The Rev. Jesse Jackson has accused the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers of racism, for treating multigazillionaire basketball star LeBron James as a "runaway slave."
This is the same James who will become his own billion-dollar marketing franchise in South Beach. If only slavery were so sweet.
And the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People played a big race card, accusing the libertarian-leaning tea party movement of harboring racists.
Meanwhile, the political right is accusing the Obama administration of racism for dropping a complaint against a black thug with a club in the New Black Panther Party who allegedly intimidated white voters at the polls in Philadelphia.
With so many race cards in the air, any day now Attorney General Eric Holder might just accuse Americans of being cowards when it comes to race, right after we elect the first African-American president of the United States.
Oops. My bad.
That one already happened, didn't it?
Jackson spent decades crying racism, even when there wasn't any, and sometimes leveraged the race card for his benefit. That boycott against a beer company that ended with a beer distributorship for his sons sure was a beauty, wasn't it?
It's taken years, but Americans have finally tuned Jackson out.
There was a time when all he had to do was even think about holding a protest, and TV news cameras would gather like flocks of ravenous pigeons before the bag lady with the big sack of popcorn.
Offenders targeted by the Rev would fall to their knees, quivering like a Jell-O mold with the horrid floating pineapple chunks.
The offenders would beg forgiveness, rush off to some Orwellian Sensitivity School and ask if there was some group to which they could write sizable checks in the name of fairness and equity.
Bulletin: Americans have already stepped over the great racial divide in 2008, by electing a president who happened to be African-American.
So now, when Jackson whines that a professional entertainer easily worth a billion dollars in salary and marketing deals was treated like a slave, most of us yawn.
A few plucky souls might even lift their beer in a toast and say, "Hey, Rev? This Bud ain't no dud. This Bud's for you."
Now the NAACP, an organization with a historic role in civil rights, seems to be taking Jackson's path to irrelevancy.
At its national convention in Kansas City, Mo., this week, the NAACP offered a resolution condemning what they call "racist elements" in the anti-big government tea party movement.
"You must expel the bigots and racists in your ranks or take full responsibility for all of their actions," NAACP President Benjamin Jealous said.
Let me hazard a guess here. Some critics of President Barack Obama don't like him because he has black skin. They might invoke other issues, but the black skin thing bothers them.
Conversely, some Obama supporters like him because he's black. They might talk about other issues, but it's the black skin that compels them.
But for the NAACP to condemn the tea party as racist and the point of the resolution was to put the libertarian movement on the political defensive isn't only wrong, it's wrongheaded.
I'm no member of the group, but from what I can tell, tea party supporters aren't a bunch of absolute racists.
They're a bunch of absolute heretics.
They're heretics because they distrust and oppose a federal government that keeps growing, telling people how to live and what to do, no matter what party is in power. They're opposed to Democratic tax increases and Republican borrowing. And they want the government to stop gorging.
The heresy of tea partiers is that they're not asking government for anything except to leave them alone. That's what frightens liberal Democrats and corporate Republicans and confounds much of the news media.
Such heresy is also highly threatening to groups that leverage government for access or "outreach" or whatever. The smaller the government, the smaller the pie and the smaller the slice.
And when groups demand that government use skin color to hand out benefits in the form of contracts, promotions, hiring and so on what do you call that exactly?
Racism?
I thought so.
Our latest summertime controversy about race has little to do with real racism.
Americans are smart enough to see real racism and call it out and condemn it.
What we're seeing are politicians who plan to tame the tea party, coming to the movement's defense, Republicans like Sarah Palin, who want those votes.
And we're seeing the NAACP helping the White House by using the race card to inoculate the all-important independent vote the same vote slipping steadily away from Obama from the tea party heresy.
It is the politics of symbolism and rhetoric, funneling Americans into groups, priming them for the midterm elections in November.
This looks like the old broken politics of the past, not Obama's promised politics of transcendence. Actually, it looks an awful lot like Chicago politics, the city of tribes.
And there are a little more than 100 days until the polls open Nov. 2.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People put forward a resolution yesterday formally accusing the Tea Party movement of racism. That's ironic coming from an organization whose mission is to promote the fortunes of one particular racial group.
Post-racial America has yet to arrive for many black leaders. President Obama has shown little interest in leading the national dialogue on race he once proposed, and civil rights groups are unwilling or unable to reach beyond their usual tired rhetoric. Saying the Tea Party movement contains "racist elements that are a threat to democracy" is a shameful slap at the millions of Americans untainted by bigotry who oppose Mr. Obama's radical leftist policies regardless of his color.
The Rev. C.L. Bryant, a black Tea Party activist who used to be an NAACP chapter president in Texas, said charges of racism are lies intended to further a liberal political agenda. ABC News quoted him as saying the NAACP wants to "create a climate where they can say that those on the right are in fact racist and those on the left are their saviors. This is very much what the liberal agenda is about." Blacks who show any signs of independent thinking do so at their peril. In August, Kenneth Gladney, a black Tea Partier from Missouri, was severely beaten by two thugs from the Service Employees International Union. The NAACP started a campaign to defend Mr. Gladney's assailants, saying the victim was an "Uncle Tom" who was "not black enough" to protect.
Last week, the Project 21 black leadership network asked Mr. Obama for the second time to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Justice Department's failure to prosecute New Black Panther Party members for blatant, race-based voter intimidation in Philadelphia in 2008. Project 21 Chairman Mychal Massie wrote that "the problem has festered to a point where perceptions of racial bias within your Justice Department cannot be ignored." The perceptions were reinforced July 6 when former Justice Department official J. Christian Adams, who resigned to protest the handling of the case, testified to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that Justice Department attorneys in the Civil Rights Division were instructed to ignore cases that involved black defendants and white victims. Justice apparently is not colorblind.
Black Panther Minister King Samir Shabazz, otherwise known as Maurice Heath, was one of the people engaging in voter intimidation. He also was featured in a January 2009 video proclaiming to a black audience, "You want freedom? You're gonna have to kill some crackers! You're gonna have to kill some of their babies!" Mr. Shabazz added, "I hate white people - all of them! Every last iota of a cracker, I hate 'em." The Washington Times' Kerry Picket reported last summer on Jerry Jackson, another accused Black Panther and an elected member of Philadelphia's 14th Ward Democratic Party committee. His interests, according to his MySpace page, are: "BLACK POWER, BLACK LOVE, BLACK UNITY, BLACK MINDS, KILLIN CRAKKKAS." These are the kind of violent black extremists that Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice Department is coddling.
No such comparable hateful language has come out of the Tea Party movement. The NAACP's tired racial rhetoric is simply the product of a time long gone. It has been almost half a century since the Civil Rights Act was passed. The United States elected a black president. American society has closed the racial divide. However, those who benefit politically from keeping the racial wound fresh continue to wave the bloody shirt and smear those who disagree with their hard-left political agenda. It will take more than a beer summit to heal the racial wounds these black leaders are inflicting on the country.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/15/2010 00:00 ||
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#4
The NAACP's job is that of a house slave (aka "porch n-----" in the black community), to eat the scraps his master feeds him and keep the rest of the slaves on the plantation in line.
Make no mistake: The NAACP's job is to keep blacks on the plantation as slaves for the Democrats to exploit, and are kept in line by lies in Liberal policy. They farm them for votes, and expect them to step-n-fetch, not to think, when it comes time to vote. The sad thing is, many do just that; they step-n-fetch obediently, and in mindset they are still slaves and are unknowingly forging the links in the chains that hobble and bind them.
Think I'm wrong? Don't look at the rhetoric, look at the results of the past 30 years. Liberal policies have ripped the fabric of the black community apart, promoting gangsterism, denigrating achievement and academics, destroying the black family, promoting unwed mothers and ignoring fathers that abandon any responsibility for their offspring, keeping unemployment higher in black communities than anywhere else due to denigrating individuals and entrepreneurship, glorifying the "thug life", seeding the black neighborhoods with abortion clinics... I could go on and on. The effects of Liberal policies on blacks in the past 30 years appear to be those of an abusive enemy, not a friend.
Black people need to wake up, and get off the plantation.
And before someone calls me out on the term, here is the definition:
porch n----- 1. an expression used exclusively by a black man to describe another black man with whom he disagrees; part of the beauty and power of the expression lies in the fact that it can be pronounced, house slave, but still make the same pointyoure not black enoughwithout the shit-storm that would accompany public usage of the unadorned term.
#5
As far as that Shabazz clown goes he'd not last 5 minutes in any real sort of conflict. Just another loud mouth wiht a microphone, who'd get a bullet very quickly if he could work up the guts to ever try that crap out of the safety of the US's free speech.
Posted by: No I am The Other Beldar ||
07/15/2010 13:02 Comments ||
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#8
Free speech is one thing but isn't it a crime to advocate violence? Isn't that what Shabazz is doing? Excuse me but, as a proud cracker, I interpret his statements as a threat to my life. Isn't that a crime? Why isn't this guy in jail?
Furthermore, isn't his use of the word "cracker" every bit as bad as the dreaded "N" word? Where is the outrage?
#12
Cracker was intended to be hurtful but like Bonny it just engenders laughter. Racist is the only term they have come up with that works. That's why they use it again and again. Ironically proving the target probably isn't racist otherwise the word wouldn't burn.
#13
I was called a "cracker" once. I broke out laughing so hard the asshole skulked off, pissed off, confused and embarrassed. I think it was supposed to insult me. Dumbass.
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/15/2010 21:37 Comments ||
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#14
Georgians love being called crackers funny as hell
Way too early to tell, but if Democrats are driven out of power this November -- and maybe the lose the presidency two Novembers after that -- I think I will know why: arrogance.
They were and are arrogant and they were clueless, which generally goes hand-in-hand with being arrogant. Because when you're arrogant, you haven't a clue about what matters to your subjects, only that you keep subjecting them to what matters to you. Now that's arrogant.
So you challenge in court the illegal immigration crackdown voters overwhelmingly support in poll after poll. Now that's arrogant.
Foist trillions of dollars in stimulus on taxpayers who consistently told you not to, but you did. Now that's arrogant.
Take over scores of industries amid overwhelming protests you were subverting the Constitution. Now that's arrogant.
And spending still more, taking over still more, vilifying still more, scape-goating still more. Yes, even in the face of rallies and protests and election after election, in which voters of all stripes said, "no more." Now that's arrogant.
And that is always politically fatal; from the smartest Cabinet that got us into Vietnam then, to supposedly the coolest, hippest deficit-basher who got us into even bigger deficits now.
Arrogance generally knows no bounds, until finally fed up voters let the arrogant know in no uncertain terms they are out of bounds -- and soon, out of jobs.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/15/2010 00:00 ||
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Summertime, and the race cards are easy.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People put forward a resolution yesterday formally accusing the Tea Party movement of racism. That's ironic coming from an organization whose mission is to promote the fortunes of one particular racial group.
