At their annual convention, delegates of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People passed a resolution condemning the “racism” of the Tea Party movement. It is important to note that the NAACP is not condemning the Tea Party movement in its entirety but merely “extremist elements” within it and asking leaders to “repudiate those in their ranks who use racist language in their signs and speeches.”
In the brewing battle between the NAACP and the Tea Party, I am firmly on the Tea Party’s side. There are two main thoughts that come to mind about the resolution:
First, why would the NAACP decide to pick on the Tea Party out of all the organizations that exist? Almost every organization has some racist people in it, or mean people, or people who are objectionable for some reason. Why should the Tea Party as a movement be responsible for the fact that some people who identify with it happen to be racist? An organization should not be responsible for the actions or attitudes of its individual members. Ted Bundy was a Republican, for example, but no one (I hope) thought that his murders reflected badly on the Republican Party or expected them to make any statements repudiating him. Plus, even though they shouldn’t be obligated to, leaders of various Tea Party groups have made statements condemning racism and making it clear that racist people are not welcome in the movement.
Second, in my opinion, many of the NAACP’s examples of supposed racist conduct by Tea Party members are not really racist. The NAACP’s website displays pictures of allegedly racist Tea Party signs, including…
- “Obama-nomics: monkey see, monkey spend” – This is just a play on the phrase “monkey see, monkey do.” I understand that the word monkey is sometimes used in a racist way, but it is not automatically racist whenever monkeys and a person who happens to be black are mentioned on the same sign.
- “Obama, what you talkin about Willis! Spend my money?” – I had to look up this phrase in Urban Dictionary. So some of the characters in the show where it originated were black, but I don’t think the phrase is used to insult black people. In this case, the sign is just criticizing Obama for spending everyone’s tax money.
- “Obama’s plan: white slavery” – This sign mentions race and is probably not true, but it’s still not exactly racist. The sign holder is criticizing Obama because he thinks he is a black supremacist, not for being black in itself.
- “Barack Hussein Obama: the new face of Hitler” – Although a dubious comparison, this could be said of a white politician just as easily as a black politician.
- “The American taxpayers are the Jews for Obama’s ovens” – Another exaggeration, and possibly a little disrespectful to Holocaust survivors, but this also has nothing to do with Obama’s race. This sign could just as easily be about a white politician who recklessly spent taxpayer money.
In conclusion, although it is almost certain that some people who identify with the Tea Party movement happen to be racist, this is true of almost every movement, and there are fewer such people than the NAACP seems to think. The NAACP needs to fully grasp the difference between criticizing President Obama and being racist. Criticizing someone who happens to belong to a racial minority is not racist unless you are criticizing them for belonging to a racial minority. Very few people in the Tea Party movement, if any, do this.
Other takes on the same subject:
I was reading a post at the CNN Political Ticker about an NAACP resolution to condemn the “racism” of the Tea Party movement. The post quoted Mark Williams, a spokesman for the Tea Party Express, who made a really good point:
“It’s the Obama administration that rolled back civil rights to a pre-civil rights era with ‘Obamacare’ in which they removed the concept of individual rights…it’s the Obama administration that put a tax on white people with a tanning salon tax.”
I never thought of that before, but it makes sense.
Suppose that there was a product that was used almost exclusively by black or Hispanic people. Then suppose that the government decided to tax it. Wouldn’t the NAACP and lots of other people and organizations call this racist?
Tanning salons are used predominantly by white people, and the Democrats’ version of health reform puts a tax on them. Why is no one calling this racist?
Is it just me, or is there a double standard here?
The State Department has decided to raise fees for a variety of services, including passports. From CNN:
“Officials recommended the hikes after a study found the current fee structure wasn’t covering the government’s costs for the services, the State Department said in the proposal outlined in the Federal Register. The agency received 1,797 comments about the proposal during the public comment period this spring, with about 70 percent of the messages expressing concern about the increase in the fees.”
According to the State Department’s chart, the price of a passport will increase from $100 to $135 (from $85 to $105 for minors), passport renewals will increase from $75 to $110, additional pages will now cost $82 instead of being free, and renouncing one’s U.S. citizenship will cost $450 instead of nothing.
If charging $100 for a little blue book does not cover the costs, then whatever production method is being used must be extremely inefficient. I understand that passports have security and anti-counterfeiting features, but your average hardcover book costs about $25 and is much larger than a passport. There is no good reason why a passport should cost $100, let alone $135.
Remember Joel Tenenbaum, the Boston University student who was ordered to pay $675,000 for illegally sharing 30 songs? Now, he only has to pay $67,500. Federal Judge Nancy Gertner ruled that the award a jury arrived at last summer was “unconstitutionally excessive:”
“There is no question that this reduced award is still severe, even harsh. It not only adequately compensates the plaintiffs for the relatively minor harm that Tenenbaum caused them; it sends a strong message that those who exploit peer-to-peer networks to unlawfully download and distribute copyrighted works run the risk of incurring substantial damages awards.”
The Digital Theft Deterrence Act of 1999 requires that people found guilty of violating copyright pay at least $750 per infringement, but jurors can award damages as high as $150,000 per infringement. The jury in Tenenbaum’s case settled on $22,500, but Gertner reduced the amount to $2250, saying in her ruling that although somewhat arbitrary, that was the maximum amount that was constitutional. Earlier this year, Jammie Thomas, who had been ordered to pay a total of $1.9 million in a similar case, saw her fine reduced to $54,000 or $2250 per song.
A few days ago, the Daily Kos (of all sites) had a great post arguing that liberals should support all of our constitutional rights, including our Second Amendment rights.
“Liberals can quote legal precedent, news reports, and exhaustive studies. They can talk about the intentions of the Founders. They can argue at length against the tyranny of the government. And they will, almost without exception, conclude the necessity of respecting, and not restricting, civil liberties.
Except for one: the right to keep and bear arms.”
Read the rest here.
I wish more liberals thought like this! Liberalism used to mean a philosophy that is basically the same as present-day libertarianism. I’m glad that to the authors of that blog post, it still does!
Quincy Market, Boston, MA
Happy birthday, America! On the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, please take a moment to read this important document. Just like in 1776, we are still fighting for freedom, since freedom must constantly be defended if we want to preserve it.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”
It seems like people in South Korea might have a little more sense left than people in the US when it comes to forcing people to be strip searched in order to fly. That country’s transportation ministry wants to install full-body scanners, which create images of people’s naked bodies under their clothes, in airports, but the National Human Rights Commission is opposed to this:
“The machines may violate privacy as they can generate images of the entire body including any prosthetic devices, the commission said. It also challenged the ministry’s contention that the body scanners would be a reliable and effective way of detecting bombs and preventing terrorism. ‘It is hard to understand the necessity of the device that definitely violates the privacy of passengers,’ the watchdog said in a statement.”
In other strip search machine news, it appears that in addition to taking away everyone’s freedom, privacy, and dignity and blatantly violating the Fourth Amendment, full-body scanners might also give you cancer:
“Experts say radiation from the scanners has been underestimated and could be particularly risky for children. They say that the low level beam does deliver a small dose of radiation to the body but because the beam concentrates on the skin – one of the most radiation-sensitive organs of the human body – that dose may be up to 20 times higher than first estimated.”
Can’t the whole world just abolish these things? Please?
