Appearing on Now with Alex Wagner on MSNBC, primetime host Chris Matthews explained that Tea Party use of the word “we” was racist, and that Tea Partiers presumably still counted black people as “three-fifths” of a person. The leg-tingling host who last week explained that the term “black hole” was racist when applied to the city of Newark, added “we” to his hit list of bigotry:
[T]hey have this weird ‘we’ they refer to. ‘We the American people.’ Why does a group of people that always loses elections or tends to do lately, why do they call themselves ‘the American people’? Do they still count blacks as three-fifths of a vote? Is that the way to count it? Is that they way they count it? Because seriously, why do you say ‘we the American people’ when the president keeps getting re-elected, and you keep saying ‘Oh, we don’t like him. We don’t like him.’ Now how does that work? Why do they vote for him? So there’s this ‘we’ I’m very worried about, like ‘we’re more American than the rest, so we should get a higher weighting of who we are.’ I think it’s dangerous.
Matthews has also suggested that the words “Chicago” and “welfare” are racist when applied in conjunction with President Obama.