Tea Party organizations are hard at work proving themselves to be racially diverse

This story, from The Daily Caller, is beyond depressing. I had thought that the proper response of the Tea Party to the absurd charge of racism was to say: “The Tea party has nothing to do with race. The Tea Party came into existence in order to fight the Democrats’ statist and socialist policies. If the Tea Party happens to be overwhelmingly white, that’s not because nonwhites are excluded from the Tea Party, it’s because nonwhites happen to be overwhelmingly on the left and so are not interested in the Tea Party. The left’s attempt to call us racist, which means evil, is really a way of saying that no conservative and white group has the right to exist. Such a totalitarian tactic has no place in America. If any all-white group is racist, which means evil, simply by virtue of being all white, then white people themselves are evil, simply by virtue of being white. That position is far more racist than the supposed racism of which we have been falsely accused.”

That’s the way I would have responded to the accusation of racism. As you will see below, it is not the way the Tea Party has responded. Instead, the Tea Party has taken the absurd racism charge seriously, and has set about proving that the charge is not true, by showing how racially diverse the Tea Party really is. The Tea Party has thus accepted the left’s premise that any organization or group that is all-white or mainly white is ipso facto racist, which means that the only way a conservative organization can prove itself to be non-racist is by conspicuously including lots of nonwhites. As I’ve often said, in order to be morally legitimate in today’s America, you have to have a black person symbolically attached to you at the hip. The Tea Party has no problem with that politically correct charade, but has embraced it.

Thanks a lot, Tea Party, for putting your seal of approval on the left’s “racism” charge and on the leftist demand for obligatory diversity. What a great blow you have struck against the left and for freedom!

Here is the article:

FreedomWorks fights back against NAACP’s accusations of Tea Party ‘racism’
By Matthew Boyle—The Daily Caller 12:46 AM 09/07/2010

Dick Armey’s conservative organization FreedomWorks is readying for the launch of a comprehensive political program aimed at debunking the NAACP’s race-charged attacks on the Tea Party movement.

FreedomWorks President and CEO Matt Kibbe said the organization will roll out Diverse Tea, a platform and advertising campaign that will showcase diversity in the Tea Party movement, sometime this week or early next week.

“The idea is to create a platform for African-American Tea Party leaders, Hispanic Tea Party leaders and Jewish Tea Party leaders to get out there and talk about why they’re involved and why these issues matter so much to them,” Kibbe said.

Kibbe said the NAACP is trying to change the conversation from the “failed policies of the stimulus and they don’t want to talk about unemployment and they sure as heck don’t want to talk about a government takeover of health care.”

The NAACP is just one of the many left-wing organizations that fear the Tea Party, Kibbe explained.

“It’s ironic that the left that so eagerly celebrates the notion of diversity is attacking what I believe to be the most diverse political movement in my lifetime,” Kibbe said. “They [the left] are afraid of the Tea Party and, frankly, they’re afraid of the diversity of the Tea Party. If you actually take the time to get to know the people in the Tea Party movement, you see an amazing amount of diversity—not just different skin colors but people literally from all walks of life that have united around the idea that the government is too big and is spending too much money it doesn’t have.”

As a part of FreedomWorks’ overall counter to the NAACP’s teapartytracker.org, former Garland, Texas NAACP chapter president and current Tea Party leader, The Rev. C.L. Bryant, is developing a feature-length documentary called “Runaway Slave.”

Bryant, who left the NAACP because he was upset with what he perceived to be the organization’s focus on liberal politics and lack of interest in civil rights, said the film will show viewers how organizations like the NAACP use their clout to keep people under their control. He says he’s a “runaway slave” in modern terms because he isn’t accepting the status quo.

The whole idea behind the film, Bryant said, is to encourage Americans to “flee economic slavery, run toward the blessing of liberty.”

“Two Octobers ago, when John McCain and then-Senator Barack Obama came off the campaign trail to sign onto to TARP, I realized that this was going to enslave the American people,” Bryant said.

Bryant said the film is going to take on the ideas of the current left establishment by showing viewers stops along the Underground Railroad between Atlanta and Delaware.

“There are people in the world who do have shackles on them, but here in America, a person has full rights of the Constitution, regardless of their skin color,” Bryant explained. “In fact, I defy anyone to name one thing in this country at this point in time that would hinder you from being whatever you want to be because of your skin color—it just does not exist.” Brendan Steinhauser, FreedomWorks’ director of federal and state campaigns, can’t believe the NAACP would say the Tea Party is racist—he says he has been to numerous Tea Party rallies and hasn’t met a single racist yet.

“Al Sharpton and his National Action Network doesn’t have any real support among the American people,” Steinhauser said. “There’s a very stark contrast in what we’re doing—everyone pays their own way, they organize the buses locally, they fly in and pay their own way, they stay in hotels and pay their own way.”

Kibbe doesn’t think the left will ever stop trying to taint the Tea Party movement. If it’s not charges of “racism,” it’ll be something else.

“Racism is the latest in a long series of attacks trying to discredit the men and women of the Tea Party movement,” Kibbe said. “First, they were ‘fake,’ then they were ‘puppets’ for some corporate interest and, then, when those didn’t work and reporters went out and actually started to talk to these folks and realize that they were real and their concerns were real, then they started with the more nasty stuff.”

Bryant said he’s hoping the documentary will be done by next spring. He is currently waiting on donations to start flowing into FreedomWorks from the general public to get the rest of production completed.

- end of initial entry -

Mark Jaws writes:

As a devoted and effective activist in the TEA Party in Virginia, I totally concur with your analysis and your approach. In looking at NAACP summits and conventions, I see nothing but a sea of black faces. And yet, the NAACP is called a fine and excellent organization by the leftist media, despite the fact that in the recent past it has invited Farrakhan and his cohorts of kooks from the Nation of Islam to speak at NAACP functions. Same could be said with La Raza or MEChA. But please don’t confuse the actions of the so-called “national leadership” of the TEA Party with the individual chapters or state associations. There is no real national leadership, which at this stage of our development is an asset. We are a loosely held confederation bound by principles of free and open markets, freedom of association, and freedom from federal tyranny. If FreedomWorks wants to play the diversity game, let them. It will fizzle. We all know that at the national level the Right is so bereft of principled and courageous leadership that if our movement is to survive and thrive, it will have to be from the bottom up, propelled by the local activists such as I, who hold firm to steadfast and time-tested principles and could not give a shoot about diversity. Our doors or open to everyone, particularly to patriotic Hispanics who have been in this country for over a generation—but I am not going to coax any ethnic minority to join my local TEA Party for the stupid reason of meeting diversity quotas. I thought that is what we are supposed to be fighting against.

Sophia A. writes:

I thought your critique of Matthew Kibbe of FreedomWorks was brilliant, but what good does it do if it merely remains on your website?

Send a message to Kibbe himself:

http://www.freedomworks.org/contact

I did.

Put his contact info on your website and urge all your readers to respond to him.

September 11

Roger D. writes:

I have to compliment you again, Larry. This is something that Republicans do all the time. The Republican Party and the establishment types especially. It drives me crazy. Don’t they realize that when they do so they have accepted the principle and now are just arguing degree? I can’t believe they are that dense. I suspect that they really have no principles and it is all a matter of the most pragmatic approach to gain power. Absolutely demoralizing to see grassroots tea party folks do the same thing. I stun people when I tell them that I was back in the 1964 and remain today opposed to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. For a brief few moments Rand Paul said he opposed the act but then when confronted did the new dance craze of so-called conservatives, “The Crawdad.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 08, 2010 08:03 AM | Send