Go to google blog search and enter Michelle Obama Whitey… you’ll get well over ONE THOUSAND hits to blogs claiming that a video with Michelle Obama using the term “Whitey” will surface any day now and completely sink the Obama campaign.
And get this – they have unnamed sources who told them the video exist! Some have even heard from people that other people saw it and said it’s unbelievable!
And if that’s not enough, they have other blogs reporting the same information! They’ll link to them to prove it! Some of them even have transcripts! Others speculate about what she might have said… hey, maybe she said “Why’d he…” not “Whitey” – it’s hard to know because not one of them has seen the damned thing and have no idea if it exists.
Not one of them, you see, has this supposed video. They just heard it’s coming out any day now. Possibly later today, even… (but that was yesterday).
And now Fox News is reporting that the blogosphere is abuzz with the rumor… oh, they don’t know if it’s true, but MICHELLE OBAMA blah blah blah WHITEY blah blah blah VIDEO MAY EXIST blah blah blah.
I bet George Stephonopolous is constructing a question about the non-existent video for a future presidential debate right now… “Mr. Obama, your wife is supposed to have used a very derogatory and hurtful racist word at some point, and the video might be on youtube – I didn’t check it myself – why haven’t you denounced her?”
If she did end up saying it, that would be a big deal, right? And it’s not one of those things that’s beyond the realm of possibility. So, what’s wrong with speculating how it would affect Obama’s campaign if it were true?
I’d be rather surprised and even disappointed if an average African-American (which Michelle is and Barack is not) hadn’t used the word “whitey” now and again in public discourse. There’s no equivalence here with using the n-word, after all.
I find it about as useful as speculating how John McCain’s illegitimate black child would affect his campaign, or perhaps how George Bush’s cocaine use would affect his campaign, or maybe how Hillary Clinton’s role in Vince Foster’s death would affect her campaign. Put simply, there’s nothing but a lot of hearsay to support that any of these things ever occurred, so it seems silly to me.
That would actually work with my “Roman Imperial Family Compromise” schemata: Bill and Hillary have a family friend (perhaps Monica Lewinsky or James Carville) adopt Chelsea to “get her out of the family”. They then in turn adopt Barack as their son, and then they marry him to Chelsea (who having been adopted out is not his sister). Barack is then made [del]imperator[/del] president, he appoints Bill and Hillary as Governors of the new province of Transappalachia (whether that’s east or west of the Appalachians to be determined by geographers, compromise, and eventually civil war) and once president he amends the Constitution for power to pass for life to his son William Obama Augustus Transappalachianus. (Michelle and daughters meanwhile can be given in marriage to some Middle Eastern king or whatever as a goodwill gesture, giving her a comfortable life and some authority.)
It’s all been blown out of proportion. Recalling the 1992 campaign, someone asked Ms Obama if her husband prefered boxers or briefs. She said he wears tighty-whities.
Assuming Michelle Obama did say “Whitey” (and let’s just for shits and giggles assume that when she said it she had a 4 foot Afro on the left half of her head and the right half was in dreads, she was smoking a splif and was competing in a rap battle in honor of Angela Davis’s birthday), I’d like to ask those who pretend to be offended “Have you ever knowingly uttered a racist term?” (Note: the question is NOT ‘Have you ever been recorded uttering a racist term’, but 'Have you ever uttered one?')
I certainly have. When I was a kid at an all white prep school we used them all the time- it was up there with other profanity, dirty movies we’d seen, and (Holy Grail) an occasional stolen cigarette to show how grown up we were. (More disgusting is that some- certainly not all- of the teachers I had in private school used the words openly- almost no rhyme nor reason to which ones; I remember a holyrolling young Virginia born substitute used it routinely [usually followed by “oops! I mean black”] while Miss Gump, a retiree from public schools who was a grandmother when Rosa Parks was arrested, would literally paddle students on the spot for saying the N-word.)
I stopped using the words when I was a teenager (other than when quoting) but I’ll admit to thinking racist thoughts over the years- something I’m certainly not proud of but I seriously doubt I’m alone. Any black person who claimed never to have had a racist thought or uttered a racist word (and whitey just has not a tenth of the wallop of most anti-black slurs) is either a liar, self-deluded, or a saint, and I think the first two categories would probably account for about 99% of the claimants.
I become more convinced that Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist should be added to the Pledge of Allegiance and Star Spangled Banner in songs all Americans should know. It’s line “Everyone’s a little bit racist, sometimes/doesn’t mean we go around committing hate crimes!” is one of the most accurate summations in any modern song. Doesn’t mean that to say “I have some racist thoughts sometimes” excuses them, but my favorite thing about Obama’s post-Wright speech (the first one) was that he actually addressed the issue head-on rather than tiptoing around it.
Of course I think it’s racist that a man who’s genetically half white and who was raised almost exclusively by his white mother and white grandparents is routinely referred to as black, or that so many Appalachians seem to think that they have more in common with a woman with an eight figure annual household income who’s had chauffeurs and bodyguards for several decades than with a self-made guy from a single parent household who was living hand to mouth when Bill Clinton was first elected president. (Of course that’s not to say that’s an incentive to vote for him- I couldn’t care less if he was a fat white blue eyed blonde gay guy from Alabama running against a Navaho Mormon with 12 kids and a wall full of squaredancing trophies as I’m voting for whoever I feel would do the best job- I’m not choosing a best friend or a date and figure if I ever meet them it will be for four seconds before they walk on by, but for the person I think would do the best job, but the most frequently heard things in post election polls has for some asinine reason to do with how well they relate to the candidate.)
Apologies for any incoherence- twas written under fire.
