Between the Lines
When racists speak their unspoken truths: Understanding why Tea Party Chairman Mark Williams got kicked out
Tea Party Chairman, Mark Williams, was kicked out of his post over the weekend, after he posted a racist blog in response to the NAACP calling on the Tea Party to purge its ranks of racists.
Without going into what Williams said (go to the blog to read his racist rant), understand he broke the number one rule of organizations where racists are harbored, “Thou shalt not publicly speak our truths.”
The NAACP (and everybody else) would’ve only been able to speculate on the ideology of the group had certain acts not occurred. Listening to provocative speakers (Sarah Palin, Rand Paul) does not a racist organization make. Promulgation of false truths that make up the philosophy of the group and cause the group to act in a certain way (exclude, attack, discriminate) does a racist organization make.
When Tea Party members spat on John Lewis prior to the health care vote, shouted the N-word at other Black Congress members and verbally assaulted gay Congressman, Barney Frank, and the crowd refused to give the person up, the movement validated the claim that it was harboring racists.
The NAACP called them out at its national convention last week. I know I’ve been hard on the NAACP the past few weeks, but this is the advocacy the NAACP is supposed to be doing.
Monitoring racial temperament, responding to legal assaults on our constitutional rights and shining their huge spotlight on racial hypocrisy is the NAACP’s job.
This chasing talking greeting cards and advocating for recreational marijuana stuff is a bunch of bullsh*t.
The NAACP put their finger on the pulse of the next racial movement in America, that was hiding in the Tea Party movement. And the racism is just below the surface. My mom used to say, if you want to know who’s guilty, throw a rock at a bush and watch who jumps out, whether the rock hits them or not. The guilty party will scream the loudest, or run the fastest.
The NAACP threw the rock, Williams jumped and screamed hard saying there were no racists in the Tea Party, then wrote a racist diatribe that got him booted. It’s the same in any company, government, or social environment. You think what you want to. You can act in unison on your ideology in a private setting and in unspoken terms. But once you make it public, that’s a no-no.
Racism is not over. But overt racism isn’t readily accepted, just yet.
The Tea Party Express, the counter-populous movement to Obama “Change” populism, is on the verge of taking over the Republican Party as the GOP seeks to reconstitute its base and its ideology. Their mock dissatisfaction over the state of the country is the baseline of a reconstituted ideology they know the Republican Party needs to listen to. The subtext of their existence, however, is to contain and marginalize President Barack Obama, which is consistent with the Republican Party’s objective of marginalizing the Democratic Party over the next two election cycles.
The biggest core of the Tea Party membership are Southerners, Mid-Westerners and poor Whites, who didn’t vote for Barack Obama, and are still shocked that the rest of the country overcame their racial insensibilities to elect a Black president. There is no other justification for their persistent objection to anything the president does.
But the Tea Party movement is adamant about their cause being about the issues. It’s what racists claimed for 235 years—that American society is about rights (mainly theirs, everybody else’s can be stepped on) and not about race. It’s why racists wore hoods and sheets in public, and why their powerful society that controlled political and economic affairs was always secret. The less you know about what they think, the less you can respond to how they think, even though the social, political and economic outcomes will tell you what they think.
No one ever publicly embraced what Strom Thurmond said in 1948 during the “States Rights” Party formation that allowed Harry Truman to win the election. Dixiecrats momentarily left the party, because Truman desegregated the military. But when Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott said, “We would have avoided all these problems had we voted for Thurmond” in 2002, he had to give up his seat. Verbalizing such thoughts was no longer popular.
No one ever publicly embraced what Bull Connor did in Birmingham in 1963, but when President Lyndon Johnson ended segregation by signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Dixiecrats permanently left the Democratic Party and became Republicans in 1968.
Even when the Democrats elected the first Southern president in more than 100 years eight years later (Jimmy Carter in 1976), those with a “peculiar” ideology were not with him.
And the code words flew with Ronald Reagan’s announcement in Philadelphia, Miss., three years later, that he was running for president. The anti-taxation, individual rights, no race quota, family values conversation, froth with racial inferences, took the country back for two decades.
Obama populism caught this segment of the population off-guard, but it didn’t catch the Republicans off-guard. They knew they had run the party in the ground with an antiquated ideology, and took the country along as well. They were looking for a way to recover, and the Tea Party is the lowest hanging branch.
Not one of the Republican Party front-runners have repudiated any comments coming from the Tea Party. Most have appeared at one Tea Party event or another. Most are tracking the growth of the Tea Party base, despite the antics tied to their message. But vocalizing racism and putting racists up front will temper the movement and re-empower Democrats. That’s the last thing the Tea Party wants.
Don’t look for Tea Party activists to try to run the racists hiding within its ranks out of the movement; they can no more disavow the racists in their own party than they could disavow their White grandfathers who raised them but said things that made them “uncomfortable.” They’ll just have to learn to keep their unspoken truths to themselves.
Anthony Asadullah Samad, Ph.D., is a national columnist, managing director of the Urban Issues Forum and author of the upcoming book, “Real Eyeaz: Race, Reality and Politics in 21st Century Popular Culture.” He can be reached at www.AnthonySamad.com.
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