The “Grandmother issue”, while perhaps intrinsically minor, may prove to be the gravest embarrassment of Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign, maybe even a decisive embarrassment. In his Philadelphia speech, he said:
I can no more disown [the Rev. Mr. Wright] 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.
That was bad enough. Disclosing the embarrassing secret of an 85-year old woman, who has told the media that she is too infirm to give interviews, and suggesting that she is a bigot – we no longer have the vocabulary. The word “cad” was invented for such conduct. (For more extended outrage, vide Melanie Phillips, “Trashing Grandma, Yet”, and hundreds of others.)
Then we see that Senator Obama’s autobiography told a different story. The book doesn’t say that Grandmother Dunham “once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street”. Rather, on one occasion her husband, just after a heated marital argument, accused her of wanting to avoid the risk of encountering an aggressive panhandler because “the fella was black”. Conceivably, though the book doesn’t say so, that incident generated an emotional fear of young black males, but her grandson is either uncandid or psychologically obtuse if he sees any comparison between that reaction and Pastor Wright’s anti-white invective.
But the worst comes today, when the candidate, perhaps thinking that he could soften the insult to “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”, said that her alleged wariness was just like “a typical white person”. What’s wrong with that statement?
On a factual level, it is untrue. Here I have a bit of personal experience. After being mugged for the third time during my residence in New York City (well before the Giuliani Renaissance), I did for a time shy away from any black man under about age 40. The impulse was subconscious and uncontrollable. It lasted for a couple of months, then faded away, never to return. Of course, I exercise prudence and don’t wander into the vicinity of people who look like hoodlums, whatever their race, but blackness in and of itself doesn’t arouse any discomfort or apprehension. I think it highly unlikely that I am, in this regard, anything other than “a typical white person”.
Assuming arguendo that Mrs. Dunham really did suffer the mild phobia that Senator Obama describes and that those feelings are “typical” of white Americans, can anyone regard them as worse than a venial offense? Shouldn’t a frank discussion of race relations in America have pointed out that the phobia is fully explained the high black male crime rate? The presumption of bigotry is itself bigoted.
The Senator’s rhetorical trope – I can no more disown Pastor Wright, who has “expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country” than I can disown my grandmother who – depends upon the grandmother’s fault being morally comparable to the preacher’s. Otherwise, the comparison falls flat. “My grandmother who gossiped about the neighbors” won’t fill the bill. Therefore, unless this skilled and highly educated orator didn’t think about what he was saying, he believes that using one’s pulpit to damn America is more or less on a level with fearing strange black males. Moreover, the “a typical white person” is guilty of the latter. The only logical conclusion is that the average, ordinary white man or woman is on a moral plane with a race-baiting demagogue.
We see now a couple of strange contradictions. Senator Obama professes an “unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people”, yet implies that whites are mostly imbued with a racism similar to Pastor Wright’s. He also stated yesterday that it is wrong for whites to be “told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced”, while today he rebukes them for those same fears. Is this a clear, analytical thinker?
If Barack Obama does not win the Democratic Presidential nomination, I’m pretty sure that historians will single out his words about Madelyn Dunham as the turning point. “Gaffe” is too pale a word.
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