news-record.com

It was encouraging to hear Mayor Bill Knight tout diversity as an asset last week,

"I believe this diversity is a source not of conflict and problems, but of strength, creativity and inspiration," he said. "We don't just have an amazing community. We have a community capable of conquering challenges working together."

That surprised and even disheartened some people.

"We elected Bill Knight to bring some common sense back to Greensboro's city government," "Sam H." posted on the John Locke Foundation's Triad blog, Piedmont Publius, "and if 'diversity' has to be sacrificed in the process, so be it."

Well, it doesn't. Diversity isn't as squishy and patently useless as some people would have you think.

It's about recognizing, respecting and harnessing the talents that people of various backgrounds, perspectives and talents bring to a business or a community. Ideally, it also should enable us to build trust and speak more honestly about difficult issues.

Obviously, we're not there yet.

Consider the still-simmering national dust-up over what U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said and how he said it. Those comments about President Obama, quoted in the new political tell-all, "Game Change," were clumsily and tactlessly put.

They also were true.

Reid said during the 2008 campaign that Obama's status as a "light-skinned" African American "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one," were assets to his campaign.

Of course they were.

Obviously Reid should have chosen his words more carefully -- who in the world still uses the word "Negro" in the 21st century? The term isn't as awkward as "colored," or as toxic as the n-word, but in most corners it's considered outdated and even pejorative.

Yet if you were to talk to a random sampling of black folks on the street, as I did the other day, you'd probably hear the same view: Obama's "crossover" looks and eloquence were helpful to his campaign, especially in appealing across racial lines.

Looks matters in politics even if race isn't a factor (just ask John Edwards).

As for diction and dialect, I tell young African Americans every day that there's nothing wrong with using so-called Black English in casual settings, as long as you also have a firm command of standard English -- and a clear understanding of when you use one versus the other.

Meanwhile some people suggest that Reid's comments rank right up there with Trent Lott's about Strom Thurmond, To quote one familiar Black English phrase, "child please."

At a party honoring Thurmond's 100th birthday in 2002, Lott said: "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."

Thurmond ran for president in 1948 on a segregationist platform.

For remarks more comparable to Reid's, consider Joe Biden's in 2007, in which he said of Obama: "I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. ..."

As if being "articulate" and "bright and clean and nice-looking" are not normally traits of "mainstream African Americans," whatever that means.

Compared to Reid, Biden's pratfall over his tongue was much more spectacular -- and Republicans are right to complain that Democrats tend to get passes in such instances.

Bill Clinton is getting one now. The same book, "Game Change," quotes Clinton saying something that appears much worse and newsworthier than Reid's poorly chosen words.

Clinton allegedly told the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, in a conversation about Obama's candidacy versus Hillary's: "A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee."

Of course, Guilford County has seen its own episodes of "When Words Attack." In the summer of 2000, John Hammer, the white editor of the weekly Rhinoceros Times, told a black school board member, Keith Green, to "bring it on, boy," after an enraged Green had hurled a chair at him.

The community dialogue that followed (why is the word "boy" such an especially loaded term when aimed at a black man?) was passionate but actually constructive.

Not many are.

On the eve of another Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, dialogue about race remains too superficial to be useful, rarely lasting beyond the latest quote wars, which will run their cycle on blogs and cable talk shows. Until the next ones.

What's more bothersome than what's being said about race in these cases is what isn't.