Dean's blunt talk about race

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http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/002/oped/Dean_s_blunt_talk_about_race+.shtml

DERRICK Z. JACKSON
Dean's blunt talk about race
1/2/2004

CHARLESTON, S.C.

HOWARD DEAN SAID, ''I'm trying to gently call out the white population.'' His genteel example was a story he tells to voters about how his chief of staff as governor of Vermont was always a woman. After two or three years, Dean noticed that she had a ''matriarchy'' in the office. When the chief of staff was going to hire a new person, Dean said, he told her, '' `I notice we have a gender imbalance in the office, and I wonder if you could find a man.' She said it's really hard to find a qualified man. I got everybody laughing about that.''

That is Dean's icebreaker to get audiences to understand institutional racism. ''The punch line of the story that it's so hard to find a qualified man is everybody does it. Everybody tends to hire people like themselves. And I get them all nodding, including the African-Americans in the audience.''

He went on to talk about a consultant who runs political campaigns in Washington. The consultant was kept on to hire the staff for one of his candidates who won a city council race. ''In the first staff meeting before the guy took office, they looked around and said, `Oh-oh.' Everyone was male, and everyone was African-American.''

This was a softer Dean than the one excoriated by his competitors for the Democratic presidential nomination for saying he wanted to appeal to white guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks. For all the fire of that moment, Dean said the Democrats cannot run away from a blunt, if gently blunt, discussion about race.