Yep, if you went about trolling threads bringing up McCain's racism like you do about Obama and "typical white person" people might believe your outrage to be sincere.
Obama's grandmother was a remarkable woman.
She and her husband raised Obama for most of his childhood, in Hawaii, while his mother traipsed around in foreign countries doing field work for her degree in anthropology.
Obama's grandmother was not an educated woman, but she eventually rose- through diligence and hard work- to a high position in her bank, the highest one attainable to someone of her humble background, beyond which, as Obama puts it "competence and common sense would not suffice".
She made more money than her husband, an unsuccessful life insurance salesman. She supported the family.
One day, when Obama was in his teens, she asked him to drive her to the bank where she worked, rather than taking the bus as she usually did.
Obama was preparing to do so, when his grandfather told him, "Don't drive her! Let her take the bus."
When Obama questioned this, his grandfather said that she had been frightened on the bus by a vagrant who had asked her for money.
But that was nothing, according to Gramps; homeless bums
routinely pestered her for money at the bus stop and it never bothered her before.
What was different this time- the reason she no longer wanted to ride the bus, according to Gramps- was that the man who pestered her for money had been black (still a fairly rare phenomenon in Hawaii at that time).
"So don't give into her stupidity and drive her to work." Gramps insisted, vowing that
he wouldn't drive her, either.
Obama eventually ended up driving her to work, although they did not speak about the incident that caused her to be afraid to ride the bus, and it made him sad that someone who could be his brother had frightened his grandmother like that. By this point, he was experiencing some of this same sort of racism- other tenants in their luxurious apartment building, especially older women, clutching their purses or seeming to be afraid of him in the elevators, etc.
Obama
never thought badly about his Grandmother; he adored her.
His love for her shines through on every page of his book. On the contrary, he has a lot of ambivalence toward his
Grandfather, who- although an outspoken, eccentric liberal who loved black people, hung around almost exclusively with black people, and loudly protested any word or act that seemed remotely racist- often embarrassed Obama as he was growing up.
Obama felt- probably correctly- that his grandmother was the more reliable, sensible, and trustworthy of the two.
When they told him stories about the past and their versions contradicted one another (such as when Gramps told Obama that they moved from Texas because it was too racist there and he couldn't stand to see blacks treated badly, and grandmother told him no, that wasn't it; actually they moved because they were having financial troubles and Gramps couldn't find a steady job there) Obama always tended to believe his Grandmother's accounts, because, he felt, she was less likely to embroider the truth or attribute worthy motives to herself in retrospect.
She was simply a plainspoken, honest, salt-of-the-earth woman, who was a pillar of strength in an otherwise flaky family.
If
that's a "typical white woman", then I'm flattered with obama's assessment of me.
