Racial Referee? Critics Charge President Obama With Playing Favorites
Harry Reid's comments have stirred up a new national debate on race.
Jan. 12, 2010— -- President Obama has been thrust into the role of racial referee amid reports of Sen. Harry Reid's remarks about his skin color, prompting some critics to question whether the president is playing favorites.
Obama was quick to forgive Reid after excerpts from a new book, "Game Change," emerged reporting that the Nevada Democrat called Obama "a 'light-skinned' black man 'with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.'"
In an interview with TV One, Obama said, "This is a good man who's always been on the right side of history. For him to have used some unartful language in trying to praise me, and for people to try to make hay out of that makes absolutely no sense."
The president was also quick to disregard a 2007 comment by Joe Biden, who told the New York Observer, "You've got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean."
In contrast, Obama was harshly critical of radio host Don Imus' comment about the Rutgers women's basketball team. Obama, who was then senator, told ABC News' Jake Tapper in April 2007 that NBC should fire Imus for his "nappy-headed hos" reference to the team, a comment for which Imus apologized profusely.
"I understand MSNBC has suspended Mr. Imus," Obama told ABC News, "but I would also say that there's nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if they made a comment like that about anybody of any ethnic group. And I would hope that NBC ends up having that same attitude."
He also helped stir up a national debate about race last year when he jumped into the middle of the debate about whether Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley's arrest of renowned Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. was a case of racial profiling.
"The Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home," Obama said in July. "What I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there's a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That's just a fact."
