As much as I loath Harry Reid, he’s being slammed for saying something that ought not to draw any criticism.

CNN:

“He (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. Reid was convinced, in fact, that Obama’s race would help him more than hurt him in a bid for the Democratic nomination,” they write.

Barry Obama is half white, thus he is lighter skinned than many black men. He does not have an accent when he speaks, unless he chooses to use one – much like Rev. Jesse Jackson. Both are facts and not subject to dispute.

I cannot provide proof that a light skinned black man would do better in an election than a dark skinned black man. It is a moot point since Obama did win the election and his race was indeed a factor.

A 2004 article about the play “Yellowman”, by Dael Orlandersmith, explored the issue of color within the black community as seen in the play.

From The People’s News:

Leeds is among the millions of blacks trying, for the first time, to enunciate clearly and properly use all the words they speak. This attention to language actually is a return to their roots. Until the mid-1960s, blacks, including groundbreakers like Jackie Robinson and Malcolm X, spoke in a cadence that sounded whiter than someone asking for Grey Poupon.

“If Malcolm walked up behind you and started talking, you would think ‘What white man has come in here?’” the late black nationalist’s friend, Elliott Saffron, told The Peoples News. “What Malcolm was saying was black, but how he was saying it was white.”

There was a paradigm shift, however, in the late 1960s when the speech patterns of blacks like Stepin Fetchit and Buckwheat—who had previously been considered buffoons—became a favored way of speaking. ‘Talking white’ became an insult.

New Black Man blog:

The notion of “talking white” and “acting white” have long been bandied about in black communities, but for a nation that has historically chosen to be oblivious to the inner dynamics of Black life in America, such a discussion elicits a fresh focus. It was just last year that perennial protest candidate Ralph Nader accused then Senator Obama of “talking white” as part of Obama’s effort to assuage white voter fears that he might be cut from the same cloth of traditional Civil Rights leaders. Nader’s comments would have been offensive, if not for the fact that there quite a few Black Americans who also read diction as an index of racial authenticity.

The black community as a whole does not recognize all their black brothers and sisters as equal. Being human, they have the same mix of prejudices and stereotypes as any of us. The notion that Harry Reid was being racist for recognizing two true facts about then candidate Obama and concluding that they would help his candidacy is plain stupid.