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Barack and his “Typical white person” grandmother
The following is a response to a question on LinkedIn, I felt like reposting it here (yes, I wrote it).
The questions was: “Barack says his racist grandmother is a “Typica white person”. Is Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. therefore a typical black pastor?
Are Pat Robertson, the late Jerry Falwell and Ted Haggard “typical” white pastors?
Typical people of any race are representative only of their own education and experience. Barack Obama’s white grandmother is from Kansas and grew up during a time when were almost assuredly few if any black people in her community (Kansas is 89.1% white according to the 2007 census). Human beings in general fear that which they do not know, so am I surprised that she has been scared by black men, of course not. Am I surprised that she has used racial epithets, hell no.
I am not an Obama supporter (nor do I support Clinton or McCain), however, I am a student of history and politics and historically and politically speaking, the typical white person is racist. Does that mean that all members of any race are racist? No. We live in a society where typical has almost no meaning, nothing is typical any more. Stereotypes are typical, not people.
If “typical” white people are all racist then Obama would have had very little success in states like Iowa (94.6% white), Wisconsin (90% white), Colorado (90.1% white), Connecticut (84.6% white) or Idaho (95.6% white). Yet he won caucuses/primaries in all of these states.
Here is what Obama said in reference to his grandmother:
“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.”To me this is a complete non-issue and I think that it has lowered the political discourse in the campaign right now to an unfortunate level.
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