Tag: racism

Tea Apartheid Express

~ Deb ~ 4 Comments

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) recently issued a resolution which essentially called upon the Tea Party Movement to denounce its racist elements.   This is no idle “race card” being  played by the NAACP.

Item #1:  Signs which call for the lynching of the President, claim that “Obamacare” is white slavery, and even those repudiating the President with sayings like “Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout, Willis?” and “Homey don’t play dat.”

Item #2:  The racial epithets hurled at U.S. Representative John Lewis as he walked to work through a Tea Party demonstration.   (For those who don’t know, Rep. Lewis is a Civil Rights hero who deserves our respect, not the taunts of bigots.)

Item #3:  The incredibly over-beaten dead horse known as the Birther movement, that Tea Party subculture of those who insist the President is a Kenyan and doesn’t even have an American birth certificate.  (Do you think anyone would have questioned the citizenship status of a President McCain, who by the way was born in Panama while his father served at the naval station in the Panama Canal Zone?)

There are other items, starting with the flags flying at half-mast after the election, but this post really isn’t about delineating every admissible piece of evidence in the claim that there is a racist element in the Tea Party.

This post is really about Item #4.  The spokesperson for the Tea Party Express, Mark Williams, responded to the NAACP’s resolution by placing the following letter on his organization’s web site.  It is a fake letter to President Abraham Lincoln from NAACP President Ben Jealous.  Summarizing it would not do it justice, so here it is in its entirety:

Dear Mr. Lincoln:

We Colored People have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!

In fact we held a big meeting and took a vote in Kansas City this week. We voted to condemn a political revival of that old abolitionist spirit called the ‘tea party movement’.

Perhaps the most racist point of all in the tea parties is their demand that government “stop raising our taxes.” That is outrageous! How will we Colored People ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn? Totally racist! The tea party expects coloreds to be productive members of society?

Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.

Sincerely,

Precious Ben Jealous, Tom’s Nephew National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Head Colored Person

Case closed.  The evidence is in.  This movement has a racist element that it not only refuses to condemn but which it apparently chooses to place in positions of leadership.

For the Tea Apartheid to claim ANY proprietary position regarding ideals this nation holds dear is an affront to every freedom-loving American.  For the Tea Apartheid to claim any understanding of the Constitution or the intents of the Founders is ludicrous.  For the Tea Apartheid to claim they have any concept of the essence of liberty and justice for all is the pinnacle of hypocrisy.

The Tea Apartheid Movement is no longer just a radical faction of the political right.  Until their leadership absolutely and unequivocally condemns, denounces, and abolishes this element of their organization, they are the official face of Racist America.

(In the interest of full disclosure, the Tea Party Express has since removed the above letter from their web site.   But, that is nowhere near enough.  Nowhere. Near. Enough.)

Red State Blues

~ Deb ~ 3 Comments

CNN’s Rick Sanchez showed an interesting map earlier this week.  It was a map of the United States broken into counties.  Each county was shaded either a variation of red or blue based upon whether the county voted more Democratic or more Republican than four years ago.  It was not a breakdown of who actually won the county, mind you, but more of an illustration of political tendency.  So a county could go for McCain but be shaded light blue if McCain only won by, say, 52% and Bush had won it four years ago by 56%, thus the light blue indicating a downward movement for Republicans and slight increase for the Democrats.

With the recent major shift towards the Democrats, not just in the Oval Office, but also in the House and the Senate, it should not be surprising that the country was almost entirely painted in varying shades of blue, light to dark depending on the size of the shift.  Ohio?  Blue.  North Carolina?  Blue.  Southern Mississippi?  Yep, blue.  Almost the entire country, except . . . Arkansas, Tennessee, Northern Louisana, Eastern Oklahoma were almost solid red.

The question was asked on Sanchez’ show about whether this reflected racism still running through a wide swath of the south.  A Republican strategist essentially replied that this kind of question was only asked by trouble-making Democrats who wanted to belittle the Republican party.  Well, then, you can consider me a trouble-making Democrat.

I’ve heard story after story about racist responses to this election.  There were rumors going around local high schools here in Middle Tennessee the day of the election that if Barack Obama won then white kids were going to bring guns to school and kill all the black kids.  In rural Georgia, people were flying flags at half-mast.   An African-American student at Middle Tennessee State University walked out of his dorm room and saw the N word written on the railing of his dorm balcony.

I DO NOT believe that voting Republican automatically makes someone a racist (of course not).  But there was a strong national trend this year that one specific section of the country resisted strongly.  There are likely many reasons for that, and I believe one of them is racism.

What do you think?

Black to the Future

~ Deb ~ Leave a comment

A woman in my evening composition class told this story last night.  After leaving the polls for early voting in Nashville yesterday, she happened upon a man she works with.  He asked an interesting question.

“Did you vote right?”

She looked at him a little puzzled.  “Well, I suppose ‘right’ would depend on which side you’re for.”

“What I mean is,” he said with a knowing southern grin, “did you vote black or white?”

As we are approaching the summit of that mountain top Dr. King saw 45 years ago, it must be noted that some Americans remain stuck in a valley of immense ignorance.  For a long time now, we have lived in the delusion that racism was disappearing.  As Barack Obama edges closer to the Oval Office, our baser elements seem to be crawling out of the ooze.

But don’t think for a minute that I would advocate the impossible (and unnecessary) concept of a colorblind election.  This election IS about the economy and the war and education and health care, etc.  But, this election is also about race, and it should be.

The civil war ended 143 years ago and with it the national sin of slavery.  In those 143 years, we have experienced Reconstruction, Jim Crow, lynchings, Plessy v. Ferguson, segregation, Brown v. The Board of Education, lunch counters, sit-ins, fire hoses, police dogs, and church bombings, not to mention the death of a thousand cuts that shows up as that subtle, systemic, sinister, subconscious bigotry that insinuates itself into everything from jobs to jokes.  To a sociologist studying cultural change, 143 years is nothing.   We absolutely cannot elect a black man to the most powerful office in our nation in 2008 and not recognize how profound that moment would be.

When I cast my vote a few weeks ago for Barack Obama, I did so because I believe in his plan for America.  I agree with his economic vision, his policy of diplomacy first and war last, his devotion to equality for all Americans, and his recognition that our diseased health care system must undergo surgery.  But I also felt a personal thrill and undeniable swelling of patriotism that I lived to see the day I could vote for an African American for president.

He shouldn’t be president because he’s black.  But it still does mean something that he is.  And regardless of whether he accomplishes that task or not, we can’t put this genie back into the bottle.  Our national racism has once again come up for healing.  And our national prayer should be that we eradicate this cancer once and for all.