant in Mississippi "reserved the right to refuse service to anyone" that looked like a nigger. Eventually, that nigger became a Negro in the vernacular of that particular restaurant owner until even that epithet was retired with the institutionalized racism of Jim Crow.
Be it an exceptionally vicious slur (like nigger or coon) or an old-fashioned yet historically harmless label like Negro, racial epithets conjure up images of an era that an overwhelming majority of Americans rightfully decry. Unfortunately, however, this warranted condemnation of the past blinds us to the realities of a new form of implicit racism in contemporary society. Keenly aware of this reality, partisan interests effectively deploy a "political race card" that exaggerates detectable traces of our explicitly racist past at the expense of a desperately needed dialogue about new forms of racism in the Age of Obama.
The controversy surrounding Harry Reid is the latest episode in the evolution of the "political race card." In a new book about the 2008 campaign, Reid asserted his belief that Barack Obama was elected because he is a light-skinned black man who speaks without a "Negro dialect." According to Reid, these inherent advantages allowed Obama to exceed the limits of his race in a way that ultimately made him more viable than previous black candidates.
The implications of Reid’s comments were clear—in order to thrive in mainstream America, blacks must abandon a linguistic identity (or, as Reid would say, their "Negro dialect") that takes root in the hardships of slavery. In conjunction with skin complexion, this ability to avoid speaking in Black English constitutes a remarkably important determinant in the success of a Black Presidential candidate. A painful reality of our society’s ongoing racial struggles, Reid’s casual observation is corroborated by a mountain of evidence that asserts the stigmas surrounding Black English. As for his remarks about the President’s skin tone, an experimental study by Nayda Terkildsen concludes that darker-skinned candidates are "penalized by white voters based the candidate’s skin color" (http://reach.ucf.edu/~pos6045a/Black%20Candidates.pdf).
Ironically, the overarching resonance of Reid’s observations was recently articulated by an equally prominent White Democrat in an even crasser manner. In the 2008 primaries, then-Senator Joe Biden described Barack Obama as the first "mainstream African-American candidate who is articulate and bright and clean." In all of this, however, Biden never received calls to exit the Presidential race and his comments were widely dismissed as just another clumsy misstep in the Vice President’s gaffe-ridden career. In terms of America’s racial past, Biden’s comments only reflected a disregard for the Presidential candidacies of less popular men like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Unlike Reid’s use of the word "Negro," which immediately invokes an era that is characterized by a type of racism that is almost unanimously condemned, Biden’s political opponents could not sufficiently tarnish him by deploying the "political race card."
With Reid, the Republicans have deployed the "political race card" as far as it will go. As the attempt to establish a false equivalence between Reid’s remarks and Trent Lott’s praise of Strom Thurmond’s 1948 Presidential campaign has fallen flat, the GOP continues to juice the card for all of its worth. On This Week With George Stephanopoulos, Liz Cheney contended that Reid’s comments were racist simply because he was "talking about the color of the President’s skin." This partisan disregard for the substantive content of Reid’s comments is a national embarrassment that should shame any Republican that cares about the state of America’s racial conscience.
Nonetheless, it would be foolish to cast Reid as a victim in this ongoing firestorm. While Reid’s impolitic description of Obama’s electability was devoid of any intentional racial malice, Reid’s decision to channel his inner-19th century linguistics professor in characterizing Obama’s speech patterns was full of racial consequence. In the midst of this controversy, Reid has cowardly refused do anything beyond offering Obama an apology, which implicitly communicates that the kernels of truth within his comments do not deserve to be adequately addressed. That darker-skinned candidates of a politically unacceptable blackness are largely unviable at the Presidential level is an unfortunate reality in 21st Century America. Instead of acknowledging that reality in the midst of this controversy, Reid’s cowardly retreat from anything but an apology signals that the Majority Leader doesn’t really care about the issues that his comments addressed. Without that acknowledgment, Reid’s remarks spew a series of negative consequences that impede racial progress.
At the end of the day, this ongoing controversy presented Senator Reid with an opportunity to stop the "political race card" dead in its tracks. Rather than embark on a new frontier in our country’s understanding of race, Reid has calculated that his political interests preclude such a courageous approach. As the Majority faces an increasingly tough re-election campaign, it remains to be seen if this calculation will pan out accordingly. Even if it does, Reid will have expediently exited a harrowing controversy that could have been a teachable moment for America’s racial conscience.