The Tea Party Exists Mainly Because Many Rural Whites Just Don’t Like a Black Guy Being in Charge
Like the author, Allen Clifton, I live in Texas. He is right that Tea Party racism is almost comically obvious here. The only problem with the late, unlamented hate blogger Clif Burnett is that he was a little too open about Tea Party positions.
You can’t “prove” racism. Sure, you can use a few examples, but most will be dismissed as the exception and not the rule.
Hell, I can throw up a map showing the states of the Confederacy, the states which supported segregation and the “strongly Republican” states today (nearly all of which are identical) and these people will continue to deny racism has anything to do with their hatred of President Obama.
And I always love how on an anniversary like Martin Luther King’s birthday, his “I Have a Dream Speech” or the Gettysburg Address, Republicans suddenly pretend to be some representative of equality and civil rights.
Because, you know, it was southern Democrats that were the real racists. But what’s actually more believable:
Entire regions, and generations, of Americans magically switched their system of beliefs on equality and race relations, or…
The two major political parties simply swapped ideological beliefs over a few decades.
For that answer, you can just refer to the “Southern Strategy” as evidence of exactly what happened.
Watch, 50 years from now Republicans will be deny that they ever stood in the way of homosexuals gaining equality.
But now Republicans have the tea party. Quite possibly the most hateful, vile, ignorant collection of people to garner mainstream attention in decades. And of course, they deny racism has anything to do with their opposition to President Obama.
It’s funny how racism undoubtedly exists, yet it’s rare that anyone claims to be a racist.
I’m sure it’s just a “pure coincidence” that the tea party happened to hold their first big events immediately after Obama took office.
But let’s be honest, shall we? It’s a reality almost every liberal is already well aware of. The main reason the tea party exists, and has grown to be as popular with hardcore conservatives as it has (especially rural, white conservatives), is that many of these rural whites really don’t want a black man telling them what to do.
That’s it.
Sure, he’s a Democrat, so many Republicans wouldn’t have supported him anyway. But their hatred of President Obama goes well beyond what political party he represents.
And trust me on this. I live in Texas and as I’ve said several times, I hear President Obama referred to as some derogatory term for African Americans far more than I do by his name or as “the president.” You can almost hear it in the voice of many of these white conservatives. They detest the idea of having someone who’s black telling them what to do. “He wants to tell me I have to buy health insurance? Who does he think he is? He’s not my president.”
Their tea party rallies are almost mirror images of protests decades ago against interracial marriage or the ending of segregation. Groups comprised almost entirely of white people, claiming they’re preserving the “American way of life.” But of course they are—for white people.
Hell, I’ve been to a couple tea party rallies. The openness at which racism was embraced stunned even me. I figured there would be some, but the fact that most people didn’t even try to hide it was what caught me off guard.
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