"I can no more disown [Wright] than I can disown 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
her by on the street, and who 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. She
doesn't. But she is a typical white person." - Senator Barack Obama

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http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:-2fSIAzZXtAJ:jonathan--singer.mydd.com/story/2008/3/31/113924/894...

Typical White People
by linfar, Mon Mar 31, 2008 at 11:39:24 AM EST

Cross posted from www.SavagePolitics.com

I ordered my 'typical white person' t-shirt today. Something I never
saw myself doing when I first set out on that road I walked for
decades in behalf of civil rights. And my Dad, if he were still
living, would find it ironical. The hours I spent confronting him over
his use of the `n' word made for some lively discussions around our
kitchen table. This Formica oblong on chrome legs sat in a street-
facing window in our apartment on Norton Avenue in Lynwood,
California, the white person's Compton. It was there I learned that
Vincent Lawrence, an Irish river rat on Manhattan's lower east side,
had been taught to say nigger along with his oatmeal. But the truly
amazing thing about my Dad's use of this word, was the way he
unlearned it the day the hearse carrying the body of John F. Kennedy
rolled across the nation's tv screens. Not long after this my father
stood up for civil rights at great personal sacrifice. And although I
had already left home, my Dad became my personal hero.

I think in order to appreciate the sacrifice involved in my Father's
stand for racial equality, you need to understand that my Father never
finished grade school-- although he was bright and understood more
from reading the daily newspaper than all my professors at Berkeley.
But my Dad had worked most of my childhood as a guard at General
Motors on the night shift. It was there, after I left home, that he
studied by correspondence course to take the California State Real
Estate License Exam. After he passed, he worked part time in the
office of an acquaintance; and then he did well enough after a couple
of years to open his own office. My Mom left the factory she worked
in and joined him as an agent. Success greeted their endeavors. They
moved to a `ritzy' part of town, bought a house with a shake roof and
hung out with a doctor and his wife, and a business tycoon and his
wife. As far as the Farley's were concerned, everything was clover.

Then California passed a Fair Housing Law--apparently when no one was
looking because the new law made it illegal to discriminate on the
basis of race. The State Real Estate Board revved up into high gear to
get the law repealed, and its strategy demanded every realtor fill a
quota of signatures on the petition to repeal the law. When the
person handing out these petition sheets came to my Dad at the weekly
breakfast meeting of the all-white Downey Real Estate Board my Dad
said, "Keep on walking." Until then my father had been extremely well
liked and had served as President of the Downey Board; but from that
moment on both my parents suffered severe penalties, not to mention
insults, from the other white realtors. Within six months he was
forced out of business in Downey.

"Do you regret it Dad?" I asked one day not long after they closed
their office.

His face tightened. "Your mother does." I nodded. I was guessing he
probably did too. They had paid an astronomic price. "But I don't," he
said. My Dad's blue eyes looked electric."You have to take a stand
sometimes. And it can be hard." His jaw jutted, the way it did
sometimes when he was set on something. "Discrimination in housing is
wrong. And it only works if there are `safe' areas. I promised Jack
Kennedy to stand up for civil rights." Then he smiled. It was a
sweet moment between us, and I wondered if he could see the awe and
the astonishment I felt for him. Here stood this once prejudiced white
guy who had grown up with nothing and who had put his entire
livelihood on the line for racial equality.

I think of my Dad him whenever I hear Obama's "typical white person"
statement.

While My Dad was standing up in Downey, I was standing up elsewhere.
In the decade of the 1960's I marched more times than I can recall in
behalf of African Americans. My best friend at Berkeley answered the
call to `Get On The Bus' and became a freedom rider in Alabama where
she put her body on the line for racial equality. In the `bad years'
I even stopped speaking to my Dad over his use of the 'n' word. This
was about the same time I wore my hair in an Afro to show not only
that 'black is beautiful,' but could be emulated by a blondie like me.
In Washington DC I listened to Martin Luther King tell us "I Have A
Dream" standing alongside a mixed race audience full of certitude in
the righteousness of our struggle. Along the way I slept with a black
guy. And he and I wept together when Mayor Bradley went down to defeat
in LA. In 1968 I was one of the few whiteys who traveled freely in
Watts during the riots. Later I worked for the Educational
Clearinghouse in Compton that helped young black kids who were
accepted into white colleges find the support and determination they
needed to stay the course rather than drop out. My best friends at
USC where I had a journalism scholarship were Louis and Sondra, a
mixed race couple. And Louis, the black male in the duo, talked my
white boyfriend out of the house one night after he erupted in a
jealous rage and beat me.

Of course, the path wasn't easy. Warren, the boy I wept with over
Bradley, would soon call me a "whitey bitch that would never
understand black men" Louis hit on me before during and after the
incident with my boyfriend. And if we were to run into each other
tomorrow he would still ask, "Are you ready for a real man?" His wife
and I were best friends, and Lou never saw that as a problem. Anita, a
young black woman in my sociology class after the boyfriend incident
when I turned up with a black eye and bruised face asked me what
happened. When I told her she called me a "stupid honkey." I think
she was halfway joking, but I didn't laugh. And we weren't friendly
after that.

The fact of it is, my intimacies with race are of long standing, were
sometimes difficult and could be painful. But I never took it out on
AA's, even when I was pitted against them. This occurred in ways I
never spoke about because I didn't know how to fit them into my belief
at that time that racism is the biggest sin. And I understood very
little about other kinds of prejudice. I knew about them in my gut.
But I had no words. Although I did know that whites are not one class,
and that working class whites, like my family, are often despised. But
I little grasped that there was a war on between working class whites
and blacks for the opportunity bonanza, not until I collided with it
in a vicious experience during college. Shall we take the black one
or the white one? That's what they asked me at the Washington Post
when I was the first person from USC to make it into the finals for
their internship program. And I was the white one.

I attended USC on a full journalism scholarship. It was like football.
USC wanted a championship school newspaper. As long as I wrote for the
Daily Trojan, I had a free ride. But they didn't think I stood a
chance of getting one of the Washington Post internships. You just
watch me, I replied. And it was exciting when I made the finals.
Everyone had to eat crow.

Then came the last interview. Towards the end of it, the tall, fleshy
white man in a good suit with great manners and a winning smile, asked
if I believed in affirmative action. I gave an Absolute Endorsement. I
quoted the figures on racial inequality, I talked about change and I
ended with a heartfelt plea that justice be done. And then my nice
white guy lowered the boom:

"What if I told you that I had to chose between you and a black girl
who was in here earlier. Her father went to Harvard, her mother is a
teacher and she is attending Stanford. Unlike you, however, she pays
her own way. You both write well, probably about the same. But she is
the right color. Wouldn't you agree?"

He peered at me the way a trapper might look at an animal caught in
on one of his traps. And he waited patiently while I twisted and
jerked. I was in pain at my own thoughts. I wanted that internship the
way only a 19-year-old who came from nowhere could want it. But
suddenly my beliefs and my principles were at war with my own
welfare. I knew that economically I deserved it more than the black
woman. But I could not abandon the issue of race. And I didn't have
the fleshed out arguments in support of a white working class kid
anyway. Growing up, I had been too busy worrying about the inequality
of race, to understand the inequality of class. And I still believed
all whites were better off than all blacks. In the end I compromised.
"I think you should take the best qualified person," I mumbled.

He sneered at me. And then he showed me the door. When the black girl
got the internship, I hurt for weeks. Had her chance come at the
expense of mine? I felt bad asking myself that. But it wasn't the last
time I did. There were many more such hurts to come. And after a
decade of standing beside my black friends I sat down one day, and I
knew that although I had stood up against racism over and over and
over again, most of the time they would not stand beside me in my
battles. Hadn't Warren, and Anita already shown me this?

After that I never walked away or was complicit with racial jokes. I
stood for racial equality as staunchly as ever. But I had come to
understand that the whole issue was a lot more complicated than I had
ever imagined. And black people could be just as wrong, just as
bigoted and just as unwilling to lend a hand as white folks.

I was also discovering the women's movement. And some of the women I
met were working class. And they had all the arguments I had only
glimpsed behind the `working class kid makes good' storyline.

This diary has not been easy to write. And the fact I am not sure I
could vote for Barack Obama represents a huge shift in my life's
values. But I do not forgive insults to me and mine anymore. I take
the slurs about Archie Bunker voters in Ohio and about Redneck voters
in Pennsylvania to heart. And I will not support a racist no matter
what their color. You cannot tell me that all white people are racists
and expect my vote. Hillary Clinton understands that.

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