'negro dialect'?

[elmerdem]

and we're debating whether they were racist remarks?

Definitely no comparison to Lott, but is Harry Reid really the best leader we can come up with? Seems like a perfect opportunity for some turnover at the top. To put it mildly, I've been less than impressed with Harry's 'leadership'.

[waiting]

1. Reid's leadership is actually much more effective

than people give him credit for.

[comtec]

10. Very true, he's the best senate Dem leader

the GoP has had in a LONG time!

[cali]

2. yes, we're debating whether they were racist. Certainly many African Americans

don't think they were. Read Eugene Robinson or Sandy Banks or any number of other prominent AA commentators or politicians.

[Deep13]

3. Walked around Cleveland recently?

It's disingenuous to suggest no such "dialect" exists. In mid century, "negro" was the PC term of the day. It's only bad because segregationists started using the word in the press when they really meant the other N word.

[cleveramerican]

4. If Obama talked like Jay-Z

He wouldn't have stood a chance in hell.
That is just a hard fact

Its not wrong to say so.
He should have said it more artfully ,yes.

[elmerdem]

5. oh come on

Eugene didn't come out & call them racist, but you can't interpret that he doesn't think they are.

mid-century? That is the problem. Look at the racism of 'mid-century'. If I said to one of my black friends they should tone down their 'negro dialect' to make other white folks like them more, I would no longer have black friends. It is the 21st century for goodness sakes.

[Deep13]

6. As I said, it was the non-racist term of mid-century. nt

[cleveramerican]

7. did any of your black friends ever do it on their own for sensible reasons?

do you really think african-americans don't already know to tone it down when applying for a job or a loan or college admission?

Was Thurgood Marshall, or Martin Luther King less black because they used the english language expertly? This is absurd on its face.


I am as white as can be and I know to speak deliberately when doing any of those above things?

Running for president is essentially applying for a job.

[Vinnie From Indy]

8. "black"? Who the hell you calling "black"?

Use of racist words like "black" are an affront to civilized society and African-Americans everywhere and using that term marks you as an obvious racist!

See? It isn't hard to attack folks for being racists regardless of the words they use.

Why did you post this? Have you not read the dozens of other posts about the very same issue here on DU? Is it that you want to keep this silly, irrelevant topic front and center just like the folks in our corrupt cesspool of a national media?

I find these constant posts about Reid's comments to be nothing more than flame bait at this point. Obama and several others have commented on the faux controversy and that should be that.

Can we move on now?

[RaleighNCDUer]

17. That is a very good point -

I remember when 'negro' was preferred and 'black' was nearly as bad as the 'n' word. Only racists talked in terms of black and white - in civilized company you said negro and caucasian, or european. It was activists who latched onto 'black' as the preferred term, much in the way that gay activists embraced 'queer'. It was years before I felt comfortable using the word.

[jbnow]

20. Of course Harry wasn't telling anyone to tone down their 'negro dialect' either

Since Harry was one of the senators trying to get Obama to run I'm sure the question came up "Is America ready?" just like it did here and in polls

Somehow Harry saying Obama doesn't have a Negro dialect sounds a lot more natural for him than if he said 'he doesn't talk black' and perhaps less rude than 'he sounds white'.

That was an accusation against Obama in the 2000 US House primary he lost (to an ex black panther in a very black district.
Before Obama Was a Favorite Son

In an unusual primary contest, issues of class, education, racial authenticity and "street smarts" were fused with tensions between the generation of Bobby Rush and Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., and younger blacks like Obama, a highly ambitious young state senator who had never known life before the civil rights era. The First District of Illinois had elected the first 20th-century black US congressman, Oscar DePriest, in 1929, has been represented by African Americans ever since, and was the nation's most overwhelmingly black congressional district in the 2000 census. Obama's political base was in the elite, interracial Hyde Park neighborhood
(snip)
The race soon became seen as a contest between the Black Panther and the professor. Rush's other primary opponent, Donne Trotter, from a well-connected South Side family, called Obama "the white man in blackface in our community." (Trotter polled a distant third on election day.) For the second time in four years Obama was challenging a black incumbent with decades of experience and wide respect in South Side politics. Shortly before the primary, black progressive journalist Salim Muwakkil noted in the Chicago Tribune that Obama was "perhaps the least favorite son," observing that "his Harvard education and crisp elocution mark him as insufficiently 'black.'"

So is it better to be complimented and supported in old fashioned language or insulted and opposed in more modern language as a way to insult and oppose you...
and for the very same trait.

As an aside that really was one thing he fought back on. Not the way he talked exactly but his Ivy League education was used against him a lot (and blamed for his fancy way of talking). He thought that was a horrible message for young minorities to hear as thoug getting a good education made you less real. It isn't in this article but while researching candidates I found some articles from the time.
Bill Clinton campaigned against him in that primary race too!

Anyway just saying if the way he speaks is going to be brought up as influencing his candidacy I like it better when it is seen as a positive.

I actually have said to quit talking so black before now that I think of it. A couple of decades ago I was in a bar/restaurant and a couple of pro-football players came in. They ended up sitting with me later and I was asking them a lot of inside football questions. At some point they were debating some point and talking very fast and with a 'negro dialect' and I could barely follow. I said something like hey you're talking black so fast that this slow white woman is feeling left out.
They started laughing and one offered to translate

[sui generis]

9. ya know, there was an agenda with that book . . . .

it's not scripture. I think we should definitely NOT have a kneejerk reaction. The point was to divide and conquer, and we're blithely helping that agenda along.

Elmermar, by any chance? PM me if so.

[pipi_k]

11. Harry Reid was stating a truth

IMO

Do you really believe that a guy who might be a few shades darker and spoke in ebonics, or like a plantation slave, would have been electable in this country?

[marshall]

12. the correct phrase in current use is "AAVE"

African-American vernacular English.

[stray cat]

14. Welcome FACTS for a change - thanks for the correct terminology

[meow2u3]

18. Reid was guilty of ignorance, not malice, in his use of the term, "Negro dialect"

He had to have been set straight by some of his colleagues behind closed doors. He goofed and admitted it.

On another note, no one who speaks with an old-school New York City dialect would be electable as President; non-New Yorkers would think he or she would sound like a mobster. "Hey, yo! I'm runnin' fa president of da United States of Americar. Ya gotta problem wit dat?" Watsamatta? Yiz don't like my yaccent? Yiz tink i'm stoopid?"
"

[lumberjack_jeff]

22. "AAVE", "Ebonics", "Negro dialect". Are all mistakes in terminology racist?

I should think the facts aren't really in dispute. Obama's speech is remarkably free of ANY discernible dialect.

[stray cat]

13. Black dialect versus standard speech - it actually is considered an independent dialect

with its own rules of grammer. http://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/05/nyregion/lingering-conflict-in-the-schools-black-dialect-vs-standard-speech.html?pagewanted=1

[izquierdista]

15. Dialect

Everyone speaks with a dialect. It's the natural speech pattern of the community you grew up with. Sometimes it is not even a conscious thing, you can meet someone with the same lilt, twang, drawl, or turn-of-phrase, and recognize them as one of your own small group. People who sit in one group all of their upbringing can become prisoners of their own dialect. People like Obama, whose upbringing has included many experiences with people of differing dialects, can easily switch from one to another.

I have some difficulty with "negro dialect", as I haven't been exposed to that much of it, and I have to pay much more attention to understand it. I won't pretend that I can respond using it, but that is the thing about dialect versus language; different dialects can communicate, different languages can't. Now I have to qualify that last statement, as a Spaniard and an Italian can carry on a simple conversation in their respective languages since the languages are so similar. Conversely, two Italians can be mutually unintelligible if they retreat to their own distinct dialetto. If you want to be understood by more people, the tendency is to drop dialect and speak in what is accepted as the standard register. Some people never learn this and seem to think everyone else understands the colloquial phrases, baseball or football metaphors, and idiomatic expressions that they grew up with.

The bottom line is, language is meant for communication. Unfortunately, it can also be used for mis-communication by people who have nefarious reasons to obfuscate.

[Ian David]

16. Yes, it Harry Reid made a racist remark. But it wasn't a mean-spirited racist remark.

It's like when my grandma would say things like, "The lovely colored girl who..."

As opposed to Rush Limbaugh calling Obama a "Man-Child" (aka, "Boy") and Barack The Magic Negro.

I would LOVE to find some excuse to replace Harry Reid.

I'm just NOT SURE that this should be that excuse.

However, if we DID replace Harry Reid over this, then that would give us the moral high ground to demand that Republicans start resigning over their regularly-scheduled and pre-planned mean-spirited racist remarks.

I'm really undecided on this.

But if you told me he'd be replaced as Senate Leader by Barbara Boxer, I'd get on a plane and picket The Senate, even if I was the only one holding a sign.

[Tom Rinaldo]

19. About as racist as the United Negro College Fund

Would you have been happier if Reid had said "African American Vernacular English"? The Center for Applied Linguistics has amassed a bibliography of more than 650 print references for African American English as a subject. What Reid was describiing is widely accepted as accurate, a Blackcentric dialect of english, which has been called by various names over the years. This is from the Center for Applied Linguistics web site:


"Dialects

African American English (AAE) is a dialect of American English used by many African Americans in certain settings and circumstances. Like other dialects of English, AAE is a regular, systematic language variety that contrasts with other dialects in terms of its grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary.

Terms for African American English

The terms used by scholars to refer to the unique language variety of many African Americans reflects the changing terms used to refer to African Americans themselves across the decades. Early studies of AAE in the 1960s used the terms Negro speech, Negro English, or Negro American dialect. Starting around 1970 and continuing throughout the decade, the preferred term was Black English or Black English Vernacular (BEV). In the mid-1980s African-American became the preferred term for black Americans, and by 1991 linguists were using the term African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Today African American English (AAE) is the generally accepted term, although AAVE is still used too."
http://www.cal.org/topics/dialects/aae.html

Every word Harry Reid said about America was true. There was nothing racist about it, other than his accurate description of America's racism. Harry Reid supported the election of America's first African American President, unlike most white Americans.

[NoSheep]

24. I feel the same way and I think I'm very touchy on the subject.

[flamin lib]

21. I took a literature class under the late Dr. Mason Brewer.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1546/is_6_14/ai_58509282/

Dr. Brewer maintained that there was an authentic dialect spoken by some negro populations (his word, not mine). Specifically he pointed out sentence structure and verb usage. The specific example I recall is the difference between "I'm going" and "I be going". "I'm going" translates to "I will go sometime in the future" as opposed to "I be going" which is "I am in the process of leaving right now."

He postulated that because of rigid segregation and exclusion from other "normal" English usage some of the language characteristics of ancestral countries was passed on in the familial setting. People from Russia who speak English as a second language have similar verbal quirks.

None of this means that a person speaking that dialect was in any way less intelligent than anyone else, any more than a British accent or German accent. It did, however, allow the listener to form an image of the speaker based on pre-existing prejudice. The voice along with the skin color was a basis for discrimination for those so predisposed.

I enjoyed Dr Brewer's class immensely and am a better person for the experience. Listening to him lecture in one voice and read folklore in another certainly drove home the idiocy of such prejudicial behavior.

Flame on if you like.

[Obamanaut]

23. Did what he said imply that he holds the belief that one race is

inherently better (or worse) than another? If not, then it was not a racist statement.

Not appropriate perhaps, maybe even bigoted, but not racist.

"Racist" and "racism" are thrown too quickly at too many things, and both terms are beginning to lose their impact. "Bigot" and "prejudiced" are usually more accurate.