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“I’m Sorry”…And it’s not even Black History Month!

Like the chorus of a Patsy Cline song, “I’m sorry….so sorry ….please accept my apology …”

Annually like the arrival of winter, racially toxic comments spill out of the mouth of a public official just in time for Dr. Martin Luther King Day and Black History Month. In a newly released book “Game Change,” by Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin and New York Magazine’s John Heilemann sources quoted Harry Reid the U.S. Senate Majority Leader making some interesting observations about then candidate Obama.

Reid was quoted by anonymous sources saying that Barack Obama was “a ‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect,’ unless he wanted to have one.” The same book quotes Reid as telling then freshman Sen. Barack Obama that he was going nowhere in the United States Senate.

I swear is it me or is it every year around important African-American related historically significant dates someone in a high governmental position or in entertainment says a comment which once known to the general public is then just apologized away. Usually it’s racial and offensive.

At this point Democrats are standing by Reid echoing Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man.” If Reid had been a Republican there would be Democrats claiming to be peasants with lit torches and pitchforks outside the senate chambers demanding Harry Reid’s resignation from his leadership post. Don’t believe me, ask Senator Trent Lott, opps I forgot he resigned his leadership position after reminiscing about the good ol’ days and if only former segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond had been elected president.

Ask Senator Rick Santorum who lost his reelection bid after video surfaced showing the candidate calling a rival’s campaign worker a “monkey” caught on tape. Perhaps it’s only Reid’s voting record on Civil Rights issues that his democratic colleagues are not seeing the double standard that exists when the perpetrator is a Democrat not a Republican. Why? Because everybody knows that Democrats care for African-Americans and Republicans don’t, no exceptions… (wink, wink).

Political leaders on both sides of the aisle have shown that there’s a “pox on both houses,” as even with an African-American president in office racism doesn’t just go away with a twitch of a nose like “Samantha” on Bewitched or a magic wand as in Harry Potter.

Fitting into the category of light-skinned African-American, Hmmmm? This harkens back to a day where if you were dark you were the lowest on the racial totem pole. It’s not good to have a southern accent or speak in stereotypical ghetto-ese or Ebonics. What Harry Reid said is what many whites believe about blacks but until recently were afraid to say publicly. And we wondered out loud why Sammy Sosa and Michael Jackson bleached their skin rejecting the deep brown pigmentation they were born with?

And in the world of journalism, liberals protect liberals and conservatives protect their own. When it comes to the issue of race many liberal whites are privy to details of bigotry and racism but because these reporters want continued access to a political figure they delete these racist comments from interviews and ignore inflammatory language used by interviewee’s to describe African-Americans.

These people who spew this racial garbage are our elected leaders. In the case of Democrats and Republicans they’re trying to out-sing each other’s “We Are the World” renditions. When in fact they need to take a line from country legend the late Patsy Cline, “I’m sorry….so sorry ….please accept my apology.”

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