The Tea Party Isn't Racist

     

At this week’s NAACP annual meeting, members voted to censure the Tea Party as "racist." But it’s the NAACP that’s the throwback, argues Tunku Varadarajan.

NAACP: Can we all agree that it stands for the National Association for the Advancement of Cynical Politics?

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The proper expansion of “NAACP” has a profoundly archaic ring to it. I know, I know: The retention of that primordial name – the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People – has to do with safeguarding history; and an irrefutably impressive history it is, too. But can anyone deny that the “colored” part of the organization’s name is no longer preservative of anything that is at all meaningful?

Colored: Who the heck says that in the America of today, unless you’re a very, very old friend of the late highwayman (as in dedicated asphalt, not armed robbery) Robert C. Byrd? Which is why no member of this once-courageous black organization will spell out its full name. Everyone says, instead, “N-double A-CP”: To elongate the abbreviation is to expose oneself to derisive – or, worse, baffled – inquisition. (“Dad, Mom, what’s with the ‘colored’ thing?”)

The NAACP, this vestigial bone on the American body politic, has thrust itself into the headlines by voting, at its annual meeting Tuesday, to censure as “racist” the Tea Party movement. This controversial public rebuke – delivered a day after the first lady, Michelle Obama, addressed the NAACP’s conference – has opened up a raw, new racial front in the run-up to the November elections. In effect, the self-congratulatory, post-racial Obama camp is reaching for the crudest weapon in the Democratic arsenal: the racial blunderbuss.

Of course, desperate times call for desperate measures, and the NAACP is going back to an old playbook. The NAACP is resorting to the Jacksonian (Jesse, not Andrew) ploy to use the race card (a) to rally blacks to the mid-terms; and (b) to intimidate the mainstream media, so that it doesn’t report critically on a liberal administration, urging it instead to focus on the perceived sins of the Tea Party movement.

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July 17, 2010