Re: White Racial Resentment Bubbles Under the Surface of the Tea Party Movement | News & Politics | AlterNet, AlterNet / By Rich Benjamin
Dale Robertson, who calls himself the “president and founder of the Tea Party,”
February 5, 2010 | Editor’s Note: Rich Benjamin’s commentary on the underlying “white grievance” currents in the Tea Party movement were buttressed Thursday by the statements of Republican Tom Tancredo, the opening speaker at the Tea Party convention. Tancredo told attendees that President Barack Obama was elected because “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country,” an allusion to how Southern states used literacy tests as part of an effort to deny suffrage to African American voters before the civil rights era.
I need to add that suffrage was forced upon southern states after the “civil rights era” because of foot dragging or outright refusal to accept the Civil Rights Act by the state of Mississippi and others. Many districts in the south fought the black vote well into the 1970’s through various means like misinformation on where and when to vote, crowding the precinct voting place with angry white men and other methods of intimidation, and even resorting to redistricting predominately black neighborhoods by splitting them in pieces to be part of larger white districts and in doing so, weakening the black vote to the point of nonexistence. The force of suffrage came from the federal authorities, such as the FBI, investigating voting irregularities.
It is very easy to see the underlying racism in the Tea Party movement. They tote signs that are “dog whistles” showing our first black president as a world-wide hated figure like Stalin or Hitler, suggesting that Obama is on the same level although he has done nothing to deserve it other than to be black.
And speaking of signs, most of the tea party crowds I’ve seen sported messages of anti-taxation, claiming that they refuse to bear the burden of Obama’s tax hikes, as untrue as that is, to pay for illegal immigrants’ food stamps, or anything else for that matter. Haven’t taxes always been a convenient target of whoever was out of favor of the American voter? Anyway, most of the southern and mid-western states, the “red” states, actually receive more money from the federal government than they pay into it. What we see at these tea party gatherings are middle class white people who have just received a tax cut from their hated Obama, protesting that Obama is unfairly raising taxes. Giving these folks some credit for having half a brain seems appropriate, so the public must infer that “taxes” as a rallying cry is false and the Tea Partiers message must convey underlying racism.
This has been going on a long time, long before the Tea Baggers came into existence last summer.
All of this is not to say that any given rank-and-file member of the movement personally despises racial minorities. Rather, the Tea Party ethos is a direct descendant of the anti-tax segregationist politics that swept the South in the 1950s and ’60s.
Before the Tea Party’s debut, a whole generation of powerful southern Republicans propelled their careers through a conservative tax-cutting, privatizing, “free-enterprise” politics that remains wildly popular in America’s white outer suburbs and exurbs: Lee Atwater (GA), Newt Gingrich (GA), Dick Armey (GA), Tom DeLay (TX), Karl Rove (AL, TX), and George W. Bush. These suburban and exurban Republicans intimately understood their constituents’ disdain for court-ordered desegregation. They fueled the rising mania for “individual freedom,” “privatization,” “states’ rights” and social homogeneity that once defined their Southern home turf and now defines the Tea Party.
To me, this movement is all about white supremacy while its members taking pains not to say it out loud. When Sarah Palin speaks of “the real America” she is actually talking about rural white America.
At a Tea Party rally in Boone County, Kentucky (roughly 92 percent non-Hispanic white), Congressman Geoff Davis called cap-and-trade legislation “economic colonization of the hardworking states that produce the energy, the food, and the manufactured goods of the heartland, to take that and pay for social programs in the large coastal states.” In Tea Party-speak, “heartland” often means “white” — what Palin calls “the real America” — while “coastal state” means the urbanized communities that teem with racial minorities, doubling as “gateway states” for Latino immigrants.
What’s the verdict here? I think common sense will win out. I think that sooner or later these folks who vehemently hate immigrants, the xenophobes, and the racists, will eventually realize that the federal income tax and social security tax that they pay allows the government to do things for us as a nation that we cannot do for ourselves as a family or small community. These taxes provide health care to more poor white families than ethnic minorities, and Social Security taxes allow many elderly white folks to retire with some dignity. Medicare benefits allow the same white elderly white folks a chance to live a few years longer by providing health care that they could not get elsewhere. The tea partiers are all going to draw Social Security and Medicare when they are eligible.
If they were true to their cause then they should refuse to apply for these benefits, but they are not true and they will not refuse them. The only other conclusion is that the tax protest is just a dog whistle for segregation.
_____________________________________________________________________
Follow me on Twitter!
From the eMail Bag: Glen Beck Fuels the Fire of Racism
This sign, held by a tea party protestor, is a dog whistle. It means, "Obama is black, we are white, he is not one of us".
Welcome to any southern state you choose. The time is 1950 and the drinking fountains and restrooms are marked according to your status as a human, i.e. men’s room, women’s room, and colored. The front of the bus is free for the taking, as long as you are white. Housing is racially segregated, schools also. In some towns, black people cannot come to town except on Saturday.
Zoom ahead to today and you find that many things have changed in the last 60 years. Some have not. The advances our society has made to relax the tensions between the races made us more sensitive to our African-American population’s mistreatment, but efforts such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the diligence of civil rights leaders to remind us of our missteps, have not yet completely eradicated the hatred. Even though these efforts have demanded civility in its discourse, things are moving in opposition and even the civility we thought would grow to become enlightenment is taking a turn for the worse.
Today, racism is in the hearts and minds, and on the tongues, of many people. In what I call a role reversal from the dark days of Selma in the 60’s, white people are taking to the streets carrying signs in protest of President Obama with no legitimate beef other than the fact that he is different from presidents in the past.
These tea party, or teabagger, protesters are using the public protest and its subsequent media coverage as a technique to demean this black president with any notion they can think of regardless of the lack of any basis in fact. They do this to propel their ideology, or I should say, their backer’s propaganda. These protesters, funded by wealthy PR firms and right-wing Corporate CEOs, lack moral high ground, or the one central cause that would endear them to the masses. They instead use a jumbled mix of messages that they think will resonate with voters. The sad part is that it is working, mainly because the media has legitimized the teabaggers. The media coverage has gone from reporting the protests to becoming the teabagger’s cheer leaders.
There are some influential figures who use their pulpit as a means to try to rally to themselves these protesters who still carry the hatreds, the white-supremist notions, of yesteryear. One such figure, Glen Beck, has seemingly leaped from the past when talk of African-American people as “different” was accepted speech, has tried to become the spokesperson for their cause. What makes it so important to understand the intent of this bigot is because there are millions who listen to him regardless of the advances we have made with race relations. This makes him, and his nonsense that he spouts, very dangerous.
From my email yesterday:
Media Matters for America wrote:
Beck says that something is wrong with Obama, that Obama is somehow fatally flawed. He does this by using any piece of conjured up nonsense he can grasp to prove his point. His talk is nothing more than covert signals, or “dog whistles”, to other racists to use this particular lie as justification for their hatred. This has happened before when southern slave owners tried a thousand different justifications and explanations for slavery.
Beck needs to be called out. We need to keep talking about these angry white people who protest nothing at all. We must continue to define these protestors and expose them for the race baiting bigots that they are. In order to continue toward enlightenment the discourse cannot go chasing nonsense claims from Beck like Alice after a disappearing rabbit down the hole. Instead, we must resolutely shine a light of truth and reason on Beck and his followers. Kudos to Media Matters for America.
(all tags),political opinion,politics opinion,democrats,political blog,political commentary,liberal blog,progressive blog,republicans,a second look,blog,news opinion,commentary,race,racism,race baiting,racial,racial tension,race protests,protests,Civil Rights Act of 1964,Media Matters for America,Glenn Beck,Barack Obama,father in Kenya,Obama father,dog whistles
Posted in: Tea Baggers.
Tagged: (all tags) · a second look · Barack Obama · blog · Civil Rights Act of 1964 · commentary · Democrats · dog whistles · father in Kenya · Glenn Beck · liberal blog · Media Matters for America · news opinion · Obama father · political blog · political commentary · Political Opinion · politics opinion · progressive blog · Protests · race · race protests · race-baiting · racial · racial tension · racism · Republicans