Part 2: Race
The most damning thing said about the Tea Party by people who dislike it is that it is a racist organization. Given the racial makeup of this crowd, and the prevalence and persistence of the belief that President Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Antichrist, this is a claim that seems to be less than entirely baseless. However, the label ‘racist’ is one of the most dubious in the entire American political landscape, close behind ‘nazi’ and ‘socialist’. It is impossible to prove that you are not a racist—it requires a negative argument, so you would have to present careful documentation of your entire life to prove that you had never said or done anything racist—and individual charges are themselves hard to disprove. Groups like the Tea Party often do rather silly things to try to disprove the claim—for instance; I noticed at the rally that the Jumbo-Tron camera spent a disproportionate amount of time focusing in on a young African-American girl to create the false impression of diversity. All this does not mean that racism was not and is not an enormous problem in the United States, but it does mean that I am always suspicious whenever someone claims that someone else is a racist.
The only time anyone talked about racism that I saw was on the way in to the rally. A group of young, liberal-looking people were putting on a counter-protest, and one of them, a young black man, was shouting that the Tea Party excludes people, which is why the crowd was not multi-racial. I heard a woman walking next to me shout “No, it doesn’t!” quite loudly and angrily as she walked past, the only time at the rally where I saw someone appear genuinely upset. And, to be fair, no one likes to be called a racist, anymore than Bill Buckley liked being called a crypto-nazi.
As I gazed out over the crowd from the Lincoln Memorial a few minutes later, I had a minor epiphany. Myself, I could barely get over how freaking white the crowd was. But many of these folks had come out from places like rural northwestern or central Pennsylvania, rural Ohio or the rural South. I know myself, from my trips to visit relatives in these places, that they are overwhelmingly white. To the people who hail from these areas, nothing must have seemed unusual about the racial makeup of this crowd. It would be impossible for me to have done a meaningful survey of the crowd, so this statement is a bit of a generalization, but given its largely rural, Southern and Midwestern makeup, it seems quite likely that almost everyone there was from a middle or working class rural area that was predominantly white. To them, the charge that their movement must be racist because its rallies include few minorities must seem bizarre.
Especially because their leader, Mr. Beck, went out of his way to talk about Martin Luther King, Jr., and how inspired he was by him. The comparison was a bit odd, given that Beck is pro-military and MLK was a pacifist, and that Dr. King had communist sympathies, but it does say something about the movement’s underlying ideology. If the movement were genuinely, fundamentally racist, it seems logical that Beck’s speech would have included veiled references to it. True, he does claim to support ‘American, Christian values’, with the clear implication that the President does not, but most politicians—and all Republicans—do this. True, many in the African-American community were offended by Beck’s decision to have the rally on the anniversary of Dr. King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, but I honestly believe Beck when he says it was unintentional, and it was clear from the way the podium was set up that he is in no way trying to ape Dr. King. It was insensitive of him, and the lack of protest among members of the Tea Party themselves speaks to a certain level of unconcern with the needs and values of, say, the African-American population of DC. However, overall Beck’s attention to Dr. King indicates, I think, that he is trying to reach out to the black community and make the Tea Party movement more diverse and mainstream.
I am a white man. A remarkably white man, or so people tell me. Maybe, were I black, I would get a different feeling walking through that crowd. But what I did see when I looked around me was a group of people who wanted to effect political changes in the spheres that would affect them. They want lower taxes, less government regulation, less government interference in the economy and an assertive foreign policy. The narrowness of their worldview probably means that they do not particularly care, for instance, about urban poverty and the issues that surround it, unless it means higher taxes. But at the same time, Marion Barry and his constituents probably do not have particularly strong feelings about farm subsidies and agricultural programs unless they mean higher taxes. This speaks to a regionalization and narrowness in outlook on the part of our citizens, but the tea partiers by no means have a monopoly on these faults.
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