PrintMarch 21, 2008
'Uttering' racial stereotypes
When Barack Obama uses an awkward expression in a scripted speech, it is deliberate; the text has been finely polished. When he famously said that his grandmother "uttered racial stereotypes" he was evoking another word, "epithet." The transitive verb coming before "stereotype" more often is "use" or maybe "employ". But people commonly do "utter epithets".
It was part of a pattern Obama's text wove, one based on explicitly and subliminally implying a sloppy false moral equivalence: Grandma is like Jeremiah Wright and stereotypes are like epithets.
All of which makes it more ironic that in a Philadelphia radio interview the candidate himself uttered a stereotype with his famous infelicitous phrase "typical white person".
So according to the blurred logic of Obama Moral Equivalence, stereotype-uttering Barack and Grandma are alike, and they also are like Pastor Wright and Geraldine Ferraro.
Has the candidate just thrown himself under the bus, like Grandma?
