One of the things I appreciate about the blog Politics, Policy, Pathology and Hope Within The Black Community (how’s that for a blog title?) is how often he asks “why do we focus so much ire and attention on that perceived potential threat to the black community but ignore these constant actual threats?” He puts it well in recent post “Non-racist assaults to the black community – thwarting the racism chasers”:
I have stated previously that as we aggregate all of the threats to the Black community and then stack rank them based upon their threat level, preponderance and proximity – there are more “non-racist” acts that will never be labeled “civil rights violations” against Black people (despite being so) than those which are labeled “RACIST” and thus raise the ire of the NAACP and other leftwing actor-vist groups.
Street pirates killing robbing and terrorizing actual black people versus Glenn Beck and the Tea Party movement.
By the way Politics, Policy, Pathology and Hope has been on a roll lately. From one brilliant post a week to something like 2-3 each day. Getting hard to keep up. My only mild warning/critique is that the writing style is not always easy to follow.
Back to the news. So the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People wants to pass a resolution about the Tea Party movement.
Stop by and give some love to Another Black Conservative who addresses the absurdity of the resolution against the Tea Party movement – and also offers a thoughtful defense (and mild critique) of First Lady Michelle Obama.
Once again the NAACP is still trying to fight pre Civil Rights era struggles in a post Civil Rights era world. They will even go after a media made racial boogeyman to do it. The NAACP is working with the false story from the media that Tea Partiers hurled racial slurs at black congressmen. To date not a single video of the incident has ever emerged and the media itself has seems to drop the story all together. Yet here is the NAACP getting all fired up about it now. If the NAACP thought there was truth to this story, they should have made noise when it happened, instead of waiting until now.
Why did they wait you ask? Because the midterm elections are now four months away and the NAACP is more about shilling the leftist agenda than they are about the “advancement of colored people”. Rallying blacks against the Tea Party is more important to the leftist agenda than tackling the real issues facing the black community like poor schools, unemployment or the devastating effects of drugs and crime.
Timothy Dalrymple serves up a gumbo pot full of truth and reason with his essay “Is the Tea Party racist?”
These arguments are, however, mere justifications for a position already taken. Liberals were inclined to believe Tea Partiers racist even before such “evidence” was available. That is, the belief that Tea Partiers are racist is not an evidence-based belief. It is a belief in search of evidence.
What I propose, then, is the Theory of the Missing Motive. Since the education establishment has failed to convey a thorough and unprejudiced perspective on differing political points of view, even highly educated liberals possess a cartoonish, easily-dismissed image of American conservative thought. Liberals cannot believe that Tea Partiers are actually motivated by the passions and the reasons that Tea Partiers claim motivate them, because liberals in general are alienated from those passions and insufficiently educated in those reasons.
It is essentially a failure of imagination. Liberals cannot imagine themselves into a way of thinking in which conservatives do what they do and believe what they believe for good reasons. And since they cannot believe that conservatives are motivated by rational beliefs and admirable motives, they must appeal to darker, more primitive impulses to explain their behavior. The racist motive presents itself as a natural and convenient explanation.
Liberals, in other words, were always going to believe that a movement dominated by white conservatives is racist.
* * *
If you were not already inclined to consider Tea Partiers racist, you would not find the evidence compelling.
Elizabeth Scalia aka The Anchoress also exposes the lack of intellectual honesty behind such charges of “racism”.
“We’re deeply concerned about elements that are trying to move the country back, trying to reverse progress that we’ve made,” NAACP spokeswoman Leila McDowell told ABC News. “We are asking that the law-abiding members of the Tea Party repudiate those racist elements, that they recognize the historic and present racist elements that are within the Tea Party movement.
Emphasis mine. Does it matter at all to Ms. McDowell et al. that the rare racist behavior exhibited at any conservative/libertarian gathering is explicitly condemned by the vast majority of tea partiers, and so the repudiation she seeks is already a reality?
Here’s another perspective the NAACP could have offered, had they wished:
“…while there is still work to be done in America, it is heartening to see that when racist behavior is exhibited it is quickly condemned by people of good will in all spheres of society; we work toward the day when racism will exist no more, and the fact that it cannot grab a foothold even among those whose concerns we do not share gives real hope too us, that the dream of Martin Luther King and of so many anonymous, tireless workers for social justice can and will be realized for all God’s children.”
That would be a statement everyone can get behind, because all reasonable people want that. If people really do want to see continuing progress made in converting distrustful hearts and minds, a positive statement like that would be much more effective than the one they’re using.
This country needs someone in authority, somewhere, to acknowledge something good about its people, and to mean it. Lacking that–and we are–such a statement from the NAACP would be something good. And it would have the added benefit of being true.
What does it say when we demand someone do something they have already done? Does it not call into question the sincerity of our demand?
Once again for the record I am not a member of the Tea Party movement although I am sympathetic with its concerns. I think the country is heading in a disastrous direction – and Congress is at least as much to blame as is the Obama administration – and am troubled by apparent efforts to use the racism charge to silence political dissent. First they come for the Tea Parties and all that.
