I’m trying to wrap my head around the controversy surrounding comments made by Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid, former President Bill Clinton, and impeached Gov. Blagojevich if Il.
People are up in arms. They’re calling for Reid to step down, they’re re-hashing their feelings about Clinton and Blago is wacko so who really pays attention to his attention whoredom. What I’m trying to understand is this; do people really think we live in a post-racial America?
If the answer to that question is yes, then I completely understand the uproar though I find it unfortunate that someone would be so naive. But the truth is this, we don’t live in a post-racial America and though we have made strides towards racial equality, the racial hatred that this country was built upon is deep rooted and will not go away overnight.
Nas said it best – “there’s still a lot of nigger calling in them corporate offices”, and political offices, so on and so on. When Adam Clayton Powell Jr. first arrived on the Hill, he went through hell integrating the cafeteria let alone trying to change the minds of racist politicians who had ill thoughts of their own black constitutents. It was a battle just to get Congress members to stop using the word nigger during sessions, never mind passing legislation that would give blacks in America their constitutional rights as citizens of this nation.
Should Reid lose his job? No, although he might lose his re-election bid without this racial drama. Is President Clinton a bad man? No, might he have some racial prejudices that you thought didn’t exist because he played the saxaphone on the Aresnio Hall show, yes. Blago is a wacko, nothing more to see there.
Racism and derogatory racial slurs are alive and well – we should be more focused on making sure that these lawmakers don’t use their prejudiced minds when passing legislation that affects people of color because that is when the real racism shows up. When small minded people have the power to limit the privileges and rights of people through the laws that govern those people.
here are the comments:
Reid: The book quotes the Nevada Senator saying that, then Senator Barack Obama had more chances of winning since he was “light skinned” and “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”
Blago: Blagojevich tells the magazine that Obama was “catapulted in on hope can change, what we hope the guy is…
“What the f***? Everything he’s saying’s on the teleprompter. I’m blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes. I grew up in a five-room apartment. My father had a little laundromat in a black community not far from where we lived. I saw it all growing up,” he says.
Clinton: –In lobbying the late Sen. Edward Kennedy to endorse his wife, former President Clinton angered the liberal icon by belittling Obama. Telling a friend about the conversation, Kennedy recalled Clinton had said “a few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee,” the authors paraphrase. A spokesman for the former president declined to comment on the claim.
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