Doofus Dialect
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Harry Reid is showing his colors.
The elder and elderly Nevada Senator and Alzheimer’s patient was recently outted for multiple stupidities in one statement, which may not be a record for elected idiocy, but it certainly vies for the top spot.
In a previously private comment on the 2008 presidential election, Reid said that Barack Obama might be electable because Barack was “light-skinned” and did not speak with a “negro dialect.” Ignoring for a moment if this is tactically true, Reid’s recklessness displayed his combined age, ignorance and imbecility.
Granted, there may not have been many black folk in Reid’s home town of Searchlight, but 70 years of life experience should have broadened Harry’s perspectives. The fact that he still employs antique terms like ‘negro’ shows he is intellectually stuck in the age of Jim Crow along with his hood wearing fellow Senate Democrat Robert Byrd.
Why, pray tell, do Democrats enjoy denigrating our black brothers so much?
As a writer, I examine how other people use and misuse the language. Thus Reid’s “negro dialect” faux pas caught my attention for multiple reasons. His was not an academic use of the word – multiple dictionaries note that “negro” is in obsolescence. He did not use commonly accepted terms such as “black” or “African-American.” Thus, Reid was using a word that in our modern age exists only in the pejorative. This says much more about Harry Reid than it says about presidential politics.
Once we brush-off Reid’s overt bigotry, we can examine his more subtle racism. The phrase “negro dialect” assumes that there is one reasonably succinct style of speech for people with dark skin, even the “light-skinned” variety. Anyone who has lived or traveled in The South, which by the vice of history has a fair number of black folk, knows there is no such thing as a homogeneous “negro dialect.” Anyone lucky enough to travel from Ochlocknee to Oakland knows there is no regional dialect for “negros” either. The assumption that there is a single, or even a small set of “negro dialects” shows Reid to have the perspective of an ostrich.
Yet, I am surprisingly unsurprised. Humans tend to drift into one of two large camps. My tribe contains people who treat everybody as individuals, and make few preconceptions based on trivial externals. We know that a person’s skin color or phonology says nothing about the person. The other camp is made of people with lower intellects who presuppose, who prejudge (the root of prejudice) others on the same factors that I ignore. This puts Harry Reid in the uncomfortable company of the Klan and its representatives in Congress (sorry, I did mention Senator Byrd already, didn’t I). The same thought process infects Harry’s hordes – the desire to classify, compartmentalize and denigrate people. Harry’s halfwits ignore individuality.
Not enough can be said on this point. Freedom is an individual instrument. For freedom to exist, everyone must be treated as an individual. The party in power does the opposite as a matter of policy. Be it race, economic class, industry, job title, geographic region … they practice separation, codification, vilification and in the case of Harry’s racist commentary, discrimination.
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2 Responses to “Doofus Dialect”
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If you have polite and articulate comments, please provide them. Rants and flames are discarded.
I have to admit I thought Michael Steele and the rest of the Republicans were over-reacting yesterday. You’ve changed my mind.
You can’t have class warfare between individuals.
RE Robert Byrd & WV, in much of this state, segregation is alive and well. Black people are sequestered in certain neighborhoods, denied opportunities for education and employment, then belittled for being uneducated and unemployed. Go figure. Byrd, albeit a great man and constitutional scholar, is a product of the “good old darkies” era, so I suspect he cannot help himself in this arena. Personally, I am a proponent of putting up signs at all major entrance roads, reading, “Welcome to West Virginia. Please set your watches back 100 years.”
RE the word Negro, it is a complete mystery to me why it is acceptable to refer to a man as “black” in English, but not in Spanish. Further south, e.g. Georgia, I have heard the word used, complete with Spanish pronunciation (or as closely as one might expect a Georgian to approximate) and grammar, using negro in reference to a black male and negra for a black female. Question: do our Hispanohablante fellow countrymen in this bilingual nation now have to switch to English for that one word in that particular context in order to be politically correct?