Conservatives have been trying to get the NAACP to condemn protesters at a liberal event who apparently called for Clarence Thomas to be lynched and “put back in the fields.” Conservatives have grown to see the NAACP less as an advocacy organization and more as a blunt instrument to be wielded against Republican politicians who offend liberal sensibilities on matters of race. The NAACP also drew the right’s ire with a report last year that tied some Tea Party organizations to racist and nativist groups. Liberals have had a lot of fun with taking these kinds of videos of random people saying offensive things at conservative rallies over the past few years, it’s hardly surprising that conservatives are doing the same thing.
As for the NAACP, it’s mostly a hypocrisy argument–if you’re going to condemn every single thing a Republican says, why aren’t you responding to these noxious, disgusting remarks by anonymous protesters? For Glenn Reynolds though, it’s an opportunity to use the same kind of offensive language he’s demanding the NAACP condemn (via Oliver Willis):
A bunch of pathetic house negroes living on the Democratic Party’s plantation. There’s no reason why anyone should take anything they say seriously any more. They’re certainly not a civil rights, or racial equality, group, as their recent behavior illustrates.
Here, Reynolds posits himself as a true champion of black rights, employing the language of Malcolm X to condemn the nation’s oldest civil rights group for not spending more time policing the real life equivalent of the comment section on a blog. Although it’s hard to see Malcolm nodding approvingly at a white person’s guide to which black people are niggers as Reynolds has.
Because he’s defending a black person, Reynolds sees himself as suddenly imbued with the authenticity to refer to black people he doesn’t like as “house negroes.” It’s a thinly veiled justification for using the kind of language he’d presumably prefer to use more often. Certainly no one is fooled, least of all Reynold’s audience, who are likely just as delighted at having an “excuse” to refer to black people using terms they wouldn’t dare employ if they weren’t merely hammering them into a keyboard.
The NAACP did object to signs and remarks at Tea Party protests, but the group really does more than simply police the public discourse, which it does poorly. There are more pressing matters of racial equality and civil rights for the nation’s oldest civil rights organization to deal with. What conservatives are really looking for here is not so much a condemnation of the protesters remarks (they don’t even have the names of people to condemn), but a kind of admission of responsibility that would allow them to portray the protesters’ ugly views as widely representative of the left as a whole. They want to do to liberals what they feel was done to them for the past two years.
