Naacp vs.. The Tea Party: Playing The Race Card?

This has been quite the controversial issue.

It has also certainly been big news concerning the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, that iconic civil rights organization that was a big reason for the advancement of African Americans, and their condemnation of Tea Party Movement, which was formed as a backlash to the economic policies and reforms of President Barack Obama, as racists.

On the surface, the fact that these tea partiers are overwhelmingly white and conservative has led to the NAACP’s conviction that they are out to get Obama because they simply cannot accept a black man in the Oval Office, and that this vitriol would not be as intense if he were a Caucasian of Anglo-Saxon Protestant descent.

I’m not too surprised, however, at the tea party’s reaction to the NAACP’s resolution that charged them with having “racist elements” and linking them to white supremacist groups on the Internet. For most whites in America today, being called a racist or a bigot is the most hurtful thing that can happen to them, undoubtedly due to the fact that those terms invoke images of the Ku Klux Klan burning crosses, black men getting lynched for the crime of looking at a white woman, black teens trying to integrate all-white schools under armed guard, and “Whites Only” signs covering the nation’s landscape.

I understand that conservatives such as Sarah Palin and Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams, who incidentally was removed from his post due to a inflammatory letter that he recently wrote, feel that the NAACP is unnecessarily playing the race card in response to the conservative protest movement’s animosity over what they feel are Obama’s socialist economic policies. 

But it’s also my conviction that these tea partiers, along with other conservative whites, just don’t understand.

They do not understand that under the policies of Republican icons like George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, African Americans – as well the poor and other people of color – had suffered with the “trickle down” economics that rewarded the rich and big business interests while exuding an attitude of “To hell with the poor and minorities”, as well as “Why the heck should blacks get special treatment?!”

They don’t understand that just because the “Whites Only” signs are no more and the n-word is seen as vile, extreme hate speech, does not mean that there are not whites who see all blacks as inferior, that there are plenty of Euro-Caucasians, particularly those with conservative views, who wouldn’t dare don white sheets or burn crosses yet feel the same way as the folks who do those things, who feel that they are better than anybody who is African American (or Latino) not only because of skin color, but also because of culture.