February 6, 2010

Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations

By Bob Weir
"For an hour, I forgot that Obama was black," said Chris Mathews, the host of MS-NBC's "Hardball," after he finished watching President Obama's State of the Union address. Did Mathews mean that he's not used to hearing from articulate blacks who sound just like educated whites? Recently, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was quoted in the book Game Change as saying privately that Obama, as a black candidate, could be successful thanks in part to his "light-skinned" appearance and speaking patterns "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." Did he mean that Obama wouldn't have reached the White House if he was darker-skinned or spoke with the African-American vernacular English known as Ebonics? In the same book, it was reported that Bill Clinton, when he was trying to persuade Ted Kennedy not to support Obama, remarked to the senator, "A few years ago, this guy [Obama] would have been getting us coffee." Did he mean that...(Read Full Article)