Time to stop the (tea) Party

It is hardly a secret in or beyond black communities, that the majority of black folks are conservative—if not ultraconservative—when it comes to morality, parenting, work ethic, homosexuality, gender roles and the like. Indeed, any black person that resides on the far left of the political spectrum—as I do—can bear witness to this reality. (I, for one, have the scars to prove it)

The plain and simple truth is—beyond race-centric issues such as racial profiling, police brutality, economic discrimination, institutionalized poverty—black folks’ politics align rather closely with those on the Right, if not the far Right on several matters.

The question of the hour, then, is why aren’t throngs of black folks flocking to the Tea Party. If you answered, because they love Barack and Michelle Obama, you’d only be partially right. The other glaring reason is that the Tea Party (which is comprised primarily of disgruntled GOP purists) come off, more often than not, as apologists for racist behaviors.

A dramatic case in point is the response that the Tea Party has recently exhibited toward the NAACP’s condemnation of perceived racist elements in the movement—namely, the blaringly derogatory depictions of Barack Obama as an African witch doctor, monkey, Hilter, and coon on handmade signs (and now billboards) that are frequently and prominently on display during Tea Party rallies and gatherings.

Rather than engage the NAACP’s claims seriously, Tea Party spokesman Mark Williams responded by calling the organization racist. Why, you ask? Because they still retain “colored” in the organization’s official name. This is the same Mark Williams that, until recently, had penned an open letter on his website, mocking the NAACP and black folks at large. In the letter, addressed to Abraham Lincoln, Williams cast African Americans as mindless, bootlicking, Tea Party haters.

Worse yet, he plays upon age-old stereotypes of black folks as welfare-loving, social parasites. At one point in the letter he writes, “The racist tea parties also demand that the government ‘stop the out of control spending.’ Again, they directly target coloreds. That means we Coloreds would have to compete for jobs like everybody else and that is just not right.” The question is not whether this is a racist document, but how can any rational person argue otherwise.

Let’s be clear here, this is not about supporting or defending the NAACP, a group that has a less than stellar history when it comes to color and caste bias. Williams’s comments are offensive because they are racist, not because they attack the NAACP. As for the Tea Partiers that don’t espouse this type of thinking—and I’d like to think that there are more than a few—it is high time that you speak up. For if you remain silent and allow Williams and his ilk to speak for your movement, you will have lost more than the black vote, you will have lost all of your political integrity.

“Watch Your Mouth (Uncle) Tom: How Our Black Pride in the President Works Against Us”

The morning after the Democrats were trounced in two significant gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, Tom Joyner remarked on "The Tom Joyner Morning Show" that a large part of the blame rested squarely on Barack Obama’s shoulders. The Democrats lost, Joyner argued pointedly, because black people stayed home. And they stayed home because Barack Obama has basically ignored them since he’s become president. Noting sardonically that Obama was “around all the time” on the show during his historic run to the presidency but had yet to appear on his show after being elected, Joyner issued a warning to Obama. If he expected to get elected again in 2012, he’d better not forget about black America. When Joyner went to the phone lines, allowing his listeners to weight in on the topic, he was roundly lampooned. Recalling the heat that Tavis Smiley—a longtime commentator on Joyner’s show—took from the black community after admonishing then Democrat candidate Obama for failing to address black social concerns in his political agenda, Joyner found himself in the proverbial hot seat. One caller went so far as to label Joyner an “Uncle Tom” for his criticism of the president. The message that was coming across the lines was loud and clear. Criticizing Barack Obama—especially if you are black—is off-limits. Politics be damned.

The salient problem with this posture is that it confuses strategic political agitation with betraying the African American community’s best socioeconomic interest. It is not, in fact, a contradiction for one to be both proud of Barack Obama’s accomplishments from a cultural perspective and fiercely demanding of him on a political front. Maintaining such a posture is not only healthy for the democratic process, but necessary if one expects the black community’s concerns to get aired and taken seriously in the public domain. The uncontested king of the sound bite Al Sharpton put it best on Joyner’s show when he quipped, “We elected a president not a Messiah.” Unlike Joyner, however, Sharpton hoisted the blame for the gubernatorial losses onto the black community, arguing that blacks at the grassroots level need to become more active in the political process—namely, by supporting the president’s initiatives such as healthcare—if they expect their circumstances on the ground to change. And, perhaps on some level Sharpton and Joyner are both right. However it shakes out, the cold, hard truth is that the black community is in serious trouble economically and socially and nobody seems to notice. In their recent op-ed article, “The Destruction of the Black Middle Class,” acclaimed writer-activist Barbara Ehrenreich and inequality researcher-activist Dedrick Muhammad sound the alarm about the downward socioeconomic spiral of black middle class. Debunking the widely held notion that the socioeconomic circumstances for the black middle class are steadily improving over time, Ehrenreich and Muhammad point to a study by Demos and the Institute for Assets and Social Policy that reveals that at the start of our current recession—which officially began in December, 2007—“33 percent of the black middle class was already in danger of falling out the middle class.” They write that for the black middle class the recession actually began in 2000. Between 2000 and 2007, “black employment decreased by 2.4 percent and incomes declined by 2.9 percent.” During this stretch, “one third of black children lived in poverty and black employment—even among college graduates—consistently ran at about twice the level of white unemployment.”

The major headline a few days ago was that the national unemployment rate had tipped over the 10% mark. Quiet as its kept, the black unemployment rate at the beginning of the recession was already around 15% and will, in all likelihood, eclipse the 20% mark before the year is done. Moreover, the income gap between African Americans and whites is widening rather than narrowing. Suffice it to say that Africans Americans across class lines have very little reason to have hope at the moment. Not only should Tom Joyner be speaking up and out, but the black community should be backing him up rather than shouting him down. Insofar as Washington politics go, the squeaky wheel of mass public agitation gets the grease of media coverage and political attention. "Silence," however, as House Majority Whip James Clyburn warns us, "is consent." While the symbolic capital of having a black family in the White House and a black man at the helm of the presidency fills many of us with hope for our future, the reality is that hope won't explode structural inequalities, end poverty, secure jobs in the black community, improve our educational system, or pay our bills. "When you pray," goes the ancient African proverb, "Move your feet."