No, they want to pretend that they're good Americans who don't see racial differences. Reid pulled back the covers inadvertently to expose the bitter truth. He said honestly what many white voters think and see when they encounter a black person--even if that person goes on to become the first black president of their nation.
###
Sam Fulwood is a Race-Talk contributor and a Senior Fellow at American Progress, where he analyzes
the influence of national politics and domestic policies on communities
of color across the United States.
Prior to joining the Center, Sam was a metro columnist at The Plain
Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio, the last stop in a nearly three-decade
journalism career that featured posts at several metropolitan
newspapers. During the 1990s, he was a national correspondent in the
Washington bureau of Los Angeles Times, where he created a national
race-relations beat and contributed to the paper's Pulitzer
Prize-winning coverage of the Los Angeles riots in 1992.
Fulwood is the author of two books, Waking from the Dream: My Life in the Black Middle Class (Anchor, 1996) and Full of It: Strong Words and Fresh Thinking for Cleveland (Gray...amp; Company, 2004).
In addition to his news and commentary writings in mass-circulated publications and anthologies, Sam frequently speaks on college campuses and television and radio programs to discuss national politics, race relations, and pop culture. He is a founding contributing writer for The Root.com, an online publication targeted to the African-American online community.
He was a 1994 Nieman Foundation fellow and is currently a member of the foundation's board of advisors. During the spring of 2000, he was an Institute of Politics fellow at Harvard University. Sam was an inaugural presidential fellow at Case Western Reserve University in 2003, where he taught courses on media, politics, and pop culture.
Sam earned a B.A. in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1978.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).