A shocking statistic in this op ed in today's NYT: "The education test-score gap between light-skinned and dark-skinned African-Americans is nearly as large as the gap between whites and blacks."

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January 19, 2010

Op-Ed Contributor

Shades of Prejudice

By SHANKAR VEDANTAM

Cambridge, Mass.

LAST week, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, found himself in trouble for once suggesting that Barack Obama had a political edge over other African-American candidates because he was "light-skinned" and had "no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." Mr. Reid was not expressing sadness but a gleeful opportunism that Americans were still judging one another by the color of their skin, rather than — as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose legacy we commemorated on Monday, dreamed — by the content of their character.