Reid and the “Negro dialect”
Of all the revelations that have come out in John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s new book, Harry Reid’s poorly worded support of Barack Obama has probably got the most attention:
[Harry Reid's] encouragement of Obama was unequivocal. He 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.
Now, this is a impolitic, ugly and certainly not attuned to our current sensibilities about the way to talk about a black politician. But it’s hard to see what exaclty isn’t true. The idea that Obama had both an ability to talk to multiple audiences in their own dialect or voice and that this ability was an asset for him was hardly controversial. Here’s what Zadie Smith had to say in a lecture that was published in the New York Review of Books entitled “Speaking in Tongues”:
It gives me a strange sensation to turn from Shaw’s melancholy Pygmalion story to another, infinitely more hopeful version, written by the new president of the United States of America. Of course, his ear isn’t half bad either. In Dreams from My Father, the new president displays an enviable facility for dialogue, and puts it to good use, animating a cast every bit as various as the one James Baldwin—an obvious influence—conjured for his own many-voiced novel Another Country. Obama can do young Jewish male, black old lady from the South Side, white woman from Kansas, Kenyan elders, white Harvard nerds, black Columbia nerds, activist women, churchmen, security guards, bank tellers, and even a British man called Mr. Wilkerson, who on a starry night on safari says credibly British things like: “I believe that’s the Milky Way.” This new president doesn’t just speak for his people. He can speak them. It is a disorienting talent in a president; we’re so unused to it.
And, from the right, here’s Shelby Steele in the Wall Street Journal:
The novelty of Barack Obama is more his cross-racial appeal than his talent. Jesse Jackson displayed considerable political talent in his presidential runs back in the 1980s. But there was a distinct limit to his white support. Mr. Obama’s broad appeal to whites makes him the first plausible black presidential candidate in American history. And it was Mr. Obama’s genius to understand this.
Basically, anytime someone mentioned that Barack Obama could speak well to different audiences, especially audiences of different races, they were basically echoing Reid. Anytime someone tried to explain why Obama was more likely to get the Democratic nomination that Jesse Jackson by mentioning Obama’s wider appeal, they were agreeing with Reid.
Now, the light skin point reads much worse than the rest of Reid’s bit’ but I think this is, again, something most people would admit. America was always more likely to elect a lighter-skinned and probably biracial black man than a black man (or woman) of unambiguously and complete African-American heritage.
That Reid described Obama’s only-occasional way of speech as a “negro dialect” can probably be attributed to Reid’s old age than to any underlying bigotry.
Anyway, nothing in this excerpt is comparable to saying that America would be better off had a single issue segregationist presidential candidate won the 1948 presidential election.
