Meet a “Typical White Person.”

I really hope that what follows makes sense.  You’ll be sure to tell me if it doesn’t, okay?

Headline from Saturday’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

Obama’s “typical white person” makes waves

Story:

Sen. Barack Obama’s description of his grandmother as a “typical white person” in an interview with WIP (610 AM) wound up making waves from the online Huffington Post to YouTube and Larry King Live.

In Thursday’s interview with [local Philadelphia radio] host Angelo Cataldi, the Democrat from Illinois responded to a question about the speech on race he delivered earlier in the week at the National Constitution Center.

In the speech, Obama said his white grandmother “once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street.” He also said she “on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

“The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity,” Obama said on WIP. “She doesn’t. But she is a typical white person who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, there’s a reaction that’s been bred into our experiences that don’t go away, and that sometimes comes out in the wrong way, and that’s just the nature of race in our society…”

Then the reactions started.

“We doubt this story will have legs, but wonder if Hillary Clinton referred to a ‘typical black person,’ would we ever hear the end of it?” Dan Gross of the Philadelphia Daily News wrote on his PhillyGossip blog.

“Seriously, Barack Obama basically called all white people racist. … Is this guy kidding?” wrote Taylor Marsh on the Huffington Post in midafternoon.  [That's not what he said, Taylor.  Read it again.  Slooooowly.]

WIP host Howard Eskin, known for having strong opinions, said during his 3 p.m. show that he was offended by the remark, at one point repeatedly asking a caller who had identified himself as African American if he was “a typical black person.” [For those of you not from this area, Eskin is basically a sports talk "shock jock, who will say almost anything to provoke people.]

“Obama ‘Typical White Person’ Racist Interview” was a headline on an excerpt posted on YouTube.

On Thursday night, Larry King referred to the comments on WIP during an interview with Obama: “You called her today ‘a typical white person,’ meaning what, Senator?”

“Well, what I meant really was that some of the fears of street crime and some of the stereotypes that go along with that were responses that I think many people feel,” Obama replied. “She’s not extraordinary in that regard. She is somebody that I love as much as anybody. I mean, she has literally helped to raise me. But those are fears that are embedded in our culture, and embedded in our society, and even within our own families, even within a family like mine that is diverse.”

Asked whether his campaign might suffer some damage because of the remark, the senator did not directly respond but expressed confidence that Americans could talk honestly about complicated issues and that “if we’re not trying to demonize each other, that we can solve problems.”

Yesterday morning, Cataldi sounded amused by all the controversy. “Only now do I know he was really just calling to give us his NCAA picks. . . . I’m asking him about his white grandmother and he wanted to talk about UCLA, about Duke against Belmont. What a disaster!”

Then he said his own mother called yesterday to rib him about helping Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Cohost Al Morganti said that CNN invited him to comment on the air, but that the cable network changed its mind because he thought the subject was “no big deal.”  [Emphasis and side comments mine.]

Well, of course it’s not really a big deal.  But it has already become one.   They can’t help themselves but to make it one.  By midday Saturday, this comment was all over the Internet, especially on right-wing blogs, but also on “progressive” ones where Sen. Clinton is the candidate of choice.  And the folks who profit from demogoging this to death were just happy as punch to oblige.  Un-Reconstructed Confederate sympathizer and Holocaust denier Pat Buchanan was ranting about this on MSNBC: his face turned bright red, he was so irate.  As if his reactions somehow represent a “typical white person’s.”  (Why that network continues to drag him out in front of the camera, I do not understand.)  No doubt this will be the focus of Sean Hannity’s narrow, racist universe for a good week or so.

Of course, the real problem is that, once again, Barack Obama is only “in trouble” with these people because he told the truth.

See, there are “typical white people” out here.  Lots of them.  I’m going to bet that most white people are “typical white people,” in the way Obama meant that phrase.

Meet one:

Hello.  My name is Dave.  I’m a “typical white person.”

My mother’s parents had their roots in England, specifically Newcastle and Manchester.  There was also some Pennsylvania Mennonite and a smattering of German on my maternal grandfather’s side.  My father’s family was Scottish on my grandfather’s side, from up around Edinburgh, and English on my grandmother’s: her line can be traced back to early Pennsylvania Quakers.

So, unless there was some stuff going on back there that I know nothing about, I’m about as white-bread Caucasian as you can get.

My late parents were pretty typical white people.  My father harbored a fair amount of anti-black racism: although he never used the “n-word,” he certainly based a number of his opinions on the usual unfortunate stereotypes.  He was fairly dismissive of many black civil rights leaders, for example.  He thought they were “hucksters.”  He didn’t like superstar baseball talent Richie Allen of the Phillies, mainly I think because Allen had the audacity to be a proud black man, Afro and all.  My dad changed, however, as he got older.  Being laid off at 50 changed him.  Having the home he built and paid for burn down in 1982 – after having lived there for twenty years and raised a family in it – changed him.  The fact that so many people of all colors and backgrounds from our community rallied around my parents when that happened softened him, and he died a very different man than the one who raised me.

I was brought up in an almost entirely white southern New Jersey suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  I had no black neighbors and hardly any black classmates growing up, until I hit junior high.  I had one black elementary school teacher, Mrs. Richardson, who started out that year as Miss Lott, who was one of the most wonderful and demanding teachers I ever had.  (I’d love to know where she is today.)  She was the first person of color with whom I spent any real time.

I had one black teacher in high school, a man who was something of a mentor to me at a time when my own father and I had grown a bit distant, but no black friends.  There were very few black students in my school, and none of them travelled in my social circle, which, frankly, was pretty darn small.  I had a Asian girlfriend for about a year and a half (she was third generation Chinese-American), and lots of white Jewish and Catholic friends, but that was about it in terms of diversity.

I bet most typical white people were raised in a similar way.

I attended college at Temple University in North Philadelphia, and got a cultural awakening that I am very thankful for to this day.  I had lots of black classmates and a number of black instructors.  I did student teaching at a high school that was about 95% black and 5% Latino in terms of student population, and my cooperating teacher, Carol Ross, was also black.  All that served me well later as I grew into teaching.

But I still had no black friends.  I did not hang out with anyone who wasn’t really a lot like me, in terms of background.

I have taught for twenty-seven years.  I have had many black students and a number of black colleagues.  One of my former black teaching buddies is someone I consider a fairly close friend, as far as colleagues go, who was very helpful to me when I made the switch from adjunct professor to middle school teacher.  She’s retired now, and I don’t see her very often.

Yeah, I know.  I just said that “one of my friends is black.”

I now am a member of a Friends Meeting which is very diverse in its ethnic and “racial” makeup.  We have folks from all backgrounds and creeds.  It’s one of the things I most cherish about it.

But here’s the thing.   I still to this day really don’t have what you’d call many ”friends” who happen to be black.  Certainly no close friends.  I have never broken bread in a black person’s home.  No black person has ever had dinner in mine.  I’ve had plenty of meals with friends of other “races” at restaurants or other functions, but always as part of a bigger group.  Nothing more intimate, the way friends do.  I have some black neighbors – that is, the black people who live in my neighborhood - but I don’t know them.  I don’t talk to them.  The most we do is wave as we drive by each other, as good neighbors try to do.

But I have never stopped to say hello, and they have never stopped for me.

I bet most typical white people are in the same situation.

Does any of this matter?  I think it does.

I read books by black authors, study black history (not just in February, either), listen to music by black artists, watch movies featuring black actors and made by black directors, attend concerts by black musicians, root for black athletes who play for the teams I follow.  Not because they’re black: because I like their work.  But I can’t pretend to know black people from all that.

I do know that I have consciously done things to avoid black people in some situations.  I have felt uncomfortable, or at least more wary, when in situations where I’m sharing space with young black men, for example.  This in spite of the fact that I have worked with a fairly large number of black students over the years, especially when I taught at the community college where I worked for ten years.  Those young men were of the same age as the ones who make me uncomfortable on the street.  I was never uncomfortable with them in a classroom, or on the quad, or in the cafeteria.  But I avoid travelling through certain neighborhoods in Philadelphia.  I am very wary when driving through Camden, New Jersey, a predominantly black city, and I know I don’t take advantage of some of the cultural events and institutions there because they’re “not in a good neighborhood.”  I don’t cross the street to avoid young black males, but that doesn’t mean I’m always totally at ease around them.

I don’t know why I’m “wary.”  Nervous.  Whatever you want to call it.  I just am.  Like most typical white people, I’ll bet.

I know all this about myself.  I’m not happy about it.  In fact, it makes me sad and ashamed.  Especially ashamed.

I’ve been thinking a lot about all this during the past week, since Sen. Obama gave his speech on race when he came to my hometown.  That speech made me think.  It made me do a mental inventory of my everyday racism.  It made me assess – again – what it means to be a member of The Most Privileged Class in America: a white, middle-class male of Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage.  Of what being that means to the way other people perceive me.  About how others of all colors may assume that I share the prejudices of other members of my tribe, and about how all our assumptions help to build the walls that still exist between us.

I still have a lot of thinking to do, and maybe some praying about it, too.

Maybe I worry about this too much.  Maybe not enough.  You tell me.  Some of you know me well enough by now.  Go ahead.

The problem isn’t with what Barack Obama said.  The problem is that he was right, and that too many white people know it. 

And we just can’t deal with it.  Maybe we just don’t know how.  Maybe some of us just don’t want to.  And, of course, some of us will just continue to use those words as an excuse to spew more of our own ignorance and hatred.

That’s what makes some – maybe most – of us “typical.”