Whiskey chugging, Appalachian accents, and ignorance galore! No, I’m not talking about West Virginians, but rather the media pundits that rebuked them throughout the 2008 Democratic primary season. Speculation about voter racism ran rampant in the primaries, but no state’s racist example was more televised than that of West Virginia. From The Daily Show to independent media outlets, and bloggers across the country, everyone jumped to denounce (and parody) the racist commentary from select West Virginia Voters after the Democratic primary in that state. Indeed, many in the media, and the Young Turks bloggers especially, fueled the fire of intolerance as they denounced WV. Rather than working to educate against racial intolerance, the pundits quickly generalized all West Virginians as ignorant and then dismissed them with statements such as “Should these people even be allowed to vote?” Now, as many know, the Young Turks are no Fox News team. They make no bones about their liberal positions on American politics, and they don’t pretend to practice balanced reporting. According to their website, which stakes the claim of “first live, daily internet TV show,” a Young Turk is a “Young progressive or insurgent member of an institution, movement, or political party; [A] young person who rebels against authority or societal expectations.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but the political party that the Young Turks support is the Democratic, and one of the main tenets of the Democratic Party is anti-discrimination. But with discriminatory flags unfurled, the Young Turks’ anchor Cenk Uygur constructed an entire state’s identity as uneducated and ignorant by generalizing the racism of a chosen few interviewees, thus painting a picture of a state based on a few disturbing examples.

Perhaps we do use these derogatory terms as a mental crutch of sorts – a fruitless effort of developing some sort of quasi-understanding of a subject so unknown to many of us that we have no other means of trying to simplify it.

So what, specifically, is causing my beef with the Young Turks’ depiction of West Virginians? Let’s have a look at Uygur’s method of spin. To begin, his tirade starts as a commentary on a recent CNN Hardball episode. On Hardball, Chris Matthews discusses WV Governor Joe Manchin’s commentary about Obama neglecting West Virginia during the primary campaign season. In the excerpted clip, Governor Manchin claims that West Virginians have “a PhD in life and in human nature” and that, because of this, they need to get to know Obama not as an African American, “but as a person.” The Governor’s assumption that people can (and should) disconnect their “identity” (code word for “race”) from who they are “as a person” seems a bit fishy. And although I would also take issue with the degrading generalization that all West Virginians have PhDs in “life” rather than in economics or art history, these are pundits and politicians we’re speaking of and catchy phrases work well for ninety second clips. Uygur, however, calls the Hardball discussion “patronizing” toward people outside WV, rather than toward West Virginians. He rebuts that “[ West Virginians] don’t have a Ph.D. in dick.” I’m positive that the state does have universities, so there are folks with doctorate degrees within its borders. However, he may be right – I’m not sure that West Virginia University is on the forefront of the “dick” field, so score one for Uygur.

The Young Turk continues his tirade as he moves on to (mis)quote two of three WV voter clips that Jon Stewart had previously shown on The Daily Show. He imitates a posh British accent and calls one of the women Stewart aired “brilliant, really.” By using the British accent to make fun of the misinformed woman, he parts from his own dialect in a way that says “Viewers, I can fake a posh and proper accent, but in my normal speech practices, I’m one of you.” Here, Uygur sets up a hierarchical scale of education and propriety: the British, Uygur/Young Turks/viewers, Chris Matthews, and, at the end of the spectrum, uneducated/racist West Virginians. OK, so now that we’re all on the same page as to the nature of the propriety pecking order, Uygur reinforces his identification with his audience by othering West Virginians when he says, “They live their life, I live our life.” By setting up this us/them dichotomy, he allows his audience to distance themselves from racism, and perhaps create enough distance so that they will be able to brush forget it – “Those racists are despicable, but they’re not part of my life” says the Young Turk. Uygur continues to use language such as “them” and “these people” and then mimics an Appalachian accent to drive home the notion that people from West Virginia are ignorant and we are educated. They are racist and we are tolerant. But what are we tolerating? Certainly not West Virginians.

By the end of the clip, all of the Young Turks’ viewers can pat themselves on the back for identifying with Uygur, being a member of the tolerant majority, and distancing themselves from racism by imagining that it is contained within one state. These conclusions would be based on the satirical news airing of a mere three interviews (of which two interviewees were actually from the same family, a detail The Daily Show conveniently left out for dramatic effect). Although there is certainly evidence of deep-seated racism in West Virginia (like the rest of America), the creation of an “us” and “them” situation only allows the illusory boundaries to cement. These imagined boundaries prevent people who may be of the decent and tolerant slant from talking to racists and chipping away at the ideologies of hatred that often go unnoticed all over our country.

Hence, Chris Matthews was on the right track. Matthews’ recognition that the Obama campaign needed to show face in West Virginia—whether or not he could have won there—did two things: it subtly acknowledged the racism that is present in the state (instead of ignoring it) and it provided a solution of education. Matthews didn’t air a few clips of racist morons and then call the whole state ignorant. He did not create an “us versus them” environment or rail against West Virginia from his elitist soapbox. Matthews’ example of acknowledgement and solution-suggestion is how the newly minted liberal majority needs to approach voter racism. We need to stop condemning it and just sweeping it under the rug – “Look at those ignorant West Virginians! Aren’t we entitled to education!?” We all need to tackle the problem of racism in Appalachia, but instead of those with a voice (cue Uygur) poking fun at a situation that is not even slightly funny, they need to stop the hypocrisy that says it’s not okay to mock immigrants, African Americans, or gay people, but it’s perfectly fine to demonize, generalize, and make fun of the poor and undereducated. Why would West Virginians listen to your opinions and strive for re-education after you’ve called them every name in the book? Denounce and demonize as a tactic for fighting racism will never work. The Young Turks’ political blog constructs the “ignorant West Virginian” and ultimately imposes a common racist identity upon the state’s residents that becomes even harder to dismantle than the racism that originally existed there.