By Karen Hunter

GOP chair Michael Steele made the rounds this weekend calling for, among other things, the resignation of Senate Majority Leader Democratic Harry Reid for comments that Reid made about Barack Obama while he was making his historic run for president.

Steele should be ashamed of himself for trying to make political hay over comments that were, well, true and could easily apply to Steele himself. Reid said Obama had a good chance to win because he was a “light-skinned” African-American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

People are calling Reid’s comments racist. Those comments aren’t racist. Harry Reid is ignorant more than he is racist. His comments were unenlightened but held some truth.

Are light-skinned blacks not favored in America, even in the black community? If Barack Obama was the complexion of Vernon Jordan or Michael Jordan he most likely would not be president.

There is white and light-skinned favoritism in this country that permeates even the black culture. We can take it back to slavery when the field hands were separated from the house slaves based on skin color (due to white men raping slaves and producing children who then became property and would often end up in the house of the master/father).

That soon became a self-inflicted cast system among blacks post slavery. There was even a brown paper bag test to enter some fraternity, sororities and clubs in the black community where if you were darker than a brown paper bag, you couldn’t get in. In the 1950s the famous Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark doll test used as evidence by the Brown v. Board of Education legal team to show the harms of legal segregation, showed that the vast majority of black children preferred white over black dolls. More recently, Kiri Davis’s film “A Girl Like Me,” recreated the Clark’s study. Same results, different generation.

If you’re brown stick around…if you’re black get back.

But the nerve that Reid really touched in his ignorance was this notion of duality among blacks. In saying that Obama had “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,” (I would have fun, however, watching Reid try to explain exactly what is a “Negro dialect”).

Most blacks who are in corporate America or who work and live around a whites are able to talk in unaccented English and carry themselves in a different way than they do around their black family and friends. It’s second nature for some of us. (There are those like Tiger Woods and Clarence Thomas who keep it “white” all the time, however).

W.E.B. Dubois wrote about this phenomenon nearly a hundred years ago.

“It’s a peculiar sensation this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity,” wrote Dubois. “One always feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

No other group in America has this sort of functional split personality and the ability to flip it on and off with such aplomb that folks like Reid who get to glimpse it are amazed.

So, yes, President Obama is light-skinned and I know he speaks in a different manner with his homies and his wife than he does when delivering a speech to the American people or speaking to Congress.

Again, if we are being honest President Barack Obama is exactly what he needed to look like and sound like to be elected in America today.

No apologies necessary. Just the truth.

Karen Hunter is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, best-selling author and media professor at Hunter College in New York City.