Tea
Party Chairman, Mark Williams, was kicked
out of his post over the weekend, after he posted a
racist blog in response to calling on the Tea Party to purge
its ranks of racists. Without going into what Williams said,
understand he broke the number one rule of organizations
where racists are harbored, “Thou Shalt Not Publicly Speak
Our Truths.” The NAACP (and everybody else) would’ve only
been able to speculate the ideology of the group had certain
acts not occurred.
Listening
to provocative speakers (Sarah Palin, Rand Paul) does not
a racist organization make. Promulgation of false truths
that make up the philosophy of the group and cause the group
to act in a certain way (exclude, attack, discriminate)
does a racist organization make. When Tea Party members
spat on John Lewis prior to the health care vote, shouted
the N-word at other black Congress Members and verbally
assaulted gay Congressman, Barney Frank, and the crowd refused
to give the person up (say who did it), the movement validated
the claim that it was harboring racists.
The
NAACP called them out at their national convention last
week. I know I’ve been hard on the NAACP the past few weeks,
but this is the advocacy the NAACP is supposed to be doing.
Monitoring racial temperament, responding to legal assault
on our constitutional rights and shining their huge spotlight
on racial hypocrisy is the NAACP’s job. This chasing talking
greeting cards and advocating for recreational marijuana
stuff is a bunch of bullsh*t.
The
NAACP put their finger on the pulse of the next racial movement
in America, that was hiding in the Tea Party movement. And
it is just below the surface. My mom used to say, if you
want to know who’s guilty, throw a rock at a bush and watch
who jumps out, whether the rock hits em or not. The guilty
party will scream the loudest, or run the fastest. The NAACP
threw the rock, Williams jumped and screamed hard saying
there were no racists in the Tea Party, then wrote racist
diatribe that got him booted. It’s the same in any company,
government or social environment. You think what you want
to. You can act in unison on your ideology in private setting
and in unspoken terms. But once you make it public, that’s
a no-no. Racism is not over. But overt racism isn’t readily
accepted, just yet.
The
Tea Party Express, the counter-populous movement to Obama
“Change” populism, is on the verge of taking over the Republican
Party as the party seeks to reconstitute its base and its
ideology. Their mock dissatisfaction over the state of the
country is the baseline of a reconstituted ideology they
know the Republican Party needs to listen to. The sub-text
of their existence, however, is to contain and marginalize
President Barack Obama, which is consistent with the Republican
Party’s objective of marginalizing the Democratic Party
over the next two election cycles.
The
biggest core of the Tea Party membership are Southerners,
Mid-Westerners and poor whites who didn’t vote for Barack
Obama, and are still shocked that the rest of the country
overcame their racial insensibilities to elect a black President.
There is no other justification for their persistent objection
to anything the President does. But the Tea Party movement
was adamant about their cause being about the issues. It’s
what racists claim for 235 years, that American society
is about rights (mainly theirs, everybody else’s can be
stepped on) and not about race. It’s why racists wore hoods
and sheets in public, and why their powerful societies that
controlled political and economic affairs were always secret.
The
less you know about what they think, the less you can respond
to how they think, even though the social, political and
economic outcomes will tell you what they think. No one
ever publicly embraced what Strom Thurmond said in 1948
during the “States Rights” Party formation that allowed
Harry Truman to win the election. Dixiecrats momentarily
left the party because Truman desegregated the military.
But when Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott said “We would
have avoided all these problems had we voted for Thurmond”
in 2002, he had to give up his seat. Verbalizing such thoughts
was no longer popular. No one ever publicly embraced what
Bull Connor did in Birmingham in 1963, but when President
Lyndon Johnson ended segregation by signing the 1964 Civil
Rights Act, Dixiecrats permanently left the Democratic Party,
switching to the Republican Party in 1968.
Even
when the Democrats elected the first Southern President
in over 100 years, eight years later (Jimmy Carter in 1976),
those with a “peculiar” ideology wasn’t with him. And the
code words flew with Ronald Reagan’s announcement for President
in Philadelphia, Mississippi three years later. The anti-taxation,
individual rights, no race quota, family values conversation,
froth with racial inferences, took the country back for
two decades. Obama populism caught this segment of the population
off guard. It didn’t catch the Republicans off guard. They
knew they had run the party in the ground with an antiquated
ideology, and the country in the ground with it. They were
looking for a way to recover and the Tea Party is the branch
of the tree lowest hanging. Not one of the Republican Party
frontrunners has repudiated any comments coming from the
Tea Party. Most have appeared at one event or another. Most
are tracking the growth of the Tea Party base, despite the
antics tied to their message. But vocalizing racism and
putting racists up front will temper the movement and re-empower
Democrats. That’s the last thing the Tea Party and the Republicans
wants.
Don’t
look for Tea Party activists to try to run racists hiding
in their ranks out of the movement. For they can no more
disavow the racists in their own Party than they could disavow
their white grandfathers that raised them but said things
that made them “uncomfortable.” They’ll just have to learn
to keep their unspoken truths to themselves.
BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad,
PhD is a national columnist and author of Saving The
Race: Empowerment Through Wisdom. His Website is AnthonySamad.com. Click here to
contact Dr. Samad. |