After the exposure of Senate Majority Leader Reid’s past racial comments about President Obama being a “light-skinned black man with no ‘negro dialect’ unless he wanted to have one,” I’m in no mood for another beer summit.

And while I can certainly understand why some in the African-American community find the Nevada Democrat’s remarks offensive, I’d be dishonest to pretend that I understand the rather immature racial hysteria coming from those demanding the majority leader’s resignation.

The truth is, we all know what “light-skinned” and “negro dialect” means; we have encountered these terms and their meanings before, both directly and vicariously.

One need only briefly toss away their contrived racial aloofness to see that famed Americans like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and even Spike Lee have brought these colorist issues to the forefront.

What the majority leader spoke is not like the n-word where we can implicitly claim that African-Americans have exclusive ownership of a supposed context of self-endearment or self-disrespect.

This is different. This is all about that uniformed code of American racial consciousness—a two-part exam that judges African-American identity on the degree of relative lightness or darkness of one’s skin, and the way that one speaks.

We’d be telling ourselves a fib if we denied that we mentally administer the African-American TOEFL to every black person we shake hands with—a way to measure Sen. Reid’s said “negro dialect” for ourselves. The “you’re so articulate” and “you speak well” moments are the usual clues that the African-American TOEFL has been administered, and that one has passed it [surprisingly] with soaring colors.

The “brown bag test” is that other crucial test we readily administer to the black community—the space that separates “red-bone” from “high-yellow” in all of the contempt it invites.

It is what has fueled the American colorist hierarchy in the black community and beyond it—the very thing which once determined university admission standards, hiring decisions, and divisions of American slave labor.

Anyone who would suggest that President Obama would have been elected without passing these tests is being nothing short of terribly naïve.

In the black community, the so called “transitional negro” looks and speaks exactly like President Obama—a token of social acceptance and comfort that promises better inroads with American life.

The “transitional negro” is thought to be walking purgatory and racial compromise. Often he or she is the first to receive unprecedented opportunities and privileges, eroding racial barriers and making it easier for someone a little bit darker to take a seat at the table. We’ve seen this transitional negritude emerge with the likes of Lena Horne, Julian Bond, Rosa Parks, Colin Powell, and Condoleeza Rice.

It’s no secret that many if not most of the “African-American firsts” are credited to African-Americans with lighter complexions (save the likes of Shirley Chisholm, Clarence Thomas, and Michael Steele).

It’s easy for an African-American president who passes the “brown bag test” to get away with side-stepping issues of race, but that doesn’t let the rest of the nation off the hook.

Rather than bemoaning some hyperbolic racial injury Sen. Reid may have caused, we should use his remarks as an opportunity to have an honest conversation about race. The fact that we aren’t doing that speaks poorly of our country and of our progress on race-relations.

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