The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [25]
We approached the short, trim woman with graying hair who was attending the stand. She greeted us and asked if we were interested in anything, so I fell back on the reliable, more familiar awkwardness of explaining that I wasn’t shopping so much as typo correcting. “The Obama shirts caught my attention, as we’re both big Obama supporters. I noticed something about one I wanted to show you.” She left her seat and followed me around the stand. “See, we’re going around the country fixing typos, and …”
I pointed out the shirt and the missing apostrophe.
“You … probably don’t want us adding it in with a marker,” Benjamin said.
“No, that’d be a bit much,” she agreed, pointing out a whole stack of them. With that many, I’d be afraid of making too big a marker blotch and ruining more than a few shirts. “But, now that I know about it, we can correct it on the next run.”
For the most part, I’d wanted photographic proof of every typo corrected in order to count it as a correction, but since she’d come up with the solution and seemed thankful that we had mentioned the typo to her, I believed her. Benjamin’s well-calibrated alarm for detecting liars didn’t sound, either. We knew she wasn’t telling us this as an effort to repel us from her stall, because she then struck up a conversation.
She told us how glad she was to talk with other Obama supporters and wondered what had drawn us to his campaign. Seeing as we were out of typo turf and into politics, I literally stepped back to give the expert proselytizer Benjamin room to gesticulate. Only then, as I became almost an outside observer of their conversation, did I feel the ponderous weight of subtext. She wasn’t asking “fellow supporters” to tell their favorite thing about Obama; she wanted to know how we two white kids had come to vote for a black candidate. I felt the familiar sensation of wanting to reach for my editing pen and make corrections to a rough draft. Red pen to slash through “white kids” and “black candidate” as I scribbled notes in the margins like: “Define your terms. Is black candidate any candidate whose skin is dark, or someone like Al Sharpton who only speaks to black voters and issues?” I listened as if from far away as Benjamin explained his preference for pragmatic, bottom-up solutions to political problems. Yet even my TEAL colleague failed to directly address the conversation’s thesis statement because he couldn’t blurt out, “I honestly don’t care that he’s black. That’s a bonus, I guess, for the future of American race relations, but the bonus isn’t the reason.” I wanted to cut whole sentences, redact phrases, and generally ask my authors for a more focused revision.
“What about this Reverend Wright thing?”
Benjamin explained that we’d been traveling and hadn’t heard about this yet. She gave us the abbreviated version, telling us that Obama’s pastor had spewed some anti-American rhetoric on clips that were now all over the news. Benjamin gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “They’re going after him for what his preacher says? Oh man, that sounds desperate. I think it’s a sign that he’s winning.”
“You don’t think,” she asked us, tentatively, “that it’ll dissuade … some people from supporting him?”
Some people. Which people? Us people? White people.
What a treacherous verbal path we walked, black and white alike, and understandably so. Slavery had been abolished from the United States a bare hundred and fifty years ago; segregation, not even fifty years ago! In the mammoth scope of human history, this was basically yesterday. The scars were fresh, some of them still oozing. Factors like typos could only infect the wounds. In 2002, for instance, an African-American spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality appeared on MSNBC. His name was Niger Innis. Picture the worst