Las Vegas Weekly

Thoughts on Reid, racism and, of course, black culture in Searchlight

Photo: Ryan Olbrysh

Driving through Searchlight a few months ago, I was stunned by the lack of African-American culture in this former mining camp along Highway 95. After all, Searchlight’s most famous resident is the U.S. Senate’s majority leader, Harry Reid. Without a proper knowledge of currently acceptable racial terms, he could get in big trouble with today’s Republican Party, which is very concerned about racism.

According to the 2007 population figures, Searchlight has five black residents, or .07 percent of its population of 759. That’s about average for small Mojave Desert towns, but is it enough to teach a Mormon grandfather about sensitive issues of race? Has he ever even heard about African-American people living here, in America? Mormons only allowed black people to become priests in what, 1978?

Republicans are very angry with Reid this week, and not just because he’s a powerful Democrat in Washington about to pass the thing Republicans hate more than Islam, which is affordable health care for Americans. They’re angry because neo-Drudge hack Mark Halperin has co-written a new gossip book about the crazy 2008 election, and one anecdote in the book is about Reid’s decision to encourage then-Sen. Barack Obama to run for president.

See, Reid wanted Obama to run against Hillary because there was concern Hillary would get destroyed in the general election, simply because so many Republicans are still so insane about the Clintons. Women!

Hacks such as Mark Halperin obviously were very concerned about whether a common black person could win the nomination, but Reid explained (idiotically) that Obama was not just another black candidate like Al Sharpton or whoever. Obama used “no Negro dialect unless he wanted one,” and was “light-skinned.” To Reid, this removed two racial barriers other black candidates on the national stage couldn’t cross with a voting population that’s still just barely in the hands of old white people nostalgic for slavery.

And it wasn’t even a unique viewpoint among the powerful Democratic senators. Joe Biden, currently serving as Barack Obama’s vice president, described the candidate in a televised interview as “clean and articulate.”

Considering Reid and Biden are big Obama supporters and current partners of his administration, it would take a real fool to make the case that these Democratic supporters of African-American equality and opportunity were, secretly, racist nuts.

Reid has, in fact, heard of African-American culture, I’ve learned: In his booster book about Searchlight, The Camp That Didn’t Fail, Reid notes that beloved ragtime composer Scott Joplin actually wrote one of his famous rags about the once-booming Clark County town.

“Even though it cannot be proved that he ever came west of the Mississippi,” Reid wrote, “there are several who say he played the piano in Searchlight. This, they say, is why he wrote the ‘Searchlight Rag.’” That was in 1907, which is around the time the NAACP also thought “Negro” was a good word to use when describing America’s former slave population.

Ken Layne is an editor of the political site Wonkette.