On “Negro Dialects” and “Talking White”

Like many, I’ve followed with interest the recent ruckus
over Harry
Reid’s comments to journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, reported in
their new book, "Game Change," that Obama could be successful thanks,
in part, to his "light-skinned" appearance and lack of a "Negro
dialect, unless he wanted to have one."  As many Lounge readers know, there is a large academic
literature addressing the impact on professional and social success of names,
skin tone, speaking patterns, hair and dress styles, and other mutable and
immutable characteristics. 

So, I asked Devon W. Carbado,
Vice Dean and Professor of Law at UCLA, for his reactions to the Harry Reid
controversy and how that controversy related to current scholarship, including
his own, on race. Below is
Professor Carbado’s response:

Harry Reid is in trouble.  Specifically, for saying, in a private conversation during
the 2008 campaign, that Barack Obama had a better chance of success in his
presidential campaign thanks in part to his “light-skinned” appearance and
speaking patterns “with no negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.”

But what exactly is problematic about these comments?  Yes, the term “negro dialect” is
jarring, particularly from a high profile figure like Reid.  But it is not Reid’s poor choice of
words alone that has generated criticism. 
In other words, the fuss is not simply about Reid’s use of the term
“Negro.” After all, as troubling as that term might be, few would equate it
with what we now sanitize and express as the “N-word.”

Instead, then, much of the fuss is about Reid’s observation
that racial minorities have to modify their behavior in ways that serve to
negate stereotypes. Whether we like the racial register in which Reid made his
observations, reality is that Reid’s observations hold true for many
African-American men, who face a variety of hurdles to success in a
white-dominated environment, whether it be a corporate law firm, academia, or
national politics.  This is a
phenomenon I discuss in the chapter, Talking
White, in my forthcoming Oxford University Press book “Acting White”
(co-authored with Mitu Gulati).  A
number of other scholars speak to these issues as well, including Holning Lau
at the University of North Carolina and Angela Onwachi-Willig at the University
of Iowa.

Here is the gist of what our research tells us:  Black men are subject to lots of
stereotypes, most of them negative. 
To succeed in environments where others hold those stereotypes,
therefore, they routinely do extra work (“identity performance work”) to ensure
that their white colleagues are put at ease with their blackness.  And that means showing their white
colleagues that they are different from the stereotypical black man; that they
are not angry, militant, aggressive, lazy, uneducated, uncommitted to their marriages
and families, etc.  Doing this
extra work is not easy; it takes effort.

Barack Obama was able to succeed, in part, because he
successfully negated these stereotypes. 
Arguably, he had to be calmer, less emotional, smarter, better educated,
more committed to his family than any of his competitors. Harry Reid, a wily
politician and a realist, presumably recognized Obama’s ability to sustain the
performance of this identity early on and predicted success for him.  Reid recognized, in other words, that
Obama, like many other black people, “works” his identity.

And let’s not forget the other “controversial” part of Reid’s
comments—that having light skin helps. 
This is hardly a debatable proposition. As stated by Syracuse professor
Boyce Watkins in a Hip
Hop Wired piece:

“But the truth is that for the past 400 years, light-skinned Blacks
have been preferable to darker skinned African Americans in almost every walk
of life, from beauty to employment to politics. In that regard, Reid was simply
pointing out the obvious and reminding us that we are a long way away from any
kind of ‘post-racial America.'”

That brings us back to the question posed at the start: What
exactly was problematic about what Reid said to those reporters?  Was the problem that he was being
explicit in recognizing that we are not in a color blind society?  That black men still have to do extra
work in performing their identities to be palatable to the majority in
society?  Open any serious
contemporary academic treatment about the realities of race in American society
(and particularly in the employment context) and one will see Reid’s views
reflected.

My guess is that Reid’s comments have put him in boiling hot
water in part because they are viewed as impolite, as recognizing a reality
that we would like to sweep under the rug.  And this is interesting, because it tells us something about
what we, as a society, think is an acceptable racial discourse for
politicians.  They have to pretend
that we live in a colorblind (and maybe gender blind) society.  They are not allowed to recognize that
for a Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton to succeed, they have to constrain and
modify—work—their identities to negate numerous problematic stereotypes.  Blinding ourselves to these dynamics
won’t make them go away.  We need
to see and grapple with them.  I
don’t mean to say that Reid was doing exactly that. In other words, I am not
arguing that Reid was speaking truth to justice. But he was speaking a truth
about race that remains uncomfortable for us to engage.