If you’re looking for some nuanced sense on the controversy surrounding Harry Reid’s ill-put, pre-2008 election comments regarding Barack Obama, check out what John McWhorter has to say. The newly-published book, Game Change, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, reports Reid’s take on primary candidate Obama thus:

He [Reid] was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama – a ‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,’ as he later put it privately.

I’ve been a fan of McWhorter’s public commentary on issues of race and language for some time; his Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English (New York: Gotham Books, 2008) was an informative joy (and will change some of my writing habits!). At the end of his column, he concludes the following:

Reid implied that Black English is lesser than standard English and that it’s therefore good that Obama doesn’t use it in public. This is not about whether black people have to sweat to speak standard English; it’s about whether Black English is as good as standard English. Most of America black as well as white is at the exact same point in understanding vernacular speech and its proper evaluation as Reid is.

For which reason most of America should leave him alone about this and move on.

When public figures lapse into a faux pas I tend to be forgiving to the point of being soft (example). My own sense on this recent controversy turns out to have been similar to McWorter’s decisive analysis. But he of course puts it much better, especially because he sees the many layers of possible analysis Reid’s comments calls for.