I’m generally skeptical of old school racial pageantry, and I think there are far more pressing issues for the NAACP to be dealing with at a time when the unemployment rate in the black community is more than 15%. So when I heard about the NAACP passing a resolution calling on the Tea Party to condemn the racist elements in its movement, I sort of shrugged my shoulders. It reminded me of the kind of useless theater the group has undertaken in times past, like the ritual symbolic burying of the word “nigger.”
Yesterday the NAACP sent out an email asking members to sign a pledge that had some more specific information about what the group was trying to do:
The NAACP does not have a problem with the Tea Party, nor its existence. We have a problem with their acceptance and their welcoming of prejudice into their organization.
And in case there is any misunderstanding about what defines racism, let me be clear.
In March, racial slurs were hurled at members of the Congressional Black Caucus as they passed by a Tea Party health care protest in Washington, DC. Missouri Representative Emanuel Cleaver was spat on. People at the rally held signs covered in bigotry.
Again, I’m not sure the racist elements of the Tea Party merit a condemnation from the NAACP, nor do I think they’re much of an obstacle to black advancement. But the incident in which Rep. Cleaver, Rep. John Lewis, were slurred by activists protesting the Affordable Care Act was an outrage–and while conservatives deny it happened, but when it comes down to he said she said I’ll believe the man who risked his life on The Edmund Pettus Bridge. If the resolution was focused on this and incidents like it, I don’t really see the harm, I only hope the organization had the decency to include a condemnation the slurs directed at Rep. Barney Frank.
Then there was the reaction from Mark Williams, a spokesperson for the Tea Party Express:
You’re dealing with people who are professional race baiters, who make a very good living off this kind of thing. They make more money off of race than any slave trader ever. It’s time groups like the NAACP went to the trash heap of history where they belong with all the other vile racist groups that emerged in our history.
This statement is part and parcel of the broad inversion of history inspired by figures like Glenn Beck, wherein traditional civil rights groups are opposed to racial equality and the modern conservative movement, which was borne out of opposition to segregation, is the true inheritor of the legacy of the fight for racial equality. Part of buying that myth is believing that the U.S. is now engaged in widespread systemic discrimination against white people, and if you watch FOX enough you just might.
Conservatives like to accuse liberals of supporting social programs that help minorities out of a sense of white guilt, but the irony to this is that the conservative insistence that black people are “the true racists” is itself an attempt to cope with a legacy of discrimination that privileged white people at the expense of minorities. While guilty white liberals seek personal redemption through identifying as liberal, conservatives seek absolution by telling themselves “the real racism” is coming from those they’re being told it’s wrong to hate. It’s an attempt to steal whatever “nobility” they believe exists in suffering as a result of bigotry. This are simply two different “solutions” to the same dilemma.
Personally I have no use for white guilt of any kind. It’s one thing to support social programs out of a broader sense of obligation towards your fellow citizens, or to feel a special obligation towards historically favored groups. But anyone who thinks they’re going to “absolve” themselves of some kind of ephemeral historical guilt is eventually going to find that guilt curdling to resentment when they don’t get their merit badge.
As for the NAACP’s resolution, I doubt it’ll do much good. We’re at a point where charges of racism, even when legitimate, have little actual meaning. But between the wall to wall coverage of the New Black Panther Party case, Rep. Steve King‘s ranting about the president having an “automatic preference” for black people, Rush Limbaugh‘s accusation that Obama is wrecking the economy as payback against white people, and Beck’s insistence that the president is racist, there’s certainly one side of this argument that is blaming racism for all their problems.
But it isn’t the NAACP.
