Race-Baiters

I have been outraged in recent weeks about the demonization of the Tea Party movement by the mainstream media, but I have been working 60+ hour weeks and have not had time to post about it until now. For those readers who don't follow politics, the Democrats and their allies in the press have been working overtime ever since the passage of the health care bill to paint the Tea Party movement as a group of angry, violent white people who want to take our country back to the era of slavery and segregation. Two of the most disgraceful examples of this "j0urnalism" were March Washington Post editorials by Colbert King and Eugene Robinson. A co-worker sent me an even more pathetic article by one Robert Paul Reyes which I link to here solely to let our readers know the ridiculous claims being made about the Tea Parties and to provide entertainment value.

Let me start by saying that racism is a deeply ugly thing and shows the sad capacity of the human heart for prejudice, hatred, and evil. The overwhelming majority of Americans find racial prejudice disgusting because they recognize that it breeds a distrust between neighbors and fellow-citizens that damages the very fabric of our society. There are few things that will destroy your reputation or your career more quickly than an accusation of racism. And it is precisely for these reasons -- the ugliness of real racism and the seriousness of accusations of racism -- that all of us should be careful not to throw the word around carelessly. When racial accusations are used to score political points, innocent people's reputations are damaged and real racism is dangerously minimized. If everything is racist, then ultimately nothing is. For example, when Harry Reid compared Republican opposition to the partisan health care bill to the racially-motivated opposition of Southern Democrats to the civil rights legislation of the 1960's, his comparision merely served to cheapen the monumental achievements of the civil rights movement.

Of course, Harry Reid's speech looks like nothing compared to Colbert King's flagrant race-baiting on the pages of the Washington Post (see 1st paragraph for link). King recounts the angry crowds in Alabama and Arkansas protesting racial integration of the schools in the 1950's, and then the vitriol of a David Duke rally in the early 1990's. He then explicitly claims that those demonstrations were the forerunners of the Tea Party movement: "Today's Tea Party adherents are George Wallace legacies." With a few strokes of a pen, King brands the entire Tea Party movement as a racist organization on par with segregationists and Klan members. (Remember, these claims are not from a Louis Farrakhan rally. They're from the Washington Post, supposedly a somewhat mainstream newspaper.)

OK, let's take a step back here. Why were Tea Party activists -- tens of thousands of them -- on Capitol Hill to protest last month? You could be forgiven for assuming from King's article that they were there to protest black voting rights or desegregation of schools, but in fact they were there to protest...a controversial health care bill. A health care bill that would dramatically increase government control over our health care system, that would cost well over a trillion dollars over 10 years, that was too long and complex to have even been read carefully by Congress members, that was being rammed through in an excessively partisan and corrupt manner, that was opposed by a clear majority of voters. The rally was the conclusion of nearly a year of nearly unprecedented political involvement by ordinary citizens across the country who expressed their passionate opposition to the Democrats' health care bill through town hall meetings, large and well-attended rallies, an outpouring of letters and phone calls to Congress, and consistent poll results. Congress had decided to ignore all of these political expressions of the will of the people and move ahead with a strictly party-line vote. Is it any surprise that the demonstrators on Capitol Hill were angry? Their anger was not against African-Americans and had nothing to do with race. It was against a Congress hell-bent on controlling health care at great cost to taxpayers.

Of course, Tea Party rallies have been occurring regularly all across the country for a year now, and are about much more than just health care. Talk to any Tea Party organizer, or ask any elected official sympathetic to the Tea Party movement, or listen to a sampling of the speeches given at Tea Party rallies, and you will find that this movement has nothing to do with race or racial prejudice. This movement is a grassroots response to a government that is becoming increasing unresponsive to the concerns of ordinary citizens. The Tea Parties are concerned about government spending that is out-of-control and filled with wasteful earmarks. They are concerned about a deficit that has tripled in President Obama's first year alone and that is increasing our debt to unsustainable levels that threaten the well-being of our children & grandchildren. They are concerned about recent government takeovers of the auto industry, the banking industry, the private mortgage industry, the health care industry, and the student loan industry, as well as future proposals that threaten the independence of energy companies, financial services companies, and radio stations. They are concerned about the increasing burdens of regulation and taxation being placed on businesses which are slowing our economic growth and keeping unemployment high. They are concerned about high taxes -- and proposals under consideration to raise taxes even further -- which are putting the squeeze on the middle and upper middle classes. They constantly talk about the Constitution and the Founding Fathers, who established a strictly limited federal government in order to maximize freedom for the states and the individual citizens, and they feel that our current government is running roughshod over the Constitution in order to maximize their own power and in so doing is threatening our individual freedoms. You tell me: are those racist concerns?

So, if King, Robinson, and others are going to brand a movement as "racist" when its stated goal is explicitly non-racial and non-racist -- then they had better have solid evidence to make this claim. They had better provide proof. So let's examine their "proof":

1. The protestors are predominantly white. This does not prove anything about the racial motivations of the protestors. White voters tend to be more conservative politically than other voters, so it's not a surprise that a conservative-leaning movement would be largely white. But the fact is, there are black and Hispanic people that identify with the Tea Party movement as well. A Gallup Poll found that 79% of Tea Party members are white, 6% are black, and 15% are part of other racial categories. If the Tea Party were about white supremacy, would thousands of its members be black? Prominent black conservatives like Ward Connerly, Thomas Sowell, and Michael Steele have defended the Tea Party movement. I also saw an interview with an African-American Tea Party activist named Kevin Jackson who has attended over 80 Tea Party events, and he insists that the movement is definitely not racist, that he has never seen violence at any Tea Party event, and that he and other black conservatives have always been warmly welcomed.

2. The protestors are angry. In King's words, "They, like [George] Wallace's followers, smolder with anger. They fear they are being driven from their rightful place in America." Well, yes, the protestors are angry. Generally, if you're not upset about something, you're not going to go to the trouble to attend a rally. The anti-war protestors so ubiquitous during the Bush Administration were also angry. Were they racist too? King assumes the reasons for this anger are racially motivated, but provides no evidence for this other than mentioning a few angry signs.

3. The protestors carry angry signs. After dramatically comparing Tea Partiers to segregationists, King cites one sign as evidence: "If Brown [Scott Brown (R-Mass.)] can't stop it, a Browning [high power weapon] can." One would think at such a well-attended white supremacist rally, King could find something a little more explicitly racial than that. Another article by someone named Robert Paul Reyes (link to article in 1st paragraph) also insists that the Tea Partiers are racists and provides the following two sign messages as evidence: "Send wetbacks back to Mexico!" and "Fight Crime, Deport Illegals." The second sign is certainly not racist, unless you happen to believe that people who think U.S. immigration laws should be enforced are racist. The first sign possibly displays some prejudice against Mexicans, but the primary anger seems to be over illegal immigration coming over the border from Mexico. The article cited in the 1st paragraph by Eugene Robinson mentions the phrases "socialism," "new revolution," and "take America back" as other inflammatory and hateful rhetoric used by Tea Partiers. Again, is this the best Robinson can do? The Democrats' attempts to give the government control over entire private industries (as mentioned above) certainly at the very least takes us in the direction of socialism, not to mention the self-described socalists in high-level positions in the Obama Administration. "New revolution" and "take America back" are normal terms used by protestors and were commonly used by the Democrats against Bush in 2004 and 2006. In fact, "take America back" was a slogan of Howard Dean's. Not one of these terms are in any way racial or violent. Other opponents of the Tea Parties have pointed out signs that portray Obama as the Joker or as Hitler. This rhetoric is not racial, as these very same claims were made about President Bush repeatedly. I can't even count the number of times I have heard Bush and other conservatives compared to Hitler, the Nazis, and the Gestapo, and a cartoon of Bush as the Joker actually appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine during his presidency. With all those supposedly racist people waving signs, nobody has seemed to find a single sign that is explicitly racist.

4. The protestors shout racist epithets. At the big Tea Party rally on Capitol Hill the day of the health care vote, numerous racist claims were made about the behavior of the crowd. During the rally, Nancy Pelosi and a number of other House Democrats, including several black Democrats, deliberately chose to walk right through the middle of the crowd, even though there was no need for them to do so. It appears obvious that they were trying to stir up the crowd to say or do something inappropriate so they could use it for political purposes. As they did so, one black congressman claimed he was spit on, another black congressman claimed he was called the "n" word, and another black congressman claimed he heard the crowd repeatedly chanting the "n" word. Even though many, many people were videotaping the rally and the congressmen as they walked through, including Jesse Jackson, Jr., the videotapes revealed not a single racist word or action throughout the entire rally. The videotapes clearly showed that the black congressman was not deliberately spit on as he claimed. He walked up to a protestor and the protestor was screaming at him and accidentally sprayed saliva in his direction as she was screaming. The videotapes also failed to capture even a single incident of the "n" word or of any other racial threats. If the crowd was really chanting the "n" word repeatedly as the Democrats claimed, wouldn't somebody's videotape have picked it up? Andrew Breitbart of biggovernment.com has offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who could provide video evidence of racism at the rally, but no one has been able to provide that evidence. The bottom line is that there is no evidence that anything racially inappropriate was said or done at any point in the rally, despite the best attempts of the Democrats to provoke the crowd.

5. The protestors promote and even engage in violence. Robinson makes a big deal of this in his editorial. He points to a comment by Sarah Palin on Twitter: "Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: Don’t Retreat, Instead—RELOAD!" The idea that Sarah Palin was encouraging physical violence against anyone with this comment is laughable. She was merely encouraging conservatives to continue to fight Obama's liberal agenda. Robinson cites a story about someone leaving a coffin in the yard of a member of Congress, which later was proved to be false. And yes, there were a few random threats against members of Congress and a few random acts of violence against political offices -- which is not all that uncommon. But there is no proof that any of these acts were connected to the Tea Party movement. And there were also threats against Republican congressmen -- in fact a Philadelphia man was actually arrested for threatening to kill Republican Minority Whip Eric Cantor. There were some more orchestrated acts of violence that occurred at the Republican Convention in 2008 which actually sent Republican convention delegates to the hospital, but the press barely covered that. Worst of all, Robinson blames Republican and Tea Party leaders for not trying to stop the violence, even though the Republican leadership and the Tea Party leadership both spoke out strongly against it. Robinson cites some unknown blogger in Alabama who has been advocating violence against the Democrats, despite the fact that this nut has virtually no following and has no connection to the Republican Party or the Tea Party movement. The fact is that the Tea Party rallies have been remarkably civil and peaceful. Unlike liberal protests such as the one at the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh last year or the one against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999, there have been no documented acts of violence committed by people attending the Tea Party rallies. Democrats talk about "attitudes and speech that may encourage violence" because they can't point to any actual violence that has been committed.

6. The protestors are racist because some liberal black authors have a sixth sense that they are. I'm not even kidding. That's what Reyes said in the article linked to above. He admits they claim to merely be conservative but insists he can "sniff out" their latent racism. He assumes with no evidence that the Tea Partiers don't like health care reform because a disproportionate number of minorities lack health insurance and Tea Partiers want to keep "minorities in their place." He goes on to say that the blacks who have joined the Tea Party movement "are traitors to their race and the two ideals of democracy and liberty, and they deserve to be called 'Uncle Toms'." Apparently Mr. Reyes has appointed himself the arbiter of who is "really" black and who isn't. If you don't share his liberal political views, then you have betrayed your skin color and don't deserve to be called black. I can't believe that African-Americans don't find this kind of language deeply insulting.

The bottom line is that any kind of political speech can be painted as inflammatory. Protests, by their very nature, attract people with strongly held, passionate views. Yet, the heart of our Constitution is our 1st Amendment right to free speech. It is not wrong or dangerous for ordinary citizens to protest, wave signs, or attend town hall meetings in order to express their opinion. It is not wrong for citizens to criticize their government. In fact, it is a healthy part of our democracy. For years, liberals told us that "dissent is the highest form of patriotism." For years, we saw protestors waving anti-war signs and screaming about Bush being a threat to democracy. And we accepted that as part of what makes this country great.

But now, it seems, liberals can no longer tolerate dissent because it is against them and their agenda. With help from their friends in the media, they are doing everything they can to discredit the Tea Party movement because they know it poses a threat to their political future. And sadly, they are willing to even stoop to playing the race card in order to achieve that goal. It is sad because false racial accusations are harmful to our country. They exacerbate racial tensions and increase distrust between whites and blacks. Tea Partiers are angry because they are being falsely accused, and African-Americans are angry because they are being told that a large portion of this country is motivated by racism. These race-baiters on the editorial page of the Washington Post, as well as other newspapers around the country, are committing lies and slander that could poison race relations in this country for years to come.