I don’t have time to give this the pitting it deserves and was hoping somebody else would, so I’ll just mention it.
The NAACP accused the Tea Party movement of having a racist faction within their midst that they needed to address and repudiate,
Sarah Palin, furious that the NAACP would make such an allegation with nothing for proof other than some copious amounts of photographic, filmed, and written evidence, released some nonsense or other about how she wouldn’t have married an Eskimo if she were racist (her husband Todd is about 1/8 Native American, which incidentally is somehow relevant to her opinions on offshore drilling but the fact he was paid by BP for 20 years isn’t). The prize rebuttal was offered though by Mark Williams, national spokesperson for the Tea Party Express:
Williams also took it upon himself in his position as spokesperson for “Colored People” (a group separate from blacks, incidentally, and one that apparently offends the sensitive Williams, who honors tradition of course- unless it’s a 101 year old name of an organization in which case it’s racist) to write an open letter to Abraham Lincoln:
(No word yet if there’s been a response from Team Lincoln, though Palin says she will deliver the message to him next time she’s in D.C. cause his house is impossible to miss- it has a huge statue of him out front. Okay, I made that part up.)
Williams’ other greatest hits include calling Obama a “half white racist” and “the former Barry Soetoro, Indonesian welfare thug”. All in all Mark Williams fills me with pride as a Southerner- mainly because he’s from Massachusetts and now lives in California. BUT— he’s not a racist just because he wants NAACP thrown on the trash heap (and he has a point- here in the city I live the secretary of the local chapterwas a jailbird!)
So…
I wish I had time to give this one full venom but I don’t. Please give him some love for me.
A pronunciation pet peeve: Williams is such a scholar on the matter of the NAACP that in one exchange I listened to he repeatedly pronounced the surname of W.E.B. DuBois as “doo-bwah” when mentioning how much he had always revered him and in fact the Tea Party is a lot like him in the ground roots analogy. He took absolutely no notice when his host and his opponents equally repeated “doo-BOYS”, referring instead to something else Dr. Doo-BWAH said. (In fairness, the surname is usually pronounced du-BWAH, but W.E.B. pronounced it du-BOYS and I think he was an authority on how his name was said, and while this may seem minor you’d think it would be known to somebody who has always considered him a great man as opposed to somebody who wiki’d NAACP three minutes before going on air [though wiki gives the pronunciation of the name]
All I can say to Palin, Williams and the Tea Party in general in “Keep 'em coming, it’s going to same the Democrats a lot of work and videotaping costs in the next couple of years.”
A “Yup I’m a Racist” T-shirt doesn’t mean the person wearing it is a racist! It may just have been cheap, and with Obama you can’t afford to go to some fancy smancy DOLLAR GENERAL for your t-shirts.
I honestly don’t believe all Tea Partiers or Obama haters are racist- Bill Clinton got vitriol galore and he’s rather white as most would describe the term- but the overlapping Venn Circles twixt the racists and the TPs is just impossible to ignore, though I actually prefer those to the larger number of “I don’t have a racist bone in my body” racists (the ones who’ll swear that Obama’s color means nothing to him shortly before they call him a racial slur or hold up a picture of him with a bone through his nose). The refutation of the racist allegations would require the invention of the No True Scotsman Fallacy if it didn’t already exist, but since it does it’s giving it one hell of a workout: “Oh, those aren’t real Tea Partiers, they’re the lunatic fringe who just happen to be at every single meeting and who we pretend aren’t there!”
I would heavily encourage any black people in need of extra money to join the Tea Party movement for a few days, incidentally, as so long as you’ll call yourself a “proud black American and a tea partier” you will get airtime on any news network of your choosing. It’s just like the eradication of unemployment for black non-supporters of Obama during the elections: every news show had to have one, a sort of flip-flop of status symbol Tituba claims in her ‘testimony’ in The Crucible when the devil said “Look Tituba, I has white people belongs to me!”
I don’t know about everything you brought up in the OP, but the Williams quote makes sense to me. It’s time for those who who are professionally offended on behalf of their racial group to give it up.
Sure, I prefer the forthright racists to the crypto ones, too. And I’m sure that not *all *teabaggers are racists, but many–and most of the truly dedicated ones–are. There are some who might describe themselves as “Tea Party adherents” in telephone surveys and who are not racist, but they don’t come out to the protests and their choice of the label has more to do with disaffection than support for the cause.
Had the tea party existed in 1860, they would have been four-square and stalwart against the federal government’s infringement on the people’s right to hold slaves.
An explanation of the quote’s context, and an explanation of the history of the person who stated the quote is irrelevant to the quote because you don’t know about it. Well, yes, you shithead, you do know about it; you just read it.
In other words, you have no fucking clue how to justify the tea party as a revival of the abolitionist spirit, and you’re hoping I’ll do your research for you.
Gosh, I guess it must be why the tea party would have been four-square and stalwart against the federal government’s infringement on the people’s right to hold slaves. Not, in fact, abolitionist.
Well, this conversation, while mildly amusing, has now lost my interest. It’s really telling that you can’t maintain a conversation without boring to tears anyone with an intellectual level above a paramecium.
With respect, my friends, you are being both naive and arrogant.
THAT quote is not the one that will get all the press. The fallacious claims that the NAACP said the Tea Parties are racist will get the head lines, with the quote of the actual resolution buried in the continuation in the second to last paragraph.
But the real hook is that people want to believe we are in a post-racist society. People want to believe we are in a post anyist society.
