So I am oddly fascinated by this week’s media frenzy over Harry Reid’s use of the word “negro”.
The Washington Post summarized the contents of the book “Game Change” as follows:
The authors describe Reid assessing Obama’s strengths as a candidate. Reid, they write, “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.”
I thought this was fascinating especially since the Census bureau announced it is including “negro” (as in “black or African-American or …” ) on the 2010 census forms because 50 thousand, usually older, people hand wrote it on the 2000 census. But this too has caused outrage. (This article has a nice summary and claims that the bureau is reevaluating its decision. Census to Drop ‘Negro’ After Backlash. Google has lots of other similar articles.)
Also, Washington Post has two nice opinion pieces about Reid’s comments:
Harry Reid’s comments were crudely put, yet true
Anyways. I was surprised that the use of the word “negro” had gotten Reid into so much trouble. Painfully old fashioned, sure, but so is he and more to the point so are the people who self-identified as negro on the 2000 census. In fact, in my parents’ lifetimes negro was the polite term that you would see in respectable publications. I’d have thought it was the content of his comment that would be more likely to offend.
Recent Comments