The word nigger found its way back into our national conversation recently. Some tea party activists hurled the epithet at Congressman John Lewis. Along the way they called Representative Barney Frank a faggot and spat on Congressman Emanuel Cleaver. This venom was supposedly provoked by health care reform; it only revealed how debased our public conversation has become.
It is relatively easy to marginalize these voices as "a lunatic fringe" or as "a few idiots" consumed by irrational prejudices. For most Americans, this way of talking is simply out of bounds. We don't use these words publicly. By locating them on the margins, our innocence remains intact. But I worry that tea party activists are not so peripheral: that their mean-spirited words expose a sensitive racial nerve-ending that threatens, as it always has, the overall health of our democracy.
I am not so sure that our habits of the heart with regards to race have changed. And this worry cuts across ideological divides. Old habits take the form of racist rants or calls for race-neutral public policies. Many liberals, black and white, make the practical argument that President Obama cannot address racial inequality directly, because such efforts would jeopardize his ability to get reelected. That speaks volumes about where we are as a nation with regards to issues of race (It says as much about us and our limitations than about President Obama and his constraints). The idea, it seems, is to rid ourselves - malevolently or benignly - of the fact that individual and structural racism continue to deform the soul of the nation.
In his seminal work, Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah demonstrates that our nation is in jeopardy because our primary language is that of an insidious individualism. We are only concerned about our own individual desires and success. And any idea of the common good gets lost as we mistake our appetites for our needs. Some will even tear down the entire economic system in pursuit of their selfish ends. Ostensibly, our religious commitments should help in this regard. But too often, especially among Christians, we become insular and sectarian. Our faith fortifies our prejudices instead of expanding our reach towards others. When matters turn for the worse, the ugliness of our souls is too often revealed. We scapegoat and, forgetting the lesson of the Good Samaritan, we become indifferent to the suffering of others. Americans have a long history of doing this.
It is in these moments that a robust conception of "fellow-feeling" must be expressed. Not only must we denounce the rhetoric of some tea party activists, we must speak against it with all of our powers. It is not enough to say, as Michael Steele did, that hurling racial slurs or gay bashing is inappropriate. We must condemn unequivocally such words as un-American and as contrary to the view that we are all children of God. Otherwise we conform to them. We become complicit.
The occasion to talk about racism cannot only be these obvious racial flare-ups. Do we need Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to be arrested again or some tea party activist to shout nigger to direct our attention to what is taking place in black communities throughout this country? According to Michelle Alexander, more African Americans are under correctional control today than were enslaved in 1850; more African American men are disenfranchised today than were in 1870. Chronic unemployment devastates black communities and families throughout the nation, and the home foreclosure crisis reveals new forms of racism like reverse redlining. Must we wait until someone publicly reveals the ugliness of their soul? And do we condemn them in order to pat ourselves on our liberal backs?
It seems that much more needs to be done and said here. The tea party movement reminds me of the White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 60s. Theirs was a passionate and, for some, respectable argument against the overreach of government: school desegregation threatened their form of life. They were wrong and needed to be vigorously opposed by their fellows. Sadly many stayed silent. Tea party activists feel that Obama and the federal government pose a threat to their form of life. And they give voice to that worry without any regards to their fellow citizens who disagree with them - revealing the malice in their hearts. But their malice cannot protect our innocence. We too become complicit in this ugliness if we refuse to address, substantively and directly, the night terrors that are engulfing black communities throughout this country.
Nope
They emerged not in response to government excesses or threats to "our freedoms" (any of them screaming about the Patriot Act - the single greatest government intrusion into our civil rights and personal freedoms in history), but in response to the election of a Black man as President - shatteringtheir belief that they had some claim to racial superiority.
They use general and inapplicable terms such as, Socialist, Nazi and Marxist simply because they are too cowardly to say the words they really feel.
Cowards - all of them.
The tea party movement is violent and scary as he ll, but, as most of us know, it came about because Obama was elected and not McCain. They are like the infection that gets worse after you start taking meds to get rid of it. I see the tea party movement as sort of the last gasping breath of a dying way of thinking.
I'm hoping this will work to our advantage. When society remains polite in public and all this stuff is still around in private, there is no way to confront it. With these people being so incredibly open in their hatred of others, they show an ugliness many Americans thought (hoped) had all but gone. They may be winning over a few supporters, but mostly I think they are repulsing the rest.
Speaking up is the step toward change. We desperately need some.
On a lighter note: Tea Baggers are looking a little like pirates these days, eh?
Maybe what is most disturbing is that the expressions that we see in the tea party, et al, ARE the expressions of America, of ourselves- perhaps by degree- but US- regardless.
We have never been honest about who we are as a people- from the very beginning.
We always tout our love of freedom but have a most dismal history in regard to "others" freedom.
Palin ironically referred to the "real" americans as those people who wear the flag of the CSA, and
Teabaggers take pride in the ideals of secession and rebellion.
Christian reconstructionists like Doug Wilson want a nation based on Old Testament law and he has stated publicly that he would support the forced exile of lesbian, gay and transgender people and the execution of adulterers. He also said, "I'm not proposing legislation. All I'm doing is refusing to apologize for certain parts of the Bible."
We must resist these people who in the guise of patriotism, would destroy this nation.
So where in the world were they when Bush and evil Cheney were spending and borrowing like no tommorrow? Where was frugal John Boehner, Mike Pence, McConnell, Cantor, why they were right there, helping them spend and borrow !!!??!!
Is it only Democratic spending they oppose? For fixing the MESS left over from Republicans?
Please give your money, and time if possible, to defeat the right wing nuts; help groups like moveon.org beat these clowns that are so phony, so hateful, so destructive.
The voice in this video is just spewing lies about the tea party protests and that is what is unfortunate. The way liberals diregard the truth is what is causing the divide in this country.
The sign in this video wasn't even at this event. It is one of a just a few signs that contain hate. Do I need to remind liberals of the nasty hate that filled the Bush Protests. Your hypocrisy is frightening.
http://soapboxblogger.com/383/liberals-lie-about-racist-remarks-from-tea-party-protestors/
Perhaps you could explain? WIthout blogwhoring, please?
By Mike Allen
Thursday, July 14, 2005
It was called "the southern strategy," started under Richard M. Nixon in 1968, and described Republican efforts to use race as a wedge issue -- on matters such as desegregation and busing -- to appeal to white southern voters.
Ken Mehlman, the Republican National Committee chairman, this morning will tell the NAACP national convention in Milwaukee that it was "wrong."
"By the '70s and into the '80s and '90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out," Mehlman says in his prepared text. "Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/13/AR2005071302342.html
Conservatives have been playing the race card for decades. Even when it was the Democrats who championed segregation. What conservatives like to ignore, by the time the Civil Rights law came into effect in 1965, most Dixiecrats jumped to the Republican Party (except WV Byrd). And they took their racist followers with them.
Beck and Limbaugh primed the pump of race resentment with their talk of health care being backdoor reparations.
As for Michael Steele condemning tea party antics. If he were sincere, he would resign as chair of the RNC. His service in that post is like the KKK hiring a black lawyer to defend them for a lynching. A black face on the party of perjorative politics and policies.
The post-Civil Rights/Segregation black children of today don't get it. They're totally blind/oblivious to systemic racism at worst, and don't feel threatened by it at best. The testimony of life under Jim Crow is "old time" and isn't relevant to them.
Who will hold the line? Who will be diligent in policing laws with insidious and hidden racist agendas? White men walk the streets for the same crimes black men are serve time for. We still don't make the same money for the same talent, time and education as our white co-workers. We're missing out on jobs where corporations pull credit reports because we often have bad credit, even if the job has nothing to do with money, handling money, etc. Another clever corporate criteria to deny black people jobs.
Skinheads, religious fundamentalists and amoral corporists will perpetuate racism based on fear, hate and power well into the 21st Century. But by 2050, if blacks don't plan ahead, we'll be under the new thumb of Mexicans or East Indians who're destined to inherent the majority status in population and power.
Nope. Lewis made it up and then used this sob lie for political gains.
But fine, I'll play. Link, please.