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Barack Obama called his grandmother a “typical white person” in a radio interview on Thursday, raising eyebrows among some of his critics only days after he sought to bridge racial division in a major campaign speech.

Obama had pointed to his mother’s mother in his speech Tuesday as an example of someone who harbored fears of blacks based on racial prejudice. The Illinois senator revisited his relationship with his grandmother on Thursday in an interview on 610 WIP, Philadelphia Sports Radio.

He denied his grandmother held hatred toward blacks, but described her as a “typical white person.”

“The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity — she doesn’t,” he said. “But she is a typical white person who, you know, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, there is a reaction. That has been bred into our experiences that don’t go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way.”

On Tuesday, Obama described his grandmother as a woman who was at times fearful of black men.

In the speech, he said: “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 remarks weren’t the only ones focusing on race and the campaign on Thursday.

Geraldine Ferraro complained that Obama had lumped her in with his controversial pastor, whom she called a “racist bigot.”

Obama mentioned the 1984 vice presidential candidate on Tuesday in his speech on race and his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., whose heated, anti-U.S. sermons raised questions about the company Obama keeps.

“To equate what I said with what this racist bigot has said from the pulpit is unbelievable,” Ferraro told the Los Angeles newspaper, The Daily Breeze, on Wednesday. “He gave a very good speech on race relations, but he did not address the fact that this man is up there spewing hatred.”

Ferraro, who left Hillary Clinton’s campaign finance team after saying Obama wouldn’t be where he is if he were white, said she had “no clue” why Obama included her in his speech. She said Obama’s relationship with Wright raises questions about his judgment.

“What this man is doing is he is spewing that stuff out to young people, and to younger people than Obama, and putting it in their heads that it’s OK to say ‘God damn America’ and it’s OK to beat up on white people,” she said. “You don’t preach that from the pulpit.”

The Wright controversy lit up shortly after Ferraro left her post on the Clinton finance committee following her initial interview with The Daily Breeze on Obama’s success.

In his speech, Obama drew a comparison between the two individuals.

“We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias,” he said.

Speaking in Philadelphia, Obama then argued that the issue of race cannot be ignored and that to over-simplify and focus only on the negative aspects of the matter would distort reality.

Overall, Ferraro said Obama’s speech was “excellent,” aside from the part where her name was mentioned.

Click here to read the article in The Daily Breeze.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 8:39 am and is filed under Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.