President can live with Sen. Harry Reid’s truth

By LYNNE K. VARNER

President Obama is right to pass up a schoolyard invitation to beat up Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

The Nevada Democrat was caught saying that Obama’s electoral advantages included being “light-skinned” and carrying “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Reid’s comments were exposed by a new book on politics, “Game Change.”

Reid’s use of “Negro” and “dialect” struck me as outdated and incendiary. What person under 105 still says Negro? I’m afraid to ask what he calls Asians or American Indians.

But Reid is guilty only of a Kinsley gaffe, a locutionary error that takes its name from columnist Michael Kinsley and is defined as an occurrence in American politics when someone accidentally tells the truth.

In that vein, Reid is guilty as charged. If then presidential candidate Obama had campaigned with chocolate-toned skin, a bass timbre to his voice and a penchant to mix English with idioms, he would have lost.

Yes, just as some assume a Southern accent denotes low intelligence, others get their internal hackles raised when they encounter people unlike themselves. The further one moves from what is familiar, the higher the hackles. When every vote counts, every difference is a concern.

The president would still be a brilliant, capable leader if he were dark-skinned and spoke in colloquialisms. But only if people make the effort to find out. Reid was betting they would not.

I have two powerful memories from childhood that when shared with other African-Americans get nods of recognition: When my parents dealt with whites, their voices took on oddly formal tones.

“Hell-ooooo,” my mother would greet them. “How dew you dew?” Goodbye was a throaty laugh, followed by the stock phrase, “The pleasure was alllllllll mine.”

Say what you will, it opened doors and got phone calls returned.

Another memory the Reid hoopla raises: My favorite cousin is very dark-skinned. From the time she could walk, our loving relatives called her nicknames that began with the word black. Black doll, black snake, black girl. The insulting list goes on. And while it is no longer acceptable, many families use to encourage, if not intermarrying, something darn close to keep familial blood lines pale.

This is the ugly swamp Reid waded into; Obama smartly declines to jump in.

There is a study that adds scholarly testimony to Reid’s remarks. Marianne Bertrand, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and Sendhil Mullainathan, a MacArthur-winning associate professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, named their analysis “Are Emily and Brendan More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination.”

The two found that resumes with “white-sounding” names — Jay, Brad, Carrie and Kristen — were 50 percent more likely to receive callbacks from potential employers than those with “black-sounding” names.

This is no pity party; it is the truth. America is moving further away every day from its racist past. But race remains a fault line. Whether it is more often perception than reality, people of color feel — and whites like Reid agree — that minorities have a higher threshold to meet. Sort of an inverse of the innocent-until-proven-guilty rule. We’ll assume you’re an unqualified affirmative-action hire until you dazzle us with your brilliance and hard work.

Those who calculate political viability based on this theory aren’t racist. One day they’ll be woefully behind the times. But not now.

X Lynne K. Varner is a columnist for The Seattle Times. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune.