It's Not Reid Who Needs to Apologize—It's Steele

OK, using the term Negro was seriously last century, writes Sandy Banks, but Harry Reid didn't say anything bigoted or anything African Americans don't know to be true when he essentially said if "you're black, it is easier in this country to be light-skinned." He apologized for offending African Americans, but Banks, writing in the Los Angeles Times, wonders what she should be offended about. His only crime is being "indelicate and impolitic."

"I think the next apology ought to come from Michael Steele," she writes, "the light-skinned, dialectically flexible African American head of the Republican National Committee." In likening Reid to Trent Lott, the proud segregationist, Steele's the one who tramples sensibilities. "Either Steele is playing politics with a combustible case, or he thinks Americans are so incapable of thinking intelligently about race that we can't tell the difference between Lott and Reid."
(More Harry Reid stories.)