The Ludicrous Right-Wing Attempts To Tie The New Black Panthers To The NAACP.

The attempts to tie the NAACP to the New Black Panther Party fall into two categories: Politically cynical or absurdly reductive.

First of all, NAACP President Ben Jealous made it very clear that he did not believe the Tea Party Movement to be racist as a whole, but was rather asking the leadership to repudiate those racist elements seeking to glom onto the movement. The response from some corners of the right that the NAACP should denounce the New Black Panther Party, are transparently ridiculous.

The NAACP was founded by a diverse group of black and white activists in 1909, and has been one of the loudest voices for integration for over a century. The NBPP is a tiny fringe hate group that preaches black separatism–you literally could not find two groups more diametrically opposed in ideology. The only thing the NAACP and the NBPP have in common is that they’re mostly made up of black people. And I say “mostly” because I’m sure there’s some crazy white dude whose wormed his way into some NBPP chapter somewhere.

Jealous asked the Tea Partiers to take responsibility for the actions of some misguided, self-identified members of their movement. The Tea Partiers have responded by demanding the NAACP take responsibility for the actions not of their members, but of black people as a whole. That absurd, reductionist, collectivist demand is nothing but a refusal to distinguish between people simply because they happen to share the same racial background. I’m willing to grant that these calls are more of the former than the latter, but that doesn’t make them any less outrageous.