Tea Party Movement

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.

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