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.