Mel Watt, a black congressman wrote to Harry Reid, suggesting his criticism of Clarence Thomas was racist and ought to have been based on issues not personal attacks.
I was in on the discussion of this on another thread a few days ago, and held the most cynical point of view of Watt's criticism of Reid, namely that it was nothing but window dressing meant to tell us conservatives to bugger off with our hypocrisy charges. I'm still not convinced to totally let that theory go, but it definitely looks like there is some real movement toward the mainstream (or at the very least, some real unease about their current course) within the liberal black establishment that I failed to take into account.