A white Republican voter in Ohio called C-SPAN’s Washington Journal program on Monday to assert that she is too busy working to “have time to be racist,” then falsely claimed that Black people were responsible for enacting the oppressive systems of Jim Crow and segregation.
The 63-year-old caller, who gave her name as Mary, made the soapbox rant that aimed at Vice President and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, as well as New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader, suggesting that they were both racist while spreading blatant misinformation on live TV.
“I know that Kamala is a sheep in wolf’s clothing,” the caller said in a malapropism of the classic phrase — a wolf in sheep’s clothing — which describes someone who disguises their true intentions. “And I wanted to talk about Hakeem Jeffries,” she added. “Whenever he gets on the television, he calls Trump supporters MAGA Republicans, white supremacy, um, just anything. And he’ll say it like five times within one minute.”
C-SPAN host Pedro Echevarria chose not to challenge the caller’s racist views, allowing her to ramble on and make herself sound ignorant during the segment.
As she complained, the woman’s point was mostly disjointed and filled with inaccuracies.
“I am a 63-year-old woman who has worked all her life. I don’t have time to be racist,” she complained without providing context about her position. “I’ve been too busy working and trying to put a roof over my head and take care of my family.”
At this point, the woman blamed the Black community for Jim Crow and segregation, pushing a ridiculous notion that the Black community was somehow complicit in its own oppression.
“And I told my grandkids not to be guilty for anything they haven’t done, slash slavery, Jim Crow laws. And the Black people, the Black men, voted in for the Jim Crow laws back in 1872,” she falsely claimed.
“And that’s a history that Black people don’t want out there,” she added.
In reality, Jim Crow laws were established and enforced by white lawmakers in the South after Reconstruction and were deliberately designed to disenfranchise and segregate Black people.
From there, the woman launched into a breathy tirade about immigration, criticizing U.S. asylum laws and railing against people of color from South America who had legally gained U.S. citizenship in recent years.
However, Echevarria quickly cut her off when she began echoing false claims from Donald Trump’s stump speeches, abruptly hanging up and moving on to the next caller.
To many on social media, it was obvious the woman harbored racist views while trying to deflect blame from Southern whites who enforced segregation and racial oppression after the end of slavery.
“Black people couldn’t vote in 1872. So, there’s that,” one person noted in the comments section on YouTube.
Black men gained the right to vote in the United States after the Civil War with the passage of the 15th Amendment in 1870. This amendment prohibited denying the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
However, Black voters faced widespread disenfranchisement through Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation, especially in the South, for nearly a century.
Black women did not gain the legal right to vote until the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920. Still, both Black men and women continued to face voter suppression until the civil rights movement, leading to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which aimed to eliminate these barriers.
The woman on the phone failed to acknowledge the immense struggles Black people faced just to secure the right to vote during this period, which was a non-starter with social media users.
“And she says she’s not a racist lady. You’re delusional; zip your mouth,” another person wrote on YouTube.
“I bet she burns crosses every week,” someone else said.
Other voices chimed in with, “This lady sounds pretty racist to me,” and “I bet she is wearing a white hood during this phone call,” — suggesting the caller was affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, a prominent hate group that terrorized Black people during the Jim Crow era.
