I never truly appreciated, before starting to blog and read blogs, that reading comprehension is a higher order literacy skill. I hadn’t really thought of it before, but every day I run across examples of interpretation, spin, and personal bias being mistaken for inherent meaning.
One current example:
Errol Louis, a columnist at the NY Daily News, writes about the latest example in the Wright-Obama flap, of lifting a quote snippet out of its context, and then mining it for sinister meanings:
There’s a new anti-Obama storyline whipping through cyberspace at the speed of stupid.
Put simply, some Internet nitwits say Obama’s comment that his white grandmother – who made racist remarks and was fearful of blacks – was a “typical white person” just proves he can’t stop alienating white voters.
Never mind that Obama’s point, made casually Thursday on a Philadelphia radio show, was to emphasize the important truth that whites, including his elderly grandmother, are slowly winning the fight to purge their hearts of poisonous prejudices.
That message was swiftly discarded as a gaggle of bloggers and correspondents – whose collective contribution to an honest national dialogue about race has been nil – pounced.
“Barack Obama basically called all white people racist,” wrote blogger/radio show host Taylor Marsh on the Huffington Post, neatly avoiding the inconvenient fact that such a libel from the biracial candidate would include (or half-include) himself.
Other political Web sites echoed Marsh’s sentiment – Oooh! He said ‘white person’! Now he can’t be President! – and conservatives dutifully added it to their talking points.
Here is the snippet in context — and note the lies in this news source as well:
Obama is drawing a new round of criticism for his comments on a Philadelphia radio sports program yesterday in which he said his grandmother is a “typical white person” who has fears about black men. He was attempting to explain a portion of his speech on race earlier this week—specifically, the statement that his white grandmother gets nervous when a black man approaches her on the street.
Obama told the radio host, “The point I was making was not that Grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn’t. But she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, you know, there’s a reaction that’s been bred in our experiences that don’t go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that’s just the nature of race in our society.” Obama was already drawing flak for his association with a controversial preacher in Chicago who has made anti-American and antiwhite comments.
Actually, uh, no. The “controversial preacher in Chicago” did not make anti-American and antiwhite comments — as Roland Martin found out when he listened to the post-9/11 sermon Rev. Wright preached in its entirety.
But getting backing to Obama’s “typical white person” remarks, aside from the inconvenient fact Louis pointed out — that Obama is half-white himself — can you point to the place where Obama said that “all white people are racist”? Or, come to that, do you see where he used the word “racist” at all in that quote?
No, I can’t, either. That’s because he didn’t.
If I say, “The typical American would rather have a hot fudge sundae than a plate of lima beans,” am I basically saying that all Americans are fat?
“But, but, but,” I can hear the sputtering, “obesity is a serious problem in this country!”
Uh, hello? So is stereotyped thinking about black men — and black people in general.
Kathy
Liberty Street 