Not all racial statements are racist

I generally try not to think much about Washington’s grandstanding psuedo-controversies, but something about the reaction to Harry Reid’s remarks struck me.

Some background from this article:

Mark Halperin and John Heliemann report in their new book, “Game Change,” that Reid said during the campaign he thought Obama could win because, while black, he was “light-skinned” and lacked a “Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

As George Will said, there’s “not a scintilla of racism” in these remarks. Reid’s wording is certainly terrible, but it’s not racist. It’s not unreasonable to say that the shade of Obama’s skin affected the way he was received by the public, nor should it be offensive to say that some speech patterns are prevalent in African-American communities in the U.S., but Obama doesn’t always speak using them.

The Republican reaction is the reason I’m writing about this, though. RNC chairman Michael Steel said that Reid should step down from his position because of these remarks: “I think he should [step down], if the standard is the one set by [Trent Lott],”. Several other Republicans have made the same point (including Sarah Palin, so you know it’s good). But let’s examine what Lott said:

“I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.”

(source)
To suggest that Thurmond’s explicitly racist pro-segregation platform should have been successful and would have avoided “all these problems over the years” is a far more radical statement than Reid’s. I don’t even like Harry Reid and I look forward to him leaving the Senate, but this criticism is over the top.