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“I Forgot Chris Matthews Was White”

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Host’s Praise for Obama Provides Teaching Moment

Ray Suarez Does Double Duty in Reporting From Haiti

Anchor Quits to Work as Nurse in Haiti

Yves Colon Helps Produce Creole-Language Broadcasts

Who Was in Haiti Before Columbus Arrived?

3 of 5 Haitian-Americans Lost "Loved Ones" in Quake

TV One Cancels 5 p.m. Rerun of "Washington Watch"

Reggie Bush Cover Turns Off Some Essence Readers

Columnist "Lost It" at Teddy Pendergrass Funeral

Short Takes

In MSNBC’s discussion after President Obama’s State of the Union speech, Chris Matthews said, "I forgot he was black tonight for an hour." He maintains, "One million times I’d say the same thing again and again." (Video)

Host’s Praise for Obama Provides Teaching Moment

Chris Matthews’ admiring comment on MSNBC Wednesday after President Obama’s State of the Union address – "I forgot he was black tonight for an hour" – provided another opportunity for examining racial mindsets, and some instantly rose to the occasion.

For his part, Matthews didn’t see the problem. "I thought I was saying something wonderful and positive about America," the MSNBC host told Adam Howard of theGrio.com.

"One million times I’d say the same thing again and again," he added.

"Matthews implores his critics to take another look at the footage from Wednesday night. He strongly believes that if people listen carefully to the words that he spoke that they will see he was only trying to point out that members of Congress and Americans watching the president’s speech at home ‘saw [Obama] as an individual person and as our leader’ not as part of a racial or ethnic group," Howard wrote.

Jesse Washington, the Associated Press’ reporter on race and ethnicity, wrote on Friday that Matthews’ comment "caused a rapid furor, with many calling the quote a troubling sign that blackness is viewed – perhaps unconsciously – as a handicap that still needs to be overcome.

"Apparently, Matthews forgot to ask black people if they WANT to be de-raced."

Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Atlantic magazine blogger, titled his Thursday morning post, "I Just Remembered Chris Matthews Was White."

"I think it’s most worth noting that ‘I forgot Obama was black’ -in all its iterations – is something that white people should stop saying, if only because it’s really dishonest," Coates said. For good measure, he posted a video of comedian Chris Rock railing about white people complimenting blacks for being well-spoken.

"One way to think about this is to flip the frame," Coates wrote. "Around these parts, we’ve been known, from time to time, to chat about the NFL. We’ve also been known to chat about the intricacies of beer. If you hang around you’ll notice that there are no shortage of women in these discussions. Having read a particularly smart take on Brett Favre, or having received a good recommendations on a particular IPA, it would not be a compliment for me to say, ‘Wow, I forgot you were a woman.’" Indeed, it would be pretty offensive.

"The problems is three-fold. First, it takes my necessarily limited, and necessarily blinkered, experience with the fairer sex and builds it into a shibboleth of invented truth. Then it takes that invented truth as a fair standard by which I can measure one’s ‘woman-ness.’ So if football and beer don’t fit into my standard, I stop seeing the person as a woman. Finally instead of admitting that my invented truth is the problem, I put the onus on the woman. Hence the claim ‘I forgot you were a woman,’ as opposed to ‘I just realized my invented truth was wrong.’

" . . . In fact, Chris Matthews didn’t forget Barack Obama was black. Chris Matthews forgot that Chris Matthews was white."

On National Public Radio’s "Tell Me More," the subject came up in the weekly "barbershop" segment. Host Michel Martin made the same point that Washington did in his AP story.

"We’ve talked about the whole Harry Reid thing and Harry Reid saying that he has no Negro dialect except if he wants to, and I was thinking, okay, it’s annoying, but why exactly?

"The reason I’m thinking about this, it still implies that being black, there’s something wrong with it that you have to forget about. For example, nobody would say, you know, the late great Tim Russert, nobody would say: I forgot he was from Buffalo. I don’t even see that he’s from Buffalo.

"He loved Buffalo, and he’d talk about it all the time, and was that anything – was there anything wrong with that? No, and so for people to constantly say, well, I don’t even notice your race, is there something wrong with it? I actually think I’m a very nice toasty brown, and I have no problem with it. And I don’t understand why this is something we have constantly sort of apologize for and look beyond."

Meanwhile, Obama’s State of the Union speech proved to be one of the most-watched, according to Nielsen ratings. But there was dissatisfaction that Obama’s emphasis on jobs meant that other topics – such as foreign policy or immigration – got what some considered insufficient mention.

Ray Suarez tells viewers of the Hispanic Information and Telecommunications Network that Haitians are proving to be patient and adept at doing for themselves. (Video)

Ray Suarez Does Double Duty in Reporting From Haiti

"A lot of the reporting that I heard in mainstream press that I saw before I got down here seemed like it was looking for commotion, looking for violence, looking for things that weren’t going well," Ray Suarez reported this week from Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

"But in the several days that we’ve been here and traveling throughout the capital, I gotta tell you. The remarkable thing is how little of that there is."

Suarez is in Haiti for his regular gig as senior correspondent for PBS’ "The NewsHour," but this report was for "Destination Casa Blanca," a weekly news show he hosts for the Hispanic Information and Telecommunications Network.

"Haitians waiting patiently at factory gates for the places where they worked to open," he continued, "to stream in in the thousands, including thousands of people who are now homeless, and yet were clean, well-pressed, dressed for work, and ID card in hand, and ready to start earning a living again. Remember, hardly any wages have been earned in this place for more than two weeks now. . . . You know it’s remarkable how people who give up on government coming to their rescue . . . often find ways to do things for themselves."

"With the blessing of the Newshour. I do the show, for HITN, on my own time," Suarez told Journal-isms by e-mail from Haiti. "It’s fun, and helps me pay two whopping big college tuitions."

Anchor Quits to Work as Nurse in Haiti

"The pictures and stories that continue to pour out of Haiti show a nation that will take months and even years to rebuild. For the Northland’s NewsCenter weekend anchor Julie Pearce, who has spent the last four years of her life telling stories, those pictures were enough to make a life changing decision," Boua Xiong reported Thursday for KBJR-TV in Duluth, Minn.

" ‘I’d sit there and produce the show and read the headlines and you know download the stories and sit there and read the headlines to the audience and it just broke my heart knowing that there’s something that I can actually do, that I actually have the skills to do something about what I’m reading and what I’m telling to our audience,’ Pearce said.

"Pearce became a registered nurse last summer after graduating from St. Scholastica. Earlier this week she got the green light to join the Evangelical Free Church of America Touch Global Crisis Response team.

". . . Pearce’s last show will be on Sunday."

In this Jan. 22 video, Internews producer Frederick Alexis and Internews journalist Johnny Etienne talk about the destruction of a local radio station and their plans to help get information to Haitians. (Video)

Yves Colon Helps Produce Creole-Language Broadcasts

Shortly after the Jan. 12 earthquake hit, we reported that Yves Colon, a Haitian-born journalism lecturer at the University of Miami, took this coming semester off work so he could go back to Haiti and help rebuild the country’s media sector with Internews, a not-for-profit organization.

Internews has since reported that local radio stations in Haiti have begun airing a Creole-language humanitarian information broadcast produced by Internews, reported by local journalists "with support from Internews team member Yves Colon, a Haitian journalist with more than 20 years of experience.

"The program, Nouvelles-Utiles (News You Can Use) will be produced daily and distributed to local radio stations, which are eager to air it."

A Jan 21 program "included stories refuting rumors that there was an imposed curfew in Port-au-Prince, and notice of water distribution locations, bank re-openings, and waste management services. Information from the Red Cross discouraged hasty and uncoordinated disposal of bodies, and dispelled rumors that dead bodies cause disease.

"Internews staff in Haiti produced the program and distributed it on CD to 11 stations. More stations will be added as they return to broadcasting."

Who Was in Haiti Before Columbus Arrived?

Some news reports have begun to discuss Haiti’s rich history as the first nation ever established by slaves who liberated themselves, but few have reported on what Haiti was like before the colonizers arrived and imported slaves.

Doug George-Kanentiio graphically described what some might call "ethnic cleansing" in a piece Friday for indianz.com. It began, "Haiti is a place of angry spirits never released from the agony of their passing.

"This land was called Ayiti by its Arawak-Taino native peoples who may, according to some, be the relatives of the Iroquois," wrote George-Kanentiio, a Mohawk.

"So what did Colon and the Spaniards do to this paradise inhabited by Arawak-Tainos who may have numbered as many as three million on that island alone?" George-Kanentiio continued, referring to Christopher Columbus, whom he said should more accurately be called Cristobal Colon.

". . . The Native population collapsed before this savagery which the Spaniards, and their European imitators, would repeat throughout the Caribbean, in Mexico and into Central and South America. Of the millions of Natives who had made Ayita into an ecological Eden only 60,000 survived to 1507. By 1531 only 600 Arawak-Taino were alive and a few years later none at all. Complete genocide by intent and design. Nothing remains of those people other than a weak DNA trail."

3 of 5 Haitian-Americans Lost "Loved Ones" in Quake

"Haitians living in the United States are deeply impacted by the devastating earthquake that hit their island homeland earlier this month, according to a poll sponsored by New America Media," Andrew Lam reported Thursday for New America Media.

"A shocking three out of five respondents said they had lost some of their ‘loved ones.’ Two-thirds felt the situation in their country was so dire they were willing to move back to Haiti for a period of time to help with the reconstruction.

". . . Additionally, 62 percent indicated that they were willing to adopt or foster a Haitian orphan from the earthquake. Three-fifths felt that the United States should welcome at least 50,000 new Haitian refugees to alleviate the calamity in the island nation."

TV One Cancels 5 p.m. Rerun of "Washington Watch"

If you’re looking for the 5 p.m. repeat of Sunday’s "Washington Watch" political talk show on TV One, expect to see reruns of the "Martin" sitcom instead. The repeat has been moved to the early-morning hours.

"Washington Watch has always been intended to be a Sunday morning show, but when it was new in the fall Johnathan wanted to offer an additional afternoon sampling opportunity for the show, which TV One did until the beginning of the year," spokeswoman Lynn McReynolds told Journal-isms, referring to TV One CEO Johnathan Rodgers.

The show, oriented toward African American interests and hosted by Roland Martin, airs at 11 a.m. Eastern  time and now repeats at 2 a.m. Eastern and 6 a.m. Eastern the next morning.

A spokeswoman for the Nielsen Co. told Journal-isms in October that "Washington Watch" was carving a small niche at 11 a.m. but that the 5 p.m. rerun barely registered in its ratings.

Reggie Bush Cover Turns Off Some Essence Readers

"A high-profile black athlete with a white girlfriend?" Jenice Armstrong began Wednesday in her Philadelphia Daily News column.

"No big thing.

"Well, not unless the athlete happens to be on the cover of Essence magazine and that particular issue is supposed to be all about ‘black men, love and relationships.’

"Then, what you have is a potentially sticky situation especially since the cover model is none other than New Orleans Saints player Reggie Bush, who is romantically involved with Kim Kardashian. Besides her reality-TV show ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians,’ Kardashian’s biggest claim to fame is a pornographic sex tape she made with former boyfriend Ray J, brother of singer Brandy.

". . . The image of Bush has irritated a long-frayed nerve that is further aggravated by the fact that Essence, a magazine many black women think of as their own, made him its cover image. It’s stirred up an old debate about high-profile black men and their preference for dating white or light-skinned women.

". . . on Essence.com, a lively debate is waging with more than 1,300 comments posted on this issue." (The comments page has apparently been deleted.)

"Essence declines comment," spokeswoman Dana Baxter told Journal-isms.

Some readers noted that the cover photo apparently was used in GQ in 2006.

Columnist "Lost It" at Teddy Pendergrass Funeral

"The music swelled, and the familiar opening chords of Teddy Pendergrass‘ sweet, sweet ballad, ‘You’re My Latest, My Greatest Inspiration,’ rose to the rafters of Enon Tabernacle Baptist Church," Annette John-Hall wrote Sunday in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

"I said I wasn’t going to cry. After all, I was there to cover the funeral of Pendergrass ‚Äî who died Jan. 13 at 59 ‚Äî not to mourn him. But when actor and R&B crooner Tyrese Gibson took the mic, sounding so much like Pendergrass, and clearly in pain over the death of the man he is slated to portray in a film, well, I lost it right there."

Pendergrass’ death took Barry Saunders, columnist for the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., back 30 years to his days as an obituary writer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

"There was a beautiful female reporter whose racial heritage some of us in the newsroom spent way too many hours trying to guess," he told readers.

"Was she white? Was she a sista?

"We were too polite to ask, and the answer would’ve remained a mystery had not I ‚Äî unintentionally ‚Äî cracked the code.

"’Yo, Slim,’ I asked her one day when she passed by the obit desk, ‘You going to the ‘Teddy’ concert tonight?’

"She looked at me blankly before answering two questions at once: ‘Teddy who?’

"She definitely wasn’t a sista, since in those days every black woman over the age of consent knew there was only one Teddy, soul singer Teddy Pendergrass."

Saunders also recalled that he had more recently seen a guy asleep at a concert by Maxwell, a current-day heartthrob.

"I never saw a man sleeping through a Teddy concert. If anything, fellas were taking notes — if they were permitted in at all," Saunders wrote.

Short Takes

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