Time for a Time-Out!

This has been bugging me for months, but I need to say this: the NAACP is not a racist organization! And I also need to say this: the Tea Party Movement is not racist! Although it has become quite fashionable in this post-racial America to throw that accusation around, in fact it is inapplicable in both cases.

At the core, these are patriotic organizations. The difference between them is quite simply a difference of opinion about the proper role of government. On the one hand, the NAACP believes that government is a force for good in our lives whereas the Tea Party Movement believes that too much government is a bad thing.

See, very simple. So can we stop all of the name-calling please?

But as racism is the fly in the ointment, people are always going to see it. Tea Partyers look to the racial makeup of the NAACP and suggest that it is a racist organization because its members are mostly black and NAACPers look at the racial makeup of the Tea Party and come to the same conclusion because of its overwhelming whiteness. Clearly, this is one of those forest but for the trees conundrums for if one does not look closely enough, one tends to miss the full picture.

Thus, a brief history lesson is in order here. Let's start with the NAACP. This is an organization started 101 years ago by a interracial group of activists to fight for racial justice in a very segregated America. That is the short version.

The long version is a bit more involved, including a personality conflict between two very prominent black men, but let's skip over all of that and highlight a key fact of NAACP activism over the years--the NAACP sought to change American within the confines of the law. Challenges to lynching, school segregation, voting rights infringements, and public accommodations were all made by advocates who happened to believe that this was their country too.

Now to the Tea Party. The Tea (Taxed Enough Already) Party can be traced to two key points in American history. The first is the protest by a group of disgruntled Americans who dumped tea into the Boston Harbor in defiance of a tax levied by the British crown an ocean away. This led to the American Revolution which led to us becoming a sovereign nation. Then fast forward a couple hundred years to the point when another disgruntled group of Americans began to protest what they deemed was more taxes levied by a distant and imperial government in Washington.

There might be a lot more to it than that, but I would argue that the current manifestation of the Tea Party is based on a philosophical disagreement with government bailouts of the banking and automobile industries (at taxpayer expense) coupled with the potential of a government takeover of the health care system led many of the Tea Partyers to take to the streets. And at some point in the future, their arguments about less government intrusion into the private market might be proven correct. The jury is still out.

The fact that the Tea Party rose to prominence at the same time we were patting ourselves on the back for electing the nation's first black president is coincidental...only because I am convinced that when the most powerful black folks were Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, none of these folks had anything to say. But they cannot deny the fact that his election and their anger over his liberal agenda may have given cover to all of the racists who intermingle with them now.

Conversely, because the aforementioned black power couple of Powell & Rice associated with the likes of George W. Bush and Co., the NAACP criticized them along with their boss. Yet despite the fact that the president is black and more ideologically in line with their agenda, the organization still struggles to remain relevant in the 21st Century, especially among blacks. Who could forget the tongue-lashing they got from none other than Bill Cosby (who is still black, last time I checked)?

So back to my original point, let's not obsess about the cosmetic differences between these two groups because it does nothing to advance the positions of either. The NAACP efforts to achieve and maintain racial equality are no more racist than the Tea Party protests against the policies of the black president with whom they happen to disagree. America is great because we can belong to both the Tea Party and the NAACP with no inherent conflicts of conscience; furthermore, this country is diverse enough to accommodate the viewpoints of both groups and then some.