What’s Behind Tea Party Leader Condemning the NAACP For Making More Money Off Of Race Than Any Slave Trader Ever
We learn so much, each and every day, from the ODS sufferers and the wingnuts. For example, that true racism consists in calling out racism, as evidenced by the rightwing meme that people who point out the blatant racism of the teabaggers are ‘the real’ racists. “I now know the pain of racism!” as one bloviating boil on the buttocks on humanity proclaimed recently, sobbing over the injustice that white people use tanning booths more.
This is quite something even for these expert victims and shameless bastards, tho:
Yesterday, the NAACP approved a resolution condemning “racist elements” within the tea party movement, with its president Benjamin Jealous challenging activists to “expel the bigots and racists in your ranks or take full responsibility for all of their actions.” In spite of the indisputable evidence that racist signs and slogans have been allowed to be displayed at tea party rallies, conservatives have feigned outrage at the resolution, and attacked the country’s leading civil rights organization for daring to speak out.
Mark Williams, the spokesperson for Tea Party Express — a leading tea party group, which has been instrumental in Sharron Angle’s Senate campaign in Nevada, among many others — launched into a particularly hateful attack on the NAACP, accusing the group of being “professional race baiters” who deserve to be sent to “the trash heap” with “all the other vile racist groups”:
WILLIAMS: 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.
Suffice to say that Williams’ claim, in addition to being loathsome, is also a sly wink to the neoconfederates and others who are so eager to refight the civil war and rewrite our textbooks in Texas. These are the sort of people who also want to blame black people for the slave trade, by focussing attention on the role of black people and Africa— and minimising or denying the South’s shame and ours.
This is just another version of the gibbering maniacs at stormfront: “black people deserved it, they’re animals, they did it to themselves.”
Nothing more or less than blaming the victim.
Now it’s part of our national discourse.
See also here: Tea Party Leader Mark Williams: The NAACP is a ‘Vile Racist Group’ for links to NPR and more.