Paul Revere by Cyrus Dallin, North End, Boston

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Friday, March 21, 2008

YES, MR. GERAGHTY, TYPICAL!

Jim Geraghty of the National Review Online is being sarcastic when he writes this:

Thursday, March 20, 2008
BARACK OBAMA

Obama Helpfully Clarifies That His Grandmother Is a "Typical White Person"
In
Philadelphia this morning, Barack Obama confronted the remains of the Jeremiah Wright brushfire, the smoldering embers of this anecdote of his grandmother using racial stereotypes that made him cringe... and promptly spilled gasoline on those embers.

610 WIP host Angelo Cataldi asked Obama about his Tuesday morning speech on race at the National Constitution Center in which he referenced his own white grandmother and her prejudice. 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."

The grandmother reference from the speech, as you'll recall:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

You know, typical.--Jim Geraghty


YES, MR. GERAGHTY, TYPICAL.

You don't believe we have grandmothers or aunts or uncles or even parents who harbor these feelings?

First let me state that I am white.

My first grandmother-in-law, a hard-working, devout Catholic from Cincinnati Ohio, and a fine, loving woman, used to caution my ex-husband when he was just a child not to put pennies in his mouth because "...you don't know if a nigger would have touched them."

My own step-mother, now deceased, who, to my knowledge, harbored no ill will toward any race, once told me of a black woman she worked with, and how "...she was pretty for a Negro woman." And on other occasions spoke of her friendships at work with Negro women, and "...was surprised at how clean they were."

A good friend of mine, a lawyer, was born and raised and lives in Louisville, Kentucky. When he was showing off his lovely city to me, he told me that he would take me to NB 1, and NB 2. I had no idea what he meant, and when I asked him he explained. There are two large thoroughfares in Louisville, Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard and Cassius Clay (Mohammed Ali) Boulevard, and he refers to both of them as "Nigger Boulevard One," and "Nigger Boulevard Two." And one of his favorite stories he often repeated was the one about an uncle who used to belong to a golf club and would like to chase the black kids who worked there up into the trees, and when he did, he roared laughing and called them "squirrel niggers."

When I was a young woman and started my first job at a company in downtown Boston, I worked for the head of one of the departments. I remember overhearing him instruct one of his supervisors to get "some of them"--meaning black clerical workers, and sit them up front, where the elevator doors opened up into the company's main working area. Why? Someone from the EEO was coming, and he wanted to make sure "some of them" were placed in a conspicuous area so it looked like the company employed a racial mixture. There were three black women employed at the time in an office of over 200. In a city that had a large population of "some of them."

There are more stories, but these are the ones I remember most clearly.

How many time have I heard my white friends or family claim that black people smell different? How many times have I heard that "they're lazy, they're criminally prone, they reproduce like rabbits with a different father for each child? They're inferior."

Enough times to know, Mr. Geraghty, that this is TYPICAL. Don't pretend this isn't true.

We have a problem in this country with being honest about racial issues--ON BOTH SIDES.

Senator Obama tried to open up a discussion, and all you, Mr. Geraghty, contribute is sarcasm and more divisiveness.

You disgust me.

3 comments:

Patrick M said...

I've heard those stories. I even have some honest racists distantly related. So I know where you're coming from.

I just wonder how long this racial crap will dominate the news.

I do know that we'd be better off if the MSM and the ideologues would stop fanning the flames.

Of course, we can expect this for at least 8 more months.

Handsome B. Wonderful said...

I've heard plenty of this from fellow whites in my life. I told the story of my grandmother freely using the "N" word and she use to call this type of nut, "Nigger toes."

Then when I was up in Idaho studying at BYU-Idaho (I was Mormon then) and was getting ready to go to Africa on a mission. I was in a building having something to do with getting ready to go.

I over-heard some parents who were talking about their kid going to South Africa and asked, "He won't have to talk to the black people will he??"

So yeah, this kind of talk is quite typical amongst whites who talk amongst themselves. Of course they don't say it in "polite company" but racism is still quite alive.

Anyone who doesn't know this is living in la-la land.

Shaw Kenawe said...

Ha! "Nigger toes!" I'd forgotten about that! And it was my Cincinnati born, conservative Catholic ex-husband who introduced me to that term. I had never heard it before I knew him.

This is not to say he was a bad person. He wasn't and isn't. He is a good man, and we remain very good friends.

He attended an Catholic high school seminary in Cincinnati, I believe it was Roger Bacon High School, and in his year book, his nickname is "The Jew." Why? Because he had a somewhat large nose--I didn't think so, but his pals did, and so that was placed under his photo in the yearbook, and the good brothers of Roger Bacon High School allowed it.


We were are still are awash in hating ourselves if we differ from what we know.

When. When. When. will be rise above this????

The MSM promotes this because it gets people to watch and that earns them $$$$$$.

I wish we could, as a nation, grow up.

Thanks for your imput, Patrick and James.