Sorry. I guess that should be “post-corporatocratic.”
Let me get this straight. During the last presidential election we constantly heard (from the now tea party types) about William Ayres, Reverend Wright’s anti-white racism and Obama palling around with terrorists. All of that suggested we should be concerned with Obama’s associations. You are the company you keep, after all.
Now associations do not matter and racists might be part of the tea party, but not really part of the tea party? I am confused.
That’s quite a long article. But I read a few of the linked studies and articles. Most of them are isolated incidents (like N.O. parishes) over things that are already illegal. A good many of the issues were resolved without the NAACP. As far as the studies, more than one relied on anecdotes. Others didn’t account for bigger variables, like social class. One study even says that when the job applicants were from wealthy neighborhoods, race didn’t matter.
Why can’t they be both useless busybodies and also correct? My estranged great aunt was a useless busybody that got into other people’s business where she didn’t belong. When she told my brother he needed to get a job, she was right. No contradiction.
Well, what do you want them to do? Cuff and drag away people that show up with racist signs? Pull their membership card? When your organization doesn’t officially exist, how do you kick people out of it?
The best we can hope for is for journalists and reporters to go visit some tea party rallies and tell us what they see. And then there are always polls.
But I’m not going to do your internet hunting for you. Google “tea party experiences”.
You know why.
Just watch a couple hours of Fox News and it’ll go away.
I like you better as a lurker. The sky in my world has no pie, despite what this liberal shudder board would have you believe.
This one deserves honorable mention
I also agree with the columnist that **Bricker **linked to.
I tried posting it to FB, and it was blocked content, meaning that multiple people have reported it as “abusive”. Further proof of the racism involved here. Assholes.
That’s one helluva read, especially since it gives hyperlinked concrete examples.
That’s weird, I just tried to reposting it to my FB page as a test, and it was fine. Maybe try attaching the link by c&p’ing the URL?
I LOVE how discussing issues of racism is “abusive.” That’s pretty much what some people said when I posted it - that bringing up issues of race is in itself racist. Idiots.
[QUOTE=Williams]
They make make more money off of race than any slave trader ever.
[/QUOTE]
Isn’t this a Michael Moore-like quote? Technically accurate, but misleading? In other words, the NAACP has made more off of race than any ONE PARTICULAR slave trader ever, no?
To “make money off of race” is a rather fluid concept, too, isn’t it? One could easily say the Nazis surpassed most U.S. corporations in providing job opportunities for Jews.
Job security, too – they were guaranteed employment for the rest of their lives. Top that, General Motors!
You know, you really don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s no denying that the NAACP has had, and continues to have, its problems, but to say there’s no need for it is simply false. Did racism against blacks suddenly end last night while I was asleep? If anything, it’s more overt now than the last 20 years, so there’s even more of a need today. Since you cited it, the Don Imus incident, although I can’t assign a malice of intent, was potentially pernicious, and just the type of issue the NAACP is charged with pursuing. That you believe it was a non issue proves that you are as knowledgeable about the viral nature of racism as I am about football, which is to say not at all.
Blacks today face a lot of challenges solely because of their race. Would they prefer to be white? I doubt it, well maybe Alan Keyes, but that’s another story. Blacks simply want to cease being treated as ‘the other’ or, more destructively, ‘the lesser’, which will not happen on its own. How do I know this? Because it never has. Women, blacks, Hispanics, gays, and every other disparaged, discriminated against, and put-upon group in existence, has been able to advance solely by confronting opposing forces, the opportunity for which, at times, is simply unavailable to many without the voice and resources organizations like the NAACP continue to provide.
Perhaps the Tea Party is not comprised exclusively of racists. I don’t know. It does, however, attract them, and that’s a fact. So, notwithstanding your slur of the NAACP as professional offenderati, I consider their statement to be timely, truthful, and needed.
I never for a moment thought that Obama’s election meant we would now live in a post-racial or post-racist society; I doubted in November 2008 and doubt now that barring an event short of a zombie uprising that we ever will. I also doubted that Obama becoming president would change much of anything where race relations were concerned. I was right on the post-racial thing but dead wrong on the Obama becoming president not affecting race relations thing and it’s been, frankly, an eye opener.
I suppose on some level I have an element of “White Liberal Guilt” but not that much. I’ve been accused in threads here of defending slavery even though you’ve no idea how viscerally I feel the injustice of it, but I don’t defend it- I just think that owning slaves didn’t make somebody intrinsically evil any more than not owning them made them liberal; I see history as an extremely complex and morality as ever changing, and will admit I’ve gotten frustrated at the inability of some people- white and black and other- to talk rationally about the history of race relations without pointing fingers at each other’s ancestors or reducing history to something so silly and vapid and one dimensional it’s worthy of being covered on The History Channel.
But I’ll admit I understand a bit better now. Again, I never thought racism was or ever would be dead- it’s just that overt racism is no longer the majority party now- but the amount of blatant racism that has surfaced since Obama’s election has actually shocked me. People who I never would have expected to forward those bullshit racist emails about him- and I’ve gotten pretty much all of them from the “I’m not a racist but” picture of him with a bone through his nose to the one with the watermelon patch (both of these centered on a guy who with no money or family connections who made it into and graduated from two Ivy League schools- but nope, not racist) to the so-fucking-easily-Snopesable packs of lies and I’ve gotten many of these from intelligent well-educated people! I’ve heard people actually say “It has nothing to do with his skin color or what race he is” used in the same conversation with “I hate that nigger” from PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY WEREN’T BEING IRONIC AND ABSOLUTELY BELIEVED FOR A SECOND THEY MEANT WHAT THEY WERE SAYING!!! Fucking floors me.
Over a year ago I posted a “Think what you like of Obama’s policies but I will defriend anybody who posts racist or borderline psychotic bullshit about the man himself” notice on Facebook that resulted in me losing about 30 “friends”- all white IIRC but, as a southerner I must say, not all of them from the demographics you might think- many of them academic. I’ve heard “I’m not a racist but…” so damned many times as the predecessor to a comment that, without exception, is completely racist, almost as if the person who starts the sentence with that thinks it’s an incantation that will make a little bitty Al Sharpton in a papal outfit to float through the air and absolve them from it.
They remind me of when I worked with the retarded and one guy (who looked a lot like Jason Lee as Earl Hickey come to think of it, just more obviously retarded) had a particularly colorful vocabulary: “I don’t want no goddamned motherfucking Cocola I want goddamned motherfucking Sprite goddamn it! Cocola taste like a motherfuckin’ cow pissed in it!” We had a boss- think Mrs. Levy from CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES if you’ve ever read that book- who was a complete self-non-educated expert on everything and assured us “Terry doesn’t know what he is saying, they’re just words to him- he has no idea they’re inappropriate.” Admittedly his talk was no more inappropriate than half the staff when we weren’t on duty, but this used to make us (the staff) laugh to no end- for somebody who was just using sounds that he had no idea of the meaning of he sure as goddamned cow piss motherfucking used them correctly, and a few times I’ve asked the “I’m not racist but…” crowds “Exactly what would you think if you were racist that would be different? Because that by-god sounds pretty good textbook stuff to me…”.
Worst part of it for me is that I got so tired of arguments that became screaming matches, because you never win with these people- you can have the knowledge base of Christopher Hitchens/Gore Vidal/Thomas Jefferson/the entire Britannica database in your mind and the oratory of Demosthenes and you’re never going to convince them of a goddamned thing- that I just don’t even talk politics anymore if I’m not around the like minded. I hate that, I love argument- but not screaming, which is just not worth the blood pressure rise. (I’ve also started using the phrase “I’m not a racist but” several times a week, usually in such a way as “I’m not a racist but I’d love a ham and cheese omelette” or “I’m not a racist but I need to check my tire pressure”.)
I hate to admit to such naivete but I honestly didn’t realize that such on-the-surface-but-also-bedrock racism was still so omnipresent. I knew it still existed in the back rooms of country clubs and the trailer parks and the boondocks (though actually when you’ve known as many people who live or have lived in trailer parks and boondocks as I have the diversity of their thought and intellectual capabilities might surprise you) and in bitter old people and the like. America’s kind of the anti-Hogsmeade in that the appearance of the Dark Lord made the DeathEaters here rise in opposition to him, but rise they have, and it’s enlightening and infuriating and almost terrifying, and I’m almost glad of it from one standpoint which is that I had no idea just how much racial cancer is still out there.
Again and again and again I don’t think all Republicans or all Tea Party folk are racist, but enough of them are that the rest need to take notice. I grew up in an area that for centuries and centuries and centuries was so thickly populated by Muskogee Indians that it was called “The Hornet’s Nest” by 18th century Europeans who came to the area- we’ll all be mulch before whites and blacks and other non natives live here 1/5 as long- and there was almost no evidence of them left, nothing to say they’d ever lived there so complete was their removal; my grandmother’s been dead only 20 years and her house and cornfields that surrounded it were occupied for years after she died and now they’re so overgrown with kudzu and pines that you literally cannot tell there was ever a house there (still is actually, but you can’t see it and it’s unusable). And then comes the realization that social progress- exactly the same way- given the right circumstances Jim Crow would be back in full force by 2015, I have no doubts at all; if slavery were somehow relegalized tomorrow, be it blacks or whoever, there’d be people lining up to buy them tomorrow. NOT ONE THING ABOUT OUR BRAINS HAS CHANGED, and all of the advances of Civil Rights are so recent that many of the people who participated in the Bus Boycott are not only still alive but still in the workforce- nothing’s been done that can’t be undone, and I’m more aware of that now I think than I’ve been- well, at least than I’ve been since the 1970s when all the people in power when MLK was shot were still in power.
Sorry for the long go-nowhere rant, but the point is FUCK YEAH WE STILL NEED THE NAACP. And don’t do drugs.
No, it ended at noon EST on January 20, 2009. Didn’t you get the memo? The election of President Obama ended all racism in America.
I gotta tell ya, and as Sampiro above alluded, the Presidency of Obama has done more to bring racists and overt racism out into the sunlight than anything in recent memory I can think of.
Actually there might be less racism, etc., if more people smoked pot.
Oh, I know. My post was sarcastic.
And even if I were completely disappointed with Obama’s presidency so far (which I’m not - there’s some disappointment, but not complete), I am thankful that the racists aren’t hiding anymore, for the most part. That’s a huge service to society, right there.
Well, now you’re substituting your own conception of what the NAACP is with what Rand Rover said they were - or more specifically, what Williams said, which RR agreed with wholeheartedly. Williams said that the NAACP was an explicitly racist and race-baiting organization of a piece with the KKK. Bricker said that they’ve raised a valid and important point about the problems with racism among Tea Party supporters. I don’t really see a way to reconcile these two positions, even in a “stopped clock is right twice a day” way.
I’m also confused as to how Bricker can be right on in this thread, while everyone else is an asshole for complaining about racism in the tea party, when he’s explicitly stated that it’s a valid criticism.
I don’t know what they should do. That’s why I’m asking you for examples of ways they’ve made it clear that racism isn’t a part of the Tea Party movement. I was assuming that you had some examples at hand. If even you don’t know how they can make it clear that racists aren’t welcome in the Tea Party, I don’t see how you can say that they’ve already done it.
I’m not clear what you’re trying to say here. Most of what I know about the Tea Party comes from clips and interviews taken during Tea Party rallies, so it appears that journalists and reporters are already going to rallies and telling us what they see there. As for the poll, I don’t see what that’s supposed to prove. I’m not surprised to find out that the Tea Party is older, whiter, and more conservative than mainstream America. I’m a little surprised to find out they’re wealthier, but the central argument in this thread isn’t that they’re poor, it’s that they’re racist.
Wait, how is it my internet hunting? You’re the one with an investment in demonstrating that the Tea Party isn’t a pack of racist cretins. I’m content with the conclusions I’ve drawn from the evidence I’ve already seen. You’re the one trying to convince me that there’s more evidence out there that I haven’t considered. Why should I go hunting for it on your say-so? You want to change my mind, it’s up to you to do the legwork to convince me I’m wrong.
I really don’t. If someone picks a spectacularly stupid way of identifying themselves, I don’t see why using that identifier in an attempt to highlight a perceived trend of spectacular stupidity should be considered unacceptable.
I think there’s an element you’re missing here.
When Bush was the President, people circulated many hateful things about him, both written and images. But an attack on Bush couldn’t realy be seen as racist. His attackers didn’t limit themselves; it’s just that there’s no area of attack that could raise those kind of concerns.
Now Obama’s in, and the attackers have some choices: they can stay away from the sorts of images that evoke racism, or ignore that taboo.
I guess I feel like Sam Kinison expressed the sentiment I’m trying to explain, here… after a back-and-forth with someone he was feuding with, with obscenity-laced barbs flung by each side, Kinison was stung by the repeated references to his weight by his attacker. “I gotta lose weight,” he mused after the call ended. “It’s my only vulnerable point.”
Someone trying to loose a no-holds-barred attack on Bish had no real limits. But a no-holds-barred attack on Obama has limits, because of the history of racism.
Now, in my view, the correct answer is: suck it up. Yeah, you can’t go there. Deal with it. I don’t think that kind of rhetor is effective anyway. But some people won’t accept that limitation. Often it’s because they are closet racists and welcome the chance to come out, so to speak. But not all vicious attacks on Obama are born of underlying racism; some are born of a hatred of his policies and a simple-minded desire to use his “vulnerable point” as a target.