Nathan Deal ‘ghettoizes’ grannies, gets hammered
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009Back in May, I used the word “ghetto” in a headline to describe an impoverished, crime-ridden stretch of road in central Atlanta. As a result, I learned the hard way that the word carries so much baggage that readers are turned off merely by seeing it in print, no matter how technically accurate its usage seems to be.
But, as the AJC’s Jim Galloway points out, when a white Georgia Congressman uses the word “ghetto” in a casually dismissive reference to folks who are poor, elderly and presumably black during a campaign stop before an overwhelmingly white audience — well, you’ve got the makings of a Macaca moment.
Congressman Nathan Deal
Just as in the case of now-ex-Virginia Sen. George Allen, who was videotaped making a casually dismissive taunt aimed at the Southeast Asian man holding the video camera, Rep. Nathan Deal was recorded by his opposition telling a Cherokee County crowd about his approach toward requiring proof of citizenship for federal or state health care benefits:
“We got all the complaints of the ghetto grandmothers who didn’t have birth certificates and all that. We wrote some very liberal language as to how you can verify it. My mother was born in 1906 and she didn’t have a birth certificate. They didn’t give birth certificates back then. But we got her one, because you can do it under the proper procedures of your state.”
A video of Deal’s bone-headed statement has been posted to YouTube by the campaign of Secretary of State Karen Handel, who’s running against Deal for the GOP nomination for governor. On Galloway’s blog, the clip has attracted nearly 300 comments, many from readers who characterize Deal’s choice of words as bigoted.
