Calling Out Tea Party Racism: Sometimes an Ally Can Challenge It Most Directly

Over the weekend, President Obama had this to say about whether resistance to White House policies were tinged with racist sentiment:

Previously, he'd spoken to the issue of race in America in a stirring speech during the Democratic primary.

I believe he's right in both his prior and most recent comments. Rudeness made Kanye West the talk of the Video Music Awards and rudeness made Congressman Joe Wilson the talk of a recent presidential address to a joint session of Congress. And, at the same time, I also believe that the president's task is to take the long view, a meta-quotidian and transcendent one. He guides the nation as we are and as we will be in years to come for the overall betterment of the country. So a disagreement over what constitutes racism moves no policy forward and certainly doesn't befit the office, and what racism exists ought not be dignified with a reply.

We, on the other hand, aren't charged with such vast, weighty responsibilities. We the grassroots live in narrower--but no less important--realms, ones where on an interpersonal level, a blatantly racist attitude can mean the difference in electoral politics between support for a candidate or not, or support for a policy. When we try to discuss politics, explain our positions, or persuade people we know, the kind of bias held by a person is one we need to be well aware of.

Like many people, I despaired of any progress for our country when I saw September 12, 2009 Tea Party signs in the capital. They equated our American president with Hitler, caricatured him in "foreign/pseudo-Muslim" garb, or labeled him in excoriating terms that seemed far out of proportion to whatever so-called policy disagreements any given Tea Partier holds. The vitriol was hysterical, extremist, overripe--and yet unyielding in defiance of fact or logic.

And yet. This is not Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction era when nativism ruled the day, as much as Sons of the Confederacy would like it to be so. This is not the pre-Civil Rights era, as much as apologists for segregation would have it be so.

This is an era in which racism has found new, post-modern expression, where even people with deep and overtly racist beliefs usually have the sense to disavow their racism in public. This is progress, though it may not seem like it. As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues, the structure's still there, but the coded language and means of attack have gotten subtler, have gone underground. If the 'N' word is in absentia, the racial tropes endure: dangerous bogeyman around kids (school boycott); probably a criminal (stealing from taxpayers to enrich "Wall Street"/"ACORN!!!!!!"); and if also an immigrant or related to one, then "unassimilable" (birtherism). Moreover, the diabolical nature of this underground racism is two-pronged: it mines the dated language of liberalism ("color-blindness") for an appearance of legitimacy and it imparts a diagnosis of paranoia upon the person who seeks to decode these new racist memes. We in the anti-racist movement are challenged to acknowledge the positives of more complicated expressions of racial identity and counter the negatives of more sophisticated packaging of the same old racism.

As an important and complementary effort alongside the naming of racism's operations by people of color, there have been decades of work now by white allies (pdf) on the social construction of "whiteness". How did white ethnics like Poles and Germans and Italians and Greeks and the Irish all become 'white' here in America? Most important of all, there have been decades of scholarship and activism by white allies to identify social structures and interpersonal dynamics where racism persists, and to dismantle it from within.

The first proof of this? The many brave white allies who campaigned for Obama, and in precinct walking, going door-to-door, or talking him up to family and friends, saw raw racism from others up close for perhaps the first time in their lives. (We allied people of color certainly had our own anti-African American racisms to rebut.)

White allies helped sweep Obama to victory at the ballot box by weighing his proposed policies before skin color. White allies consistently educate family and friends and defend the merits of the new president's policies when attacked by friends and family, sometimes at great cost to relationships of many years' standing.

White allies perform undercover work by helping to document and expose the racism embedded in Tea Party protests. They film, photograph, then upload Tea Partiers' ugly images and frame it for what it is: shameful, baseless, and unprincipled. Un-American, because it's anti-progress.

White women in particular joined with women of color to urge that schoolchildren be allowed to listen to the president's address just as they would to the national address given by any other president. White women allies called out purse-clutching alongside their sister women of color.

And finally, white allies like Jimmy Carter, Tim Wise, and Frank Schaeffer have given us frameworks for understanding how racism's new iteration works.

Of the disturbing and extremist racialized language used to describe our current head of state, former president Jimmy Carter said recently:

Jimmy Carter was born in Georgia in 1924. (This year he turns 85 years old.) To give some context of race relations in 1924 in Georgia: at the height of the popularity of the Ku Klux Klan, it was estimated that membership among Protestant white men was 156,000. Much of this was documented by Julian Harris, a courageous journalist who reported on publicly-elected officials who were Klan members in his home state of Georgia and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for doing so. My point in re-stating these incendiary facts is to show how, while former president Carter was born in an era of virulent, violent racism, he nevertheless rejected it. And I don't question former president Carter's acquaintance with racism, given that he's no doubt witnessed the many forms it could take from his childhood onward. He reminds us that we forget our history at our peril, and to be aware of the old embedded in the new.

Tim Wise, a progressive, anti-racist longtime scholar of "whiteness" and race, has much to say about Ayn Rand and her cult of selfishness, which, when combined with ethnocentricism, is a key component of racism. After describing how Limbaugh uses the imagery of "prisoners" "picking up the trash...let prisoners mow some highway grass" to apply a vaguely racial smear the president's speech encouraging all Americans to consider 9/11 as a day of community service, Wise says:

Yet as bizarre as [Limbaugh's] words may seem at first blush, they actually illustrate with bold clarity the fundamental (and increasingly common) core of the conservative belief system. They speak to the sociopathy that is at the heart of the far-right worldview. It is a worldview that holds, quite simply, that doing for others is contemptible; that doing for self is the purpose of human life; that altruism and service are somehow pathologies pushed by collectivists and should be subordinated to selfishness and greed.

Sound too extreme? Well if so, consider this. Among the most interesting phenomena of the past year--and especially since the inauguration of Barack Obama--has been the explosion of interest in (and sales of) books by the late author, Ayn Rand: most prominently her classic novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Indeed, the latter had an all-time record year in 2008, and 2009 sales are on a pace to shatter even last year's numbers.

Far from a simple believer in limited government and a free market economy, Rand's philosophy--now being endorsed by tea party protesters and anti-Obama minions across the nation (indeed the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights was among the sponsors of the 9/12 march on Washington)--was predicated on one overarching notion: that a commitment to selfishness and a rejection of altruistic behavior were the height of morality. That's not to say that she merely rejected compulsory altruism via taxation, but altruism even privately chosen. To do for others, out of a charitable impulse or out of some faith-based commitment, for example, is morally and ethically suspect, for neither feelings nor faith are rational bases for human actions, according to her philosophy known as Objectivism. Unless one's assistance to another were rooted in some self-interested motivation, it was to be condemned.

Jonathan Chait, at The New Republic, also talks about the pernicious influence of Ayn Rand on the American right, despite scholarly discrediting of Rand as a novelist or a conservative intellectual.

Finally, Frank Schaeffer identifies the unholy connection between racism and religion. Once a scion of the religious right, Schaeffer has since renounced his prior beliefs in that movement.

As Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell has pointed out, when Dixiecrats fled the Democratic Party for the Republican Party in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Act, they made snug alliance with northern conservatives all too eager to adopt the "Southern strategy" that's been favored since Nixon onward. Professor Harris-Lacewell contends that the GOP has a special mission to be mindful of not using racist language, tactics, strategy, and imagery in putting forth the conservative agenda. GOP: you bought your Willie Horton strategies, you own them until you disavow them. I agree with Harris-Lacewell.

As do the majority of the American people--of all races, ethnicities, and religions--who also seem to agree. I for one am offended and fatigued by the GOP's shrill, extremist tactics or other types of grandstanding. I know that I'm not alone. Approval ratings for the GOP, a political party which is more and more homogeneous by the day, are extremely low.

Once, a lone drunk, homeless, penniless, unwell white man leveraged an entire system of belief in the superiority of whiteness to say, "I may be low, but I'm still better than you and I'll prove it in one epithet." From his spot on the street, he called me a "chink." I grew up Asian American in this country, and even so it caught me up short to have the ugly tangle of race/class/gender exposed so vividly in a single encounter. Racism is the phantom, threadbare fantasy of superiority he huddled inside but that still let the chill air in at night; cheap warmth. Did his racism help him with a cure for his illnesses and addictions, help him get a job, keep him warm, get a roof over his head? Did his racism help narrow the gap between him and the corporate gazillionaires who run far too much of the world, his world?

Paradoxically, I urge the GOP to continue along its self-marginalizing path with its chosen "Southern strategy." Go ahead, drag out every last ugly thing most people are too polite or too thoughtful or both to root their decisions in, and play to your increasingly small base while you repel everyone else. Marginalize yourself and threaten to hold your breath until you get your way.

The rest of us will continue to call out and reject the incivility, backwardness, intolerance and selfishness that comprise racist fantasies of superiority and entitlement. Because the sooner we as a people abandon racism as a means to governing, the sooner we'll actually have a government, policies, and a people that work for all--for everyone, even that man on the street.

Cynematic writes at P i l l o w b o o k.

Comments

[Julie Pippert]

Fantastic -- and if I may, I need to quote this absolutely brilliant point: "If the 'N' word is in absentia, the racial tropes endure: dangerous bogeyman around kids (school boycott); probably a criminal (stealing from taxpayers to enrich "Wall Street"/"ACORN!!!!!!"); and if also an immigrant or related to one, then "unassimilable" (birtherism). Moreover, the diabolical nature of this underground racism is two-pronged: it mines the dated language of liberalism ("color-blindness") for an appearance of legitimacy and it imparts a diagnosis of paranoia upon the person who seeks to decode these new racist memes. We in the anti-racist movement are challenged to acknowledge the positives of more complicated expressions of racial identity and counter the negatives of more sophisticated packaging of the same old racism."

[Aviva Gabriel]

Calling out #teaparty #racism. MOMocrats blogpost explores a new, post-modern, covert expression of racism. http://bit.ly/Jm9ir

[NHTPC]

Just the fact you entertain the possibility of this idea has you losing credibility. Do you know how foolish you look and sound?

It's going to make your side lose big... people are sick of it.

As for me, I will hesitate to vote for a black man next time no matter what his policies, because I will forever be afraid of criticizing him.

Your is a covert expression of the attempt to mind control.

[Cynematic]

NH Tea Party Coalition,
Strange how you don't want to argue with what Jimmy Carter, Tim Wise, or Frank Schaeffer has presented. I doubt you read or clicked on the videos.

As for looking and sounding foolish, that would be the ill-informed Tea Partiers who showed up at the Mall on September 12, when organizer Glenn Beck didn't even show. I wonder if he was too busy? Did he ever give a satisfactory answer for not being there?

Or did you skip watching that video I included too?

[Siditty]

Aviva,

Explain to my why when it comes to Obama we have questioned his citizenship, even though McCain was born in Panama (on a military base), why Rush Limbaugh has called for a return to segregation, why Glenn Beck refers to the President as a racist, and why the President is being referred to as a communist, marxist, and the anti-Christ. Explain why people like to hold pictures of posters of this man portrayed as an African tribesman, and anything and everything he is criticized for, seems to be based upon rumors rather than fact. Why are people scared for him to speak to their children, when we have had Reagan, Bush Sr., and Bush do the exact same thing? Where was the outrage and fear then?

I don't want people like you to vote for a black man, because you wouldn't anyway, no one said not to criticize the President, it is the manner in which he has been criticized over and over again by a very vocal segment of the population. When you can criticize him and come up with legitimate reasons that don't rely on falsehoods, I will know we have transcended race, but for now, I can't say that because the amount of anger, vitriol, and need to "reclaim America" is very reminiscent of those resistant of desegregation and the strong embrace of "States Rights" to justify segregation during the Civil Rights movement.

[Cynematic]

Oh, Siditty, I appreciate your comments and commitment to anti-racism! I think it's probably that you disagree with the NH Tea Party person as opposed to Aviva. (Aviva's a friendly.)

But I think you're dead-on that some people *say* they're against the president's policies yet they're the first ones to reach for racial language or images to oppose them. And that needs to be called out over and over.

[Eric Pearson]

Many Democrats already know their elected representatives within the Democratic Party have clearly set their own agendas over the members of the Democratic Party, our Nation, and the American people. Overall, many of them no longer think of themselves as being our elected representatives, and now refer to themselves as leaders in the true form of tyrants.

Most Democrats already know their pleas to their elected representatives within the Democratic Party are only being answered by repeated insult and injury. Despite this, we as Democrats can restore control of the Democratic Party back to the party members. All we need to do is cut off donations to the local, state, and national headquarters of the Democratic Party, and to make sure the donations are made directly to worthy and honorable Democratic Party candidates.

Web site: http://www.democraticreformparty.com

[Brianna]

Glenn Beck wasn't there because he was doing a 2-hour special report. After all, somebody had to be on the air to counter idiocies like this one.

Further, if you'd bothered to actually READ anything by Ayn Rand, you might have come across her essay (simplistically titled "Racism") where she specifically excoriates racism and the idea of discrimination based on someone's skin color. She didn't support legislation that forbade individuals from discrimination because she believed that people had the right to believe as they pleased, even if what they believed was stupid and wrong (though she did support the abolishment of all legal support for racism, such as Jim Crow, and the abolishment of discrimination in public institutions, under the premise that government did not have the right to discriminate against any of its citizens). But just because she supported people's right to believe something she hated (unlike many lefists, who only purport to do so) didn't mean that she believed in or supported the idea herself.

Finally, your assertions of "coded language" are simply idiotic. "Color-blindness" is what Martin Luther King was calling for when he asked for people to be judged by the "content of their character." To assume that blacks will automatically lose if people stopped paying adequate attention to skin color is far more racist than any sentiment I have ever heard expressed at any tea party.

[gpracer]

Using Jim Carter as a spokesman is laughable! The segregationist governor from GA. He was quite good (with the help of the bias media) at covering it up. My Washington D.C. birth certificate list "race" as "negro". I have see more than my fair share of bigots in my 45+ years on this rock, most of what I see is in areas of democrat (marxist) infestation. Democrats are the racist party, the party of lies, coercion, socialism, Jim Crow laws, gun bans, I could go on and on.
obama is a marxist that is the reason I dislike him. He disgraces the office of the President and the country by bowing to foreign leaders. Insults the country by apologizing for what is Americas greatness. America has done more to improve the human condition than any other nation in the history of the world. Just in the last 10 years we have liberated 50 million people from tyrants.