“that one”

Lotta people seem to be puzzling over the weird moment in tonight’s debate when McCain referred to Obama as “that one.”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed-k1xOCsMs[/youtube]

I worked for several years in NYC with a white woman in her 50s, named Marion, from Queens.  Marion was intensely racist but never expressed it in any of the usual epithets and slurs.  Instead she spoke of Black people in general as “Them” (you could hear the capitalization in her voice) and, if the specific object of her detestation was present in the vicinity, as “That One.”  It was a kind of nudge-nudge wink-wink code, but it was unmistakable what sentiments lay behind the usage.  When we lived in Windsor Terrace in Brooklyn, a heavily Irish-Catholic neighborhood, I heard the same verbal code from many of our neighbors.

“That one” coming from McCain is his seething resentment pushing his racism out into public view.  Considering that he still calls Asians “gooks,” it’s not all that surprising.