You think I exaggerate? I do not.

As soon as I read Woman’s March activist Linda Sarsour’s comment about Nancy Pelosi, I thought, “Obama and his grandma!” In case you haven’t seen Sarsour’s statement yet, it goes like this:

Nancy is a typical white feminist upholding the patriarchy doing the dirty work of powerful white men. God forbid the men are upset – no worries, Nancy to the rescue to stroke their egos.

I discussed the statement in today’s previous post, but now I want to say something different about it. The phrase “typical white” as a form of criticism by people in public life (particularly on Twitter) has been normed and is quite common. And it goes without saying that if the roles were reversed, and a prominent white person (other than an ostracized neo-Nazi) derisively called someone a “typical” anything else (black, Muslim, whatever protected victim identity one can think of), the sky would fall on the person issuing the statement. But “typical white person” is rather typical these days, and merits hardly a squeak of protest—except, of course, from “typical white people.”

And it was none other than Barack Obama who began this trend. I well remember the moment he began to describe his white grandmother as a racist—it made me gasp when he said it. Obama was trying to do damage control when the nature of his mentor Rev. Wright was being publicized during the 2008 campaign:

I can no more disown [pastor Wright] than I can 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 by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

That was followed by a radio interview in which Obama called that same grandmother a “typical white person”:

He was asked about his grandmother’s reaction to his potentially being president. “She’s extremely proud,” he said. “The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn’t. But she’s a typical white person who — if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know — there’s a reaction that’s been bred into 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. We have to break through it. And what makes me optimistic is you see each generation feeling a little less like that.”

Sounds so very gentle compared to Sarsour, doesn’t it? But it is a demonization of white people as typically being racists, which opened the door to what is now a far more extremely-stated version of that sort of “white people bad” sentiment.

It could have gone differently. Obama didn’t have to do this. But he chose to do this. It wasn’t just about defending himself regarding Wright, either. There were numerous other occasions during the 2008 campaign on which he played the race card, as I described here.