What does that mean? I don’t know. Ask Barack Obama, who has been trying to bridge the racial gap and has instead been making it bigger; first by his friendship with his pastor, the anti-white and anti-Jewish, Jeremiah Wright, and then by stating after his race speech that his grandmother is just a “typical white person.” I would like to remind Mr. Obama that he is half white and also that he doesn’t speak for every white person in America. How can he paint white people with so broad a brush and say something so racist and inflammatory and expect white people to embrace him? And get away with it?
Philly radio station host Angelo Cataldi (a “typical Italian-American person”) asked Obama about his speech on Tuesday at Philly’s National Constitution Center in which he talked about his maternal grandmother and her prejudices.
Obama told Cataldi that
“The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity, but that she is a typical white person. If she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know (pause) there’s a reaction in her that doesn’t go away and it comes out in the wrong way.”
As an “atypical’ white person, I am not all that offended, but I’m ticked off. It takes a lot more than that to offend me, because in this case, frankly, I just consider the source. He’s right in that there are prejudiced white people in this country. But not everyone- you only have to look at his campaign volunteers to see that. It doesn’t matter that he said his grandmother doesn’t harbor any racial animosity. The money quote is “TYPICAL. WHITE. PERSON.” The double standard is what ticks me off. If Hillary Clinton or John McCain had said “Fulano” was just a “typical black person,” Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would be all over it! Look what happened to Geraldine Ferrarro with her comment last week. It also ticks me off that he said this in my home town- you know, brotherly love and all that?
You can watch the whole bigoted mess here.
Claudia,
Over at Dean’s World they have two great links touching on this very subject:
The first one would completely change race talk in this country, but I’m not holding my breath. I really suggest EVERYONE read that link; that’s hitting the nail on the head.
The second one is a lively debate on whether the comment was or wasn’t racist and what Obama may have or may have been not trying to say.
I think this has a LOT to do with the view among lefty “educators” both white and black that it is impossible for a black person to be racist or bigoted because they “have no power”. They redefine the word ‘racist’ in a way to make sure it sweeps their own sins under the rug of denial while focusing glaring harsh spotlights on the sins of white people, whom they assume are all ‘rich’ or at least have a red phone in their basement to call the president or Delta Force who are at their disposal to make any black person disappear or cause the weather to be bad on a day they have an outdoor event scheduled.
With that as the cultural water they swim in, many blacks never learn diplomacy or tact in dealing with non-blacks and are in fact encouraged to talk and behave as if they have a terminal case of Tourette’s Syndrome when dealing with people of other races. They rarely if ever get called on these things so they have no incentive to stop. Either some of this rubbed off on Obama or he really is horrible at thinking on his feet — or he really does feel that way about white people.
If Hillary Clinton or John McCain had said “Fulano” was just a “typical black person,” Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would be all over it
Those two would never make Obama’s remark because they’re not black! It’s that simple. I don’t understand the hair-splitting here. I’m gay, and I’ve grown up all my life around family and friends, sympathetic or not, making all-too-typical remarks about gays. Does that make them homophobics — a word, by the way, thrown around all too often? No! I’m sensitive to stereotypes, and my friends and family — who’ve never known the isolation with which gay youth are all too familiar — are not. It neither provokes self-pity nor makes them wretched human human beings. Human beings are contradictory and just plain weird. Is that too difficult for you to accept?
The good thing about Obama’s address is that an intensely political man forced his audience to accept contradictions. As a Cuban-American, you and others on this site know all too well how the perceptions of people ignorant of the struggle prevent them from understanding you (isn’t that what this site is about? HELLO!), so read his address with a little empathy, and not with complete, gob-smacked idiocy like the poster before me did. I gotta admit, though, that in 2008 reading phrases like “many blacks never learn diplomacy or tact in dealing with non-blacks and are in fact encouraged to talk and behave as if they have a terminal case of Tourette’s Syndrome when dealing with people of other races” is hilarious. I can almost see the wagging finger of Associate Justice Henry Brown in Plessy vs. Fergueson. Apparently this man has never walked onto a college campus.
The point? Stop listening to CNN, FOX NEWS, and media talking points.
First of all, ThinWhite, I saw this news on the ABC news in Philly, not FOX. And the comment was not in his address, it was in his interview afterward, an interview with a white man.
Second of all, my point was to point out the double standard of how the prominent blacks defend their own race and go on attack on those who make racist comments against them but when it is the other way around, nobody says anything. This is not hairsplitting, it’s recognition of a double standard that we have come to accept: If you’re black, make all the generalizations and repeat all the stereotypes you want. But if you’re white, keep quiet.
As for you being gay, this is about race, not sexual orientation but this does not mean you should be any less deserving of respect or consideration for your way of life. Educating family and friends is where tolerance and acceptance starts. If it offends you to have those comments made about you, you should speak up. How else will you break the cycle of people thinking it is acceptable to gay-bash? If a politician made an anti-gay comment, like Larry Craig acting like a “typical gay man,” (whether he is or not is irrelevant) I’m sure GLAAD would step up for the homosexual community and tell the country how inappropriate it is to make generalizations about gays and how it causes more division.
After confirming his allegiance to Jeremiah Wright this week, I think Obama is starting to show his real self. I hope I’m wrong, because I’d hate to have a bigot fot a president.
The term, typical “…..” person, (fill in the blank) at best prompts a stereotype. As we know, the black community rails against being identified from a stereotypical viewpoint, and rightly labels such views as “racist.” You can’t have your cake and eat it.
I think this is all going to a point I’m about to make on my own blog today, now that I’m stuck home.
Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas has been the law of the land for over 50 years. In ten years, the people who were in kindergarten when Brown was handed down will be applying for Social Security. The people who were alive when Jim Crow was the law of the land are more or less senior citizens, and are moving off the center stage of politics, in favor of generations of people who have always gone to integrated schools.
“I can almost see the wagging finger of Associate Justice Henry Brown in Plessy vs. Fergueson. Apparently this man has never walked onto a college campus.”
I go to a mostly black church and I frequently overhear stereotyping of other races much worse than what Obama said. A college campus is hardly a microcosm of the world, and in fact doesn’t much doesn’t much resemble the real world at all, so I don’t understand why you seem to think that being on a college campus makes anyone socially omniscient, or gives anyone the right to wag a finger at me for not giving the benefit of the doubt to Obama that would never be given to a white candidate.
(In fairness to Obama, if the “typical white person” thing was his only racial faux paus, I’d give him a pass. Everybody from time to time makes a social goof that isn’t indicative of their character, and we REALLY don’t need to be that uptight with each other. But in context of his long close association with Rev. Wright, it’s an awful lot to ask.)
I made a very plain and obvious observation that many — not all or even most, MANY (please get that through your head) — black people hold to pretty vicious stereotypes of other races, and are encouraged to do so because — and here is my point I must repeat since you missed it somehow, regarding the effect of their cultural environment — they never get called out for saying such things. If you never face consequences for a certain behavior, that behavior is sure to continue and very likely increase. That is a cold hard fact of human nature and no racial or ethnic group is immune from it.
On the other hand, today not only white people but increasingly Asians and Hispanics are under constant scrutiny and threat of being labeled “racist” for offenses real or (more often) imagined — as you seem to be attempting to do with me — and are intimidated into silence about what they believe, good or bad. All of this is a really lousy recipe for an environment conducive to the free exchange of ideas, something that rumors I’ve heard say is supposed to happen on college campuses but apparently doesn’t. But it IS a good formula for social ferment and rot of the very kind of resentment, rumors and lies that lead to racial stereotyping and all the horrors that inevitably follow.
If anyone resembles Justice Henry Brown in this conversation, it’s you. You appear to want to keep the status quo where white, black, brown and yellow can’t REALLY talk to each other without labels flying and heads rolling.
See, this is more eloquent and reasonable than what you originally posted. This post suggests that you’re a lot closer to Obama’s position than you may have realized: we all have the capacity to say (and hear) nasty things to each other.
I mentioned my sexual orientation because it only comes up when someone makes an issue of it, yet when I do, I’m accused by these same people of “rubbing [their] faces in it.” This is infuriating. Choosing to attend a church at which a pastor makes these kinds of remarks is not the same thing, I’ll concede. But in the same way that I don’t like straights telling me how I’m supposed to comport myself, I get uncomfortable when whites advise blacks on how to act in a civil manner; the criticism should come from their respective communities. The best rebuke to a Jeremiah Wright is a glance at the enrollment figures at local universities, where blacks graduate and enter a job market like everyone else; they don’t have TIME for nonsense like Wright’s. That’s the context in which I mentioned universities. Certainly they’re not the Real World, but as places where mulitiplicity exists and is encouraged, sometimes to a fault (here we agree again), they’re great rehearsals for potential conflicts.
To return to the original subject and conclude, it’s impossible to read Dreams From My Father and think that Obama’s a racist. He attends this church for a spiritual balm that I understand but with which I don’t sympathize (I wish we had a proud atheist for a candidate, but that’s another story).