Tuesday, March 09, 2004

I'll see your pander and raise you one!

First it was Jawnee pining to be the nation's "2nd black president". Now we find out that Teresa's black friends call her African American:
First lady wannabe Teresa Heinz Kerry once insisted that her black friends think of her as African American and often refer to her in conversation using the term, a phrase almost universally employed by blacks in America to describe their race.

In 1993, Grant Oliphant - the spokesman for the wealthy Mozambican-born socialite at the time - told the Los Angeles Sentinel, "Her black friends support her decision to call herself African American."

Oliphant described his ketchup-heiress boss as "sensitive to black issues," saying she "traces interests in health care, human rights and the environment from her days of growing up in Africa."

"For decades, many of her black friends have referred to her as an African American," he claimed.

In a story headlined "White Woman Says She is African American, No Hyphen!" the Sentinel explained that Heinz Kerry had "long referred to herself as an African American since moving to the United States from Mozambique in 1964."

Oliphant justified his boss' description of herself as African American by saying she doesn't hyphenate the two words, saying that makes the term applicable to both blacks and whites who have come to the U.S. from Africa.
Hmm, didn't James Taranto get all sorts of nasty email for saying Teresa was "African-American"? Maybe it's because he used that pesky hyphen!