{"id":2937,"date":"2010-09-20T01:41:26","date_gmt":"2010-09-20T08:41:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=2937"},"modified":"2010-09-20T01:41:26","modified_gmt":"2010-09-20T08:41:26","slug":"racist-republicans-claim-tea-party-not-racist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2010\/09\/20\/racist-republicans-claim-tea-party-not-racist\/","title":{"rendered":"Racist Republicans Claim Tea Party Not Racist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Personally, I have spied out three local Tea Party events here in Portland.  In all I saw signs racially degrading Obama.  In none did I see a single non-white face.  They love to support racist causes like Arizona\u2019s unconstitutional profiling law and trashing the Fourteenth Amendment.  But Republicans continue to claim that the Teabaggers are not racist.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\"20GOPracists\" Are the Tea Parties racist organizations? No, said three African-American panelists presented with that question at the third and final day of the \u201cTaking America Back\u201d conference here on Saturday.<\/p>\n

But given the fact that the conference was organized by the far-right World Net Daily (WND) and two of the panelists work for the online organization<\/strong>, their verdict was about as surprising as balmy nights and swaying palms on a South Florida summer night. Still, it reflected the anger and resentment that many conservatives have felt over the characterization of the populist Tea Parties as racist.<\/p>\n

Many liberals and reporters have pointed out various signs of anti-black racism within the movement, which took root after Barack Obama was elected the nation\u2019s first black president in late 2008. The NAACP brought that criticism to a new level this July, when it passed a resolution asking Tea Party leaders to repudiate followers who use racist language and symbols. The movement was set back on its heels again a few days later, when Mark Williams, chairman of the Tea Party Express, was expelled along with his group from the National Tea Party Federation after he wrote a satirical letter in which he called slavery as \u201cgreat gig.\u201d<\/strong> Earlier, Dale Robertson, leader of TeaParty.org, wrote an arguably racist E-mail<\/a> to his followers.<\/p>\n

The World Net Daily crowd stands considerably to the right of most Tea Party followers, and it is overwhelmingly white. But the WNDers feel the Tea Parties\u2019 pain, and so the conference offered up what black speakers it had to take on the allegations of racism. They included Erik Rush, a WND columnist; Albert Thompson, executive assistant to Elizabeth Farah, who started WND with her husband Joseph; and Alan Keyes, an ultraconservative activist and oft-times candidate who has called President Obama \u201ca radical communist.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are a few racists in there. In any group, you\u2019re going to find a few people of low character<\/strong><\/font>,\u201d Rush said. But, for most in the movement, Rush said, \u201cThis has never been about Barack Obama. It\u2019s certainly not about his skin color.\u201d<\/p>\n

He spoke to an audience of some 70 people. One of them was black\u2026 [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Inserted from <SPLC<\/a>><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Now, I have no doubt that there are some Teabaggers who are not racists, just as there are some Republicans who are not racists.  However, they are a racist party, simply because they are Republicans, who abandoned their commitment to equality when they adopted the Southern Strategy.  They consistently use every dirty trick their vile imaginations can muster to disenfranchise minority voters, taking away their right to vote.  Why?  Most minority voters are poor or middle class, so the Republican party does not govern on their behalf.  Republicans govern only for criminal corporations and the richest 1%.  So Republicans, and their Teabagger Brown Shirts support racism, and in my book, anyone who supports racism is a racist.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Personally, I have spied out three local Tea Party events here in Portland.  In all I saw signs racially degrading Obama.  In none did I see a single non-white face.  They love to support racist causes like Arizona\u2019s unconstitutional profiling law and trashing the Fourteenth Amendment.  But Republicans continue to claim that the Teabaggers are […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2937\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}