If the past is any guide, there's going to be a wave of protestations, followed by grudging, modest, but real actions to reduce the influence of overt, outspoken racists in the Tea Party movement. That's what happened after the NAACP passed a resolution last July condemning outspoken racist elements in the Tea Party and calling on Tea Party leaders to repudiate such elements. Now, the NAACP has gone further. It has just released a report--"Tea Party Nationalism: A Critical Examination of the Tea Party Movement and the Size, Scope, and Focus of Its National Factions"--documenting racist influences in the Tea Party movement from a variety of angles. The report was conducted for the NAACP by the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, and written by Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind, Vice President and President, respectively of IREHR. It focuses attention on six national Tea Party organizations--FreedomWorks Tea Party, 1776 Tea Party, ResistNet Tea Party, Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Patriots, and Tea Party Express-each of which is the subject of a separate chapter. And, as David Neiwert writes at Crooks and Liars:
-- James von Brunn, the white supremacist who killed a Holocaust Museum guard last year, posted on Tea Partner Express partner websites.
-- Mark Williams, former chairman of the Tea Party Express, not only wrote racist screeds, he made death threats against President Obama,
-- Billy Joe Roper, a member of the ResistNet Tea Party who also happens to be the founder of the overtly racist White Revolution organization, indulging in "Nazi glamorization" with his eulogy for William Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, the notorious race-war blueprint.
We also get "profiles of troubling Tea Partiers," including Roan Garcia-Quintana, a South Carolina Tea Party member who the report says belongs to the largest white nationalist group in the country; Karen Pack, another Tea Party member the report says is linked to the Ku Klux Klan; and Clay Douglas, a Tea Party member from Arizona the report says has pushed "militia-style 'New World Order' conspiracies" and "hard core anti-Semitism."
The report also integrates some survey data about Tea Party supporters' attitudes. For example:
Tea Partiers are more likely than white people generally to believe that "too much" has been made of the problems facing black people: 52% to 39%,
Of those who strongly disapproved of the Tea Party, 55% agreed with the statement that black people were "VERY hard working." Of those who strongly approved of the Tea Party, only 18% agreed with the statement that black people were "VERY hard working."
68% of the Tea party "approvers" believed that if only they would try harder, then black people would be as well off as white people. That number fell by almost half, to 35%, when the "disapprovers" answered it.
One can get a very good feel for scope, content and seriousness of the report from the first few paragraphs of the introduction, which reads as follows:
Tea Party Nationalism is the first report of its kind. It examines the six national organizational networks at the core of the Tea Party movement: FreedomWorks Tea Party, 1776 Tea Party, Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Patriots, ResistNet, and Tea Party Express. This report documents the corporate structures and leaderships, their finances, and membership concentrations of each faction. It looks at the actual relationships of these factions to each other, including some of the very explicit differences they have with each other. And we begin an analysis of the larger politics that motivate each faction and the Tea Party movement generally.
The result of this study contravenes many of the Tea Parties' self-invented myths, particularly their supposedly sole concentration on budget deficits, taxes and the power of the federal government.
Instead, this report found Tea Party ranks to be permeated with concerns about race and national identity and other so-called social issues. In these ranks, an abiding obsession with Barack Obama's birth certificate is often a stand-in for the belief that the first black president of the United States is not a "real American." Rather than strict adherence to the Constitution, many Tea Partiers are challenging the provision for birthright citizenship found in the Fourteenth Amendment.
"a 17-page framework for education reform being released Monday by a coalition of civil rights groups amounts to a thrashing of President Obama's education policies and it offers a prescription for how to set things right"
Excerpts from the report highlighted by Strauss . . .
on Race to the Top:
"By emphasizing competitive incentives in this economic climate, the majority of low-income and minority students will be left behind and, as a result, the United States will be left behind as a global leader."
on charter schools:
"while some charter schools can and do work for some students, they are not a universal solution for systemic change for all students, especially those with the highest needs."
on so-called reform:
""Rather than addressing inequitable access to research-proven methodologies like high-quality early childhood education and a stable supply of experienced, highly effective teachers, recent education reform proposals have favored "stop gap" quick fixes that may look new on the surface but offer no real long-term strategy for effective systemic change."
Shirley Sherrod, as most of us know by now, is the Agriculture Department official vilified this week after a distorted video posted by right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart went viral. When the facts were in, it was clear that Breitbart had engaged in an intentional and callous attempt to smear Ms. Sherrod, an African American, and the NAACP with a false charge of racism.
At first glance – and without the facts – Breitbart’s doctored tape seems to be credible, so much so that Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack asked for her resignation, and the NAACP quickly concurred with that decision – all in a span of just a few hours. But wait, let’s go to the whole tape, as Ms. Sherrod had urged. In it, we see the March 2010 meeting at which Ms. Sherrod described an incident that occurred 24 years ago, before she was an Agriculture official. Contrary to the viciously edited tape excerpts, Ms. Sherrod was really telling an admirable and uplifting story of redemption, respect, and racial justice. She had recounted how she had been called upon to help a white farmer save his farm at the same time that so many black farmers were losing. The unedited tape shows how she, the daughter of a man slain by a member of the Ku Klux Klan, America’s homegrown terrorists, had learned to overcome her initial misgivings and looked beyond race to treat all farmers – black and white – fairly.
There were two major modes of viewing the issue raised in the comment that were worth taking note of. First, there was the discussion of racism in the Tea Party, typified by Filler's comment (directed :
You are the type of person for whom no evidence of racism would ever be good enough.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has spent the past few days talking about racism in the Tea Party and those, like Metamars, who enable it, if anyone's interested.
Second was the view of the Tea Party as an example of American white supremacy, which was typified by Oaktown Girl's comment:
Just like 1776
Here's a good Tim Wise link unpacking the take our country back rallying cry. Hard to get a louder dog whistle than that:
How fascinating. That it is factually impossible to separate out the "racism part" from the rest of it is something many white folks seem not to understand. They seem to think there was once a time of innocence when oppression wasn't happening, or that we can easily extract from our accounting of those crimes the great and noble things about our forefathers and view them in some patriotic vacuum.
Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. When the dangerous and dark "other" does so, however, it isn't viewed as normal or natural, let alone patriotic.
The discussion of racism in the Tea Party took up most of the comment thread. It represented far and away the most common perspective. But the song/video was clearly articulated from the perspective that Oaktown Girl introduced, the perspective of the Tea Party as an example of American white supremacy.
There are, as I see it, two fault-lines here worth noting:
Today at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and other leaders joined together to call for urgent action to create jobs and rebuild the economy.
In a live webcast panel discussion, the consensus was clear: Without quick action, an entire generation could be mired in economic turmoil. The nation can, and must, put people back to work-while addressing critical needs for the future of our communities.
The scale of the jobs crisis is obvious: Since the beginning of the recession, more than 8 million jobs have been lost. The official unemployment rate is at 10.2 percent, with more than 26 million unemployed or underemployed. These figures are even more severe among African American and Latino communities. Young people are at risk of permanently stunted opportunity, and the jobs crisis is rebounding throughout the country with increased hunger and poverty, massive numbers of home foreclosures and diminished access to health care.
Trumka will be part of a noted panel in "Spotlight on the Jobs Crisis" at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
With unemployment at its highest rate in more than 20 years, Trumka says America needs bold, quick action to put people back to work, in addition to longer term, structural fixes for our economy. The AFL-CIO initiative he announces will include calls to extend help for the unemployed, rebuild the nation's infrastructure, provide aid to struggling states and communities, create federally funded community-based jobs and increase lending to small and medium-sized businesses to spur job creation.
This week's immigration blog round-up covers a new report on low-wage Latino workers and some state immigration news.
A new Southern Poverty Law Center report finds that low-wage Latino workers in the South are "are cheated out of wages, subjected to inhumane conditions, subjected to wide-spread racial profiling and are regularly harassed by law enforcement." The report also found that:
-Eighty-eight percent of Georgia respondents believed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials targeted and treated Latinos differently, including immigrants of other backgrounds;
-41 percent of responders reported that they had personally experienced wage theft, meaning they had not been paid for work they completed; and
-Although only 44 percent of survey participants were women, 77 percent of them reported that sexual harassment was a major problem on the job.
Last weekend in Baltimore, a coalition of organizations and people of African descent come together to form the Black Immigration Network to address immigration and racial equity issues surrounding African Americans and immigrants of African descent. The convening included participants from the Center for New Community and the NAACP.
The Center for New Community has more on their initiative to address race and immigration here. They reject the notion that immigrants and African Americans compete for jobs and argue that proof of citizenship legislation disenfranchises African Americans.
Representative Michael Honda, Chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, has joined Rep. Luis Gutierrez on the Family Unity tour. Asians make up 12 percent of the undocumented population.
The Latino Coalition is working to ensure that Latino entrepreneurs secure their share of government small business contracts and procurement opportunities. They will be holding an Economic Summit in DC on May 6th.
For more from The Opportunity Agenda, visit our blog.
by Zach Carter, Media Consortium MediaWire Blogger
Progressive media is sounding the alarm on the AIG bonus scandal, demanding that policymakers stop repeating Bush administration mistakes and offering concrete solutions to the dire economic situation those missteps have created.
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich describes the bonus insanity in a blog distributed by AlterNet. "Had AIG gone into chapter 11 bankruptcy or been liquidated, as it would have without government aid, no bonuses would ever be paid," Reich writes, noting that institutions like AIG "are no longer within the capitalist system because they are no longer accountable to the market." If AIG is not accountable to the Treasury Secretary of the country that owns an 80% stake in AIG, then the company has unlimited access to taxpayer coffers without being accountable to anyone at all.
I blogged last week about Comcast manipulating the NAACP in Boston to push their anti-net neutrality agenda. It's a standard move from conservatives, to fund some group called, say, the Disability Council and use it to push tax cuts for oil companies. Now that their ploy in Boston failed, Comcast is moving to the open shill groups, preying upon the subtle bias of journalists, who list all groups with an ethnicity or gender in the name as a 'civil rights group'.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) should allow broadband providers to manage their networks and slow "bandwidth hogs," despite concerns that such practices arbitrarily target some customers, said a coalition of seven civil rights groups.
Net neutrality rules for broadband providers would protect bandwidth hogs at the expense of other customers and civic organizations, said the coalition, which includes the National Black Chamber of Commerce, Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology Association, League of Rural Voters, and National Council of Women's Organizations....
That position puts the civil rights groups at odds with several consumer rights groups, including Public Knowledge and Free Press, which have called for the FCC to stop Comcast from slowing some Internet traffic. Those groups, among a coalition of consumer rights groups that filed a complaint against Comcast in November, submitted their own comments late Thursday, saying opponents of their argument have misrepresented them....
"We need some honesty in this debate," Harry Alford, president and CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement. "Content discrimination is a real threat to an open Internet, but so are bandwidth hogs -- particularly those who traffic in illegal, pirated material. Bandwidth management can be objectionable if it is aimed at censoring certain content, but it is in the consumer's interest if it is aimed at preserving bandwidth for consumers that pay for it."
Maybe I'm not paying attention, but I missed the march on Washington led by the National Black Chamber of Commerce for civil rights, and I missed the statement from the Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology Association protesting the government's abuse of civil rights over FISA.
I did however notice the National Black Chamber of Commerce's denial of global warming (funded by Exxon), it's opposition to the FDA regulating tobacco (funded by Altria), and its work to privatize Social Security because "Blacks, on average, pay far more in Social Security taxes than they can ever expect to receive in benefits."
The NBCC is one of many of these groups funded by telecom interests, in this case Comcast. It's a shame that journalists like Grant Gross of IDG News Service gives them credibility by dubbing them 'civil rights' groups. This is one of the more cynical corporate tactics in polluting our national discourse, using the funding of great brands like the NAACP to build abusive relationships and astroturf groups like the NBCC to push a corporate agenda.
It's very annoying, but it's the only card Comcast has yet to play. This company needs to be broken up, as it is a bad faith operator that should not have control over what is actually public infrastructure, internet and cable access to much of the country.
By now you've probably heard that Comcast hired a crowd to sit in an FCC hearing on net neutrality so interested citizens couldn't get a spot to speak. The gist of Comcast's excuse is that they hired people to hold spots for Comcast employees, though those people accidentally fell asleep and stayed in their seats throughout the entire hearing. Nuts.
Interestingly, there's a bit more to the story, and it involves the cozy relationship between the NAACP and Comcast. Corporate funding of civil rights groups has been a quiet and dank hallmark of liberal politics for decades. Most of the time these partnerships are innocent, but they lead to some coincidentally problematic situations. For example, here's what else was going on in Boston around the FCC the day before the rent-a-crowd incident.
On the same day and location of the hearing, the Boston and Cambridge, Mass., branches of the NAACP plan to host a "take back our media" rally, according to a flier that was circulated on the Internet.
The flier includes quotations from several civil rights groups criticizing Martin's policies on media ownership. The Rev. Jesse Jackson was quoted as claiming Martin supports a "massive new and unjustified welfare for the rich program."
But in a statement Friday, Jackson denied making such a comment and said it does not reflect his position or that of his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. "We have always enjoyed a constructive relationship with the FCC and look forward to continuing it," the statement said.
Martin defended his efforts as FCC chairman, saying the agency has been "active and proactive in taking steps to increase minority ownership."
Most of the quotations took issue at Martin's efforts to push cable operators to offer channels on an a la carte basis. His proposal has met with opposition from the industry, which says it would hurt minority programming.
The flier initially did not include the rally sponsors. A later version, supplied to the AP by a public relations firm, included the NAACP's Boston and Cambridge branches as organizers.
According to Karen Payne, president of the Boston branch of the civil rights group, the rally was sparked by the sale of Boston radio station WILD-FM in 2006. The station's urban format was popular in the black community.
Payne said the NAACP had not authorized the release of the flier, and that as of Friday night, it was still in the draft stages.
So a flyer calling for a rally protesting the FCC under the NAACP's name, put out by a PR firm, and disavowed by the local NAACP as simply a 'draft', was going around on the same day as a net neutrality hearing that Comcast packed with a crowd they hired to prevent net neutrality advocates from attending. And on that very same day, this letter to the editor in the Washington Post attacking net neutrality shows up, from Jose Marquez of the Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology, an astroturf group sponsored by Sprint, the cell phone carrier most aligned with Comcast and the cable industry. In addition, the founder of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, a right-wing group that pushed for the privatization of Social Security in 2005, wrote this piece attacking FCC Chair Kevin Martin for being a racist.
A cynic might say that Comcast, caught red-handed blocking and manipulating the internet traffic of their users is trying to divert attention from the FCC investigation and possible subpoena threat by state AG's by doing a PR campaign around cries of racism. I just think that the NAACP should be a lot more careful in how and when their name shows up when large conservative corporations would want to use their name to distract from their lawbreaking.
The state conference of the NAACP has joined a growing protest against the selection of a Chinese artist to sculpt the tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. planned for the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Is this an issue of civil rights that the state NAACP should be concerned with or just a severe case of racial sensitivity?
Well, sort of. I put up a post about the NAACP in the wake of their convention two weeks ago, with the intent of spurring some dialogue on the huge increase of Africa-Americans who use broadband, from 14% two years ago to 40% today. What's important to understand about broadband versus dial-up is that dial-up is more for casual web surfers and email users, and broadband gets users more into user-generated content tools - blogging, podcasting, youtube, etc. And generating content is both culturally and politically empowering in a way that surfing the web is not. So this is a big opportunity for an organization like the NAACP, which has gone through some rather dramatic and wrenching changes of late.
The title of my post was a quote from BlackAmericaWeb, 'Is the NAACP Still Relevant?' I was certainly surprised that SNCC founder and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond emailed with some thoughts on the question. I've been asked to put up his speech to the NAACP Convention. The specific piece that addresses the 'relevance' question is here, and the full speech is in the extended entry:
A 1993 leadership study by Brakeley, John Price Jones, Inc., showed 75% of blacks believed the NAACP the leader among groups with civil rights, social justice and race relations agendas. An October 1995 US News and World Report poll reported 90% of blacks supported the NAACP. In an April 1998 poll conducted by the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, 81% of blacks reported a favorable opinion of the NAACP.
Now I have the pleasure of announcing the results of a survey taken just two weeks ago. Conducted by the respected firm Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, this poll confirms that our work is both valuable and valued. The NAACP has the highest favorability of 17 organizations working in the civil rights arena. The NAACP is viewed favorably by almost all blacks - 94%, including 70 percent who view it very favorably, and by three-quarters of the general public. Fully 93 percent of blacks surveyed believe the NAACP represents the interests of the American-American community, and 67 percent believe this strongly
Those are genuinely incredible numbers. The full speech is below.
(photo of lone GOP Presidential candidate at the NAACP forum via the Detroit News, h/t Marc Ambinger - note that Tom Tancredo was the only GOP candidate to show up)
That's the title of the email I got from Tom Joyner's Black America Web, a very large portal that discusses African-American politics (though not in a particularly bloggy format). It's a useful question to ask for a number of reasons. One, while growth of broadband has stalled, African-American use of broadband has tripled over the last two years, bringing it nearly into line with whites. I expect significant political developments in black online politics to occur because of that (and because Obama has kicked up a furious and classic debate in the black community). And two, this week was the NAACP's Annual Convention, where thousands of activists gathered.
STATE BLOGS
By now you've probably heard that Comcast 