Harry Reid’s comments may not stand up to Trent Lott’s, but a lack of criticism is undermining the Dems’ credibility.

When Harry Reid was growing up in post-Depression Nevada, the term “negro” had not yet fallen out of common usage. As the Senate Majority Leader is now painfully aware, however, the times have changed, and such terminology has gone the way of the dinosaur and the Jim Crow law. It’s unfortunate that he didn’t seem to be aware of that back in 2008, when he described our future president as potentially successful because he was “light skinned” and “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

As usual in the game of politics, such inflammatory comments were seized upon immediately by Reid’s opponents, who accused his supporters of carrying a double standard with regard to senatorial racism. As a result, some prominent Republicans have demanded that Reid, like his predecessor Trent Lott, step down for what he said. Democrats have countered that they’re backing the senator not because he’s one of the country’s most prominent liberal politicians, but because what he said is in no way equivalent to Lott’s 2002 declaration that if the rest of the country had voted for then-segregationist Strom Thurmond back in the 1940s, our country wouldn’t have had “all these problems.”

What it comes down to is this: both sides, unfortunately, are right. What Reid said is not, in any way, equivalent to Trent Lott’s gaffe. But that doesn’t make it acceptable. And the Dems’ failure to come out and say as much absolutely proves a double standard, and seriously undermines the left’s credibility on the seriousness with which they take race issues. Which is too bad, because buried underneath the political backbiting and brawling is a conversation about race – not about when we apply our racial standards, not about when we remember or forget our core beliefs on equality, but on race itself in America – that needs to happen.

Let’s address the right’s first claim: that what Trent Lott and Harry Reid said are somehow similar. Aside from the fact that they both address the subject of race and display a breathtaking ignorance of American public sentiment, there’s no real comparison. When Trent Lott claimed that America would have been better served if Strom Thurmond had won the presidency, he wasn’t talking about old Strom’s economic platform. Thurmond was running on the strength of one issue and one issue alone: the separation of black people from white people in accommodations that were theoretically “separate but equal” but in reality were far, far apart. It’s no stretch to infer, then, that Lott was saying that a) black people were the cause of a lot of indistinct problems over the past half-century, and b) we would all be better off if minorities had just minded their own business and stopped asking for equal rights. Everyone’s entitled to their views, of course, but most voters don’t want those particular views held by a very prominent elected official, and after some pressure, he stepped down.

Harry Reid, to his credit, did not express a wish that fifty years of progress be reversed. To argue that he simply used outdated terminology, however, is disingenuous at best. What Reid said was patronizing and offensive, failed to take into account the wide variety of the African-American experience in the United States today, and showed complete insensitivity to the power that certain words still have in our nation’s troubled relationship with race. There is a reason why the term “negro” has never been reclaimed, why James Brown never sang, “Say it loud, I’m Negro and I’m proud”; the word itself is the root of several others, one particularly toxic, that have been used for decades to disrespect black people.

And if the Democrats had simply said that, that Reid wasn’t as bad as Trent Lott but that he certainly wasn’t in the right, they might be able to justify their claims that their maneuvering is based on honest racial dialogue and not on a desire to keep the national political balance in their favor. Unfortunately, they haven’t. Not a single prominent Democratic leader, African-American or otherwise, has called Reid out on comments that would undoubtedly – from a Republican – caused the candidate in question to be ridden out on a rail. And this is not the first time that they’ve conveniently kept silent on polarizing comments from their leaders. In 2001, Senator Robert Byrd not only referred to “white n*****s” – thus insinuating that to be compared to a black person was a negative thing – but also asserted on national television that “we talk too much about race” in this country. Anyone who has ever been a victim of American racism would likely agree that we still have a ways to go in terms of racial equality, and that simply not talking about it might not be the most proactive strategy. Somehow, however, no one has made the case that Byrd’s outdated views on race mean that he should step down too.

The power of these words, the way these perceptions influence our actions as a voting public, the difference between being ignorant and insensitive and actively wishing ill on others – these are the things that we, as a country, need to be talking about in order to move to that post-racial society we’ve all heard so much about. But until both sides can prove that they legitimately have race on their mind, and not just how to prove the other side wrong, we’re not going to make much progress.

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