The Tea Party, much like country music, evangelical Christianity, and the Republican Party, fits Ellison Lodge’s description of a movement whose identity is implicitly white and yet whose rhetoric is explicitly non-racial or multiculturalist. The overwhelming majority of Tea Party participants (I’d say 90-95 percent) are white people. The Tea Party leadership, however, has bent over backwards to put colorful African-American entertainers and advocates of free-markets up on stage at every rally, each new one more embarrassing than the last.
When I first heard about this latest controversy, I predicted that, at best, the Tea Party would react as it did against Olbermann and, at worst, it’d stage public hand-wringing and ritual denunciations and become the latest organization to pay a yearly tithe to Diversity Inc. by hiring various anti-racist councilors, consultants, and experts.
I was wrong. The Tea Party Express chairman Mark Williams came out swinging: he dismissed the NAACP as a group simply out to get federal goodies and set-asides for blacks, and on Friday he issued a blog in which he satirizes NAACP “colored person” Ben Jealous writing to Abraham Lincoln. Despite the awkwardness of the piece, Williams gets at something real.
Liberals sense this reality about the welfare state, even though they rarely articulate it, and this is why any forthright call to dismantle the federal government -- no matter how rhetorically colorblind -- will automatically be labeled “racist.”
