The Black Tea Partier… The American Pageant

Note: BlackCommentator.com welcomes Syreeta McFadden as a columnist and member of the Editorial Board.

At last year’s Tax Day Rally in New Dorp, Staten Island, I did in fact, meet ONE black Tea Party supporter and took his picture (above). I’m not sure if he’s still kickin” it with them today. He was a curious oddity to me. I don’t remember his name, but I do remember that he was a Cuban immigrant, naturalized American. And after a year of vitriol and obfuscation, I wonder if he is still aligned with this movement. A movement that at its heart invalidates his right to claim America as his home.

UPDATE:

So I got this comment on my rather benign commentary:

This man integrated, joined America ” as proven by his being a Tea Partier ” and no other Tea Party supporter would gainsay his status as a right and proper American.

Get over your racism and your hatred of all things White and all things truly American and maybe, just maybe, you’ll earn the same privilege.

I won’t hold my breath though.

I can accept a critique, but if this commenter were a regular reader of mine, he’d recognize that my supposed hatred of “all things White” is unfounded. I mean, seriously, who blogs about Procul Harum, Foo Fighters, and Bartleby, the Scrivener??? I don’t even need to unpack all the things wrong with that premise. Perhaps I do? I don’t know.

Yet, I had missed the findings of a recent poll from Quinnipiac University that breaks down the demographics of the Tea Party Movement:

” 74 percent are Republicans or independent voters leaning Republican;
” 16 percent are Democrats or independent voters leaning Democratic;
” 5 percent are solidly independent;
” 45 percent are men;
” 55 percent are women;
” 88 percent are white;
” 77 percent voted for Sen. John McCain in 2008

I don’t doubt that there are people of color who are part of the conservative movement, or the tea party movement. They’re entitled to their opinion and have the right to associate with an organization that compliments those beliefs. More power to them, even if it confuses me. However, I do have to question a movement that argues that my right to claim my American-ness is contingent upon my embracing white culture exclusively. I do have a right to question the intentions of a movement that failed to condone those who yelled racial and homophobic epithets at elected officials. We can disagree on the policy, even the politics, but again, from this commenter and the protesters, that’s not really the conversation or debate they want to have with someone like me.

On Meet the Press, Doris Kearns Goodwin said something that struck me. “The tone of recent time is troubling” But in the last 30 years or so to hear the racial epithets, the homophobia, when we thought were becoming a more tolerant society shows we have far way to go” People worrying the country is becoming un-homogeneous. There’s a lot of minorities out there. And that whites are fearful something going on. She was referring also to Frank Rich’s column on March 27, 2010.

It also reminded me of something Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote awhile back during his close reading of Civil War history the following:

It makes sense when you think on the deep promise of white supremacy. Black equality is the promise of mortality for everyone. I ask it again, what are you in a world where a black man is president? Who knows what depths a man might go to cling to those last vestiges of Godhood? He would claim Obama’s Muslim. He would claim he isn’t a citizen. He would claim that Obama was not “really black” or not black in the “usual way. Anything to differentiate themselves from the teeming masses, anything to get away from he undying fact that in the hearts of all men, there is a Harlem.

White racism and fear have historically been used as wedge issues against social and economic reformation. This is not a new tactic. It’s old, trite even, like the cartoon circulating on the internet this weekend suggesting Obama raped the Statue of Liberty by signing health reform into law. A black man defiling Liberty; that pure, and iconic image of white culture. Smarter bloggers than me have written their analysis of that, so I don’t feel a need to rehash. Still, I can’t clearly articulate the policy objection from these people. There’s no entry point to find a middle ground. It’s all or nothing. I’m holding my ground.