MSNBC talking-head Chris Matthews, who famously said he “felt this thrill going up my leg” when Barack Obama speaks, now praises President Obama’s temporary absence of blackness:
I was trying to think about who he was tonight. It’s interesting: he is post-racial, by all appearances. I forgot he was black tonight for an hour.
Matthews’ gaffe comes on the heels of Sen. Harry Reid’s riff on the acceptability of light-skinned blacks with no “Negro dialect” and observations that Sen.-elect Scott Brown “looks like an American.”
More than 100 years later, W.E.B. Du Bois’ prediction remains as prescient as ever: “The problem of the twentieth twenty-first century is the problem of the color-line.”
