Harry Reid’s negro dialect comments
by John T. Reed

1. He is light-skinned.
2. He may be right that light skin was necessary for Obama to win, but there are many dark-skinned blacks who are quite accepted by Americans like Sidney Poitier, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jackson 1.0, Barbara Jordan, Clarence Thomas, Martin Luther King, Jr., Maya Angelou, Thurgood Marshall, Willie Brown, Jr., Jackie Robinson, etc.
3. Throughout my adult life I have read that skin lightness is a matter of great interest and status among blacks worldwide—most recently in the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, a light skinned Jamaican who is related to light-skinned Colin Powell, also a Jamaican. Powell has lately morphed into Mr. Black. What is he—10% black? Didn’t his Jamaican relatives play their whiteness for all it was worth in that country?

Indeed, the names Barack and Hussein are Arabic, which suggests white ancestry. His grandparents could have given President Obama’s father black African first and middle names. They deliberately chose Arabic names, one suspects, for their higher status, even in totally black Kenya. I believe I read that explanation in the mainstream media.

I do not understand the commotion within the African community about skin lightness. I do not care for ambiguity. I would think the preference would be to either be BLACK or WHITE. A light-skinned black is sort of betwixt and between. Obama said in his autobiography that his agony over the ambiguity of his race caused him to drink alcohol and use marijuana and cocaine. In short, the preference for light skin seems to be a racist thing blacks do to each other, and not something “they all look the same to me” white racists would much notice.

1. When I was a kid, we were supposed to say negroes. My 1968 college yearbook has newspaper headlines of the era including one from the New York Times saying Negroes were rioting in various cities in the summer of 1967. There is still a United Negro College Fund.

My reaction to young blacks who claim they are offended by the word “negro” is to laugh. How’s about you folks get your freaking act together and let us know what name you want. Don’t be giving us crap about using a word that you previously told us was the one you wanted. If you had stuck with one word throughout Harry Reid’s life, he would not have used the “wrong” one. It’s as simple and meaningless as that.

While I’m at it, the same applies to “colored people,” which I have also heard young blacks denounce as offensive. Jesus! Make up your minds. And let the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People know your decision, too. And if “colored people” is out, why is “people of color” OK? How about “people of negro?” Next time you hear someone say En double A See Pee, ask, ‘En double A what pee?”

I think what’s really going on is that many blacks really just want as much to bitch about as possible and refuse to take yes for an answer. If you say “potato,” they say “potahto.” And if you switch to “potahto,” they say “potato” and call you a racist for saying “potahto.”

2. Observers have said “negro” is out of date. Except at the United Negro College Fund, it is. The media, trying to be politically correct and help what Jesse Jackson used to call the “po pitiful negroes,” decided to change the English language with unaccustomed speed. (They did it again with “Ms.” and “gay.”) Obviously, Reid did not use the word “negro” to slur Obama. He used it because he’s really old. Are Democrats now discriminating against old people? Harry’s just a “typical white person,” like Obama’s late grandmother.

I want Black History Month to be replaced by Negro History Month. For one thing, there’s a hell of a lot more negro history than black history. The black shtick only got started in the late 1960s. More importantly, when they were negroes, the racial group in question had higher employment rates, lower drop-out rates, lower out-of-wedlock pregnancy rates, and lower incarceration rates than whites in terms of percentage of population. The pissed off, rioting, looting, entitled, fist-waving, black victim era reversed all those laudable statistics.

Negroes won the civil rights they sought by eliminating, through legislation and court decisions, legal discrimination against them. Blacks have no goals, never did, only endless bitches and a death grip on victimhood. “Blacks” would benefit greatly from studying negro history. The main difference between blacks and negroes is that negroes did not think hard work, responsible fatherhood, and lawful behavior were “acting white.”

Actually, the way of speaking Reid was referring to is not the negro way. It’s the black way. Martin Luther King spoke in the negro way. That way of speaking, which is what Obama does with white audiences, did indeed get him votes. Obama got elected by being a negro, not a black.

1. I heard a black guy on O’Reilly say there is no such thing as negro dialect. Wellll. Perhaps the word “dialect” is slightly off. But there darned sure is some sort of black way of speaking. The Oakland, CA School District briefly was going to teach Ebonics in the public schools there, until a firestorm of criticism laughed them out of town. Horrified black English teachers were perhaps the main opponents of Ebonics. They said, simply, that Ebonics was real, but that it was poor English that the teachers had been working their whole lives to end.

In the 1980 movie Airplane, a flight attendant could not understand two black guys talking to her. A white lady (played by Barbara Billingsley) in a nearby seat says, “Oh, stewardess. I speak jive,” then proceeds to act as a foreign language interpreter. Ebonics and Jive are identical. (It’s not “jibe.”)

Rush Limbaugh’s assistant Mr. Bo Snerdley is the black Official Barack Obama criticizer. When he criticizes Obama, he does it both in English and black speak, yo.

On 1/12/10, Snerdley, who claims to be a dark-skinned black took exception to Obama not defending dark-skinned negroes. He let Reid throw them under the bus—and left them there. Good point. That did not occur to me or to Rush he said. Obama said Reid was complimenting him. Oh, really!? When he called you “light-skinned?” Is calling a black person “light skinned” a compliment? How do you figure that, Barack? Is there something wrong with dark-skinned blacks? If so, what, pray tell, is that? Actually, I have read one of the differences, and Snerdley referred to it. In slave days, the darker skinned blacks worked outdoors; the lighter-skinned, indoors. That is the genesis of the phrase Al Qaeda #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri leveled at Obama when he called him a “house negro” on 11/18/08. Some American Muslims called Obama a “house N-word” in blogs.

Because he is nouveau noir, Obama is insensitive to the feelings of darker-skinned blacks, like Michelle and his daughters, for example. It did not occur to him to comment that there was no virtue in lighter skin and that he was sure he would have gotten the same number of votes had his skin been darker.

When people call me “light-skinned” they are referring to my being at risk for skin cancer.

2. I already criticized Obama a couple of times for talking like some black, southern, grade school dropout when the number of blacks in his audience rises above some percentage. In Selma, AL Obama said to a black audience, “I bin heah befoh.” He did not learn such Uncle Remus conjugation or pronunciation in Hawaii, Indonesia, Pasadena, Manhattan, Cambridge, or Chicago. It is a bullshit affectation he consciously or unconsciously uses to try to prove he’s a real black when he is around people who are real blacks.

Harry Reid cited Obama’s on-again-off-again black street talk and Harvard-Hyde-Park faux intellectualism as a plus. It just proves that Obama is another two-faced, politician chameleon who tries to be what he thinks each audience wants him to be. Hillary did the same stupid black accent and phraseology when she did a dramatic reading of a black slave poem to that same Selma audience. When it comes to who Obama really is, there’s no there, there. He is whomever you want him to be. Reid’s acknowledging that Obama turns his black speak on and off at will was a Freudian slam on Obama if you are not a lying politician like Reid and Obama. Reid was saying admiringly that Obama was a good liar when he complimented him on not using Negro dialect unless he wanted to.

1. I think he was.

2. Democrat Geraldine Ferraro, the first major party female VP candidate, said Obama would have gone nowhere if he had the exact same resume and white skin. She was right. Harry’s phraseology was a bit goofy, but he was saying about the same thing as Ferarro and both were right.