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:
I was going to write a diary about this. But then I came across this clip from Rachel Maddow, from a show that I somehow had missed. It hits all the high points I had in mind, and I don't have to go searching through archives of the NY Times from the 1980s.
Answer to the question I asked: Because that's the way the GOP wants it.
[Update on the Flip:] Some detail on his record prosecuting black voter registration activists for "voter fraud" in the 1980s.
On May 30, 29-year-old Raul Flores and his 9-year-old daughter Brisenia Flores were shot to death, purportedly by a group of far-right anti-immigrant activists who broke into the Flores home by posing as police officers. On Friday, Shawna Forde, anti-immigrant activist and Executive Director of the Minutemen American Defense, (MAD) along with accomplices Jason Eugene Bush and Albert Robert Gaxiola were arrested on two counts of first-degree murder and burglary charges related to the Flores murders.
While Barack Obama's speech on race last Tuesday was widely hailed, even by some conservatives, it was hardly flawless, nor will it put an end to race playing a role in this election. To the contrary, it will almost certainly come to be seen as an inflection point, a place at which the nature of the racial discourse changed, not where it ended or began.
The right's continued racism has been noted this weekend by both David Neiwart and Glenn Greenwald. While Greenwald treats it more tentatively, reflecting his lawyerly background and temperament, he sticks to his guns against "balanced" tut-tutting that would characterize what he's doing as "guilt-by-association" no different than that practiced on the right. Neiwert, however, quite literarly, wrote the book (Rush, Newspeak and Fascism [PDF]) on the orchestrated transmission of hard right (typically, but not always racist or anti-semetic) memes from the fringes into the mainstream, though that isn't his focus in this weekend's post. It's just something that everyone should be thoroughly familiar with by now. Trust me, we're going to need it.
I'll have something to say about both posts on the flip, but first, there's this, from Mel Reeves at Black Agenda Report:
When did Black liberation theology and the prophetic tradition of the black church become "hate speech"? When did asserting that racism was and remains foundational to the nation's settlement, development and culture become itself "racist" and "anti-American"? When did advocacy on a wide range of fronts and issues begin to take a back seat to the advancement of political figures who build careers and multiracial electoral coalitions by convincing whites that they have repudiated what Barack Obama famously called the "excesses of the sixties and seventies."
And, indeed, if one looks at the paragraph of Obama's speech in which he distances himself from Wright, it is clearly troubling from a reality-base perspective...
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