Chris Matthews: “Regular Folks” = “White Folks”– Blatant Racial Framing Again

• • journalism, language, media, politics, racism


MediaMatters reports this continuing saga of leading media commentators questioning from a Senator McCain perspective and periodically framing the world, without apology, from the old white racial frame of society: (credit: MSNBC)

On the July 7 edition of MSNBC’s Hardball, host Chris Matthews teased an upcoming segment by saying: “They’re the working-class white voters Hillary Clinton won and Barack didn’t. Can Obama now win over the regular folks, white folks, against John McCain? We’ll ask the strategists.” On the June 30 edition of Hardball, Matthews similarly teased a segment by asserting: “Up next: They’re the working-class white voters Hillary won and Barack didn’t. Can Obama win over the regular folks against John McCain?”

This is the year 2008, right? And we are a “colorblind” society? Right?

Racially Segregated Cemetery in Texas

• • African Americans, built-in racism, racism, whites

 

The July 5, 2008 edition of the New York Times features an article that could have come out of a time capsule.

Authorities in Waller County, near Houston, Texas, had the responsibility to deal with the remains on an unknown murdered white woman. The cadaver was found in the jurisdiction of Justice of the Peace DeWayne Charleston. Cemeteries were still segregated in the county, but Judge Charleston, who is Black, ordered that the body be buried in a Black cemetery. He explained his reasoning as follows:

“ I’ve come to understand that I am to call black funeral homes to pick up black people, white funeral homes to pick up white people . . . I didn’t want to cross that line when I was dealing with white bodies . . . But here was a case where the body was unidentified. I believed this was it, this was the opportunity for the cemeteries to be integrated without offending anyone.”

However, Judge Charleston’s efforts were thwarted. Without Judge’s Charleston knowledge, the county’s top elected official, Judge Owen Ralston, who is white, decided that the woman’s remains should be interred in a white cemetery.

Black county leaders rose in protest. However, Mayor Michael Wolfe, who is Black, defended Judge Ralston as being fair-minded. He said that people in the area knew that there were segregated cemeteries but nobody made an issue of it.