Like A White Woman

Barack continued his "Race in America" media tour yesterday, committing a blunder that, as usual, would have caused a new firestorm if circumstances were reversed. As it is, the casualness with which he throws language around that whites are called racist for using is enlightening. You'll recall that on Tuesday, one of Barack's White Lies in response to the Preacher Wright controversy was this:

"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."

Since when did throwing your grandmother under the bus become appropriate? And whose grandmother doesn't possess an ear that belongs to another time? Barack's attempt to equate this sort of private comment with the outrageousness of the Preacher's many public proclamations promoting hatred toward country and cultural divide represents the politics of old that Barack is supposed to be the antidote to.

Seeking to clarify, Barack had this to say on a radio talk show yesterday:

"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."

A typical white person? But wait a sec. Remember in the mid-nineties when Jesse Jackson admitted to the same transgression?

"There is nothing more painful to me ... than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved."

Maybe this isn't a race issue at all, but a class issue, and a crime issue, and a survival issue. Maybe Barack's grandmother, along with Jesse Jackson, was just acting like a typical human being!