Tea Partiers Showing Their True Colors
Date: Wednesday, February 10, 2010, 6:25 am
By: Tonyaa Weathersbee, BlackAmericaWeb.com
by
WhatIThink
February 10, 2010, 6:05 pm
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In this April 15, 2009 photo, a man holds up a tea kettle during the Atlanta Tea Party tax protest in Atlanta. (AP)
For some time now, former GOP congressman Tom Tancredo has been giving free rein to his inner George Wallace.
Like the former Alabama governor, whose political fortunes rose based on his ability to “out-seg” his opponents, Tancredo’s future seems to hinge on his demonization of Latinos, black people and others who, by exercising their constitutional right to vote, threatens some white people’s expectations of privilege.
So it happened that Tancredo, a rabid foe of brown people who enter the country illegally, as well as the black man who got into the White House legally, opened the first National Tea Party Convention with a speech that pined for the days when literacy tests and poll taxes once held blacks to being only 1 percent of registered voters in some Deep South states.
“We do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote,” Tancredo said. “People who could not even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House.”
That Tancredo would play to racial fears to trash President Barack Obama isn’t shocking. It’s an old game, one that segregationists like Wallace played when Southern whites were terrified at the idea of having to share classroom space and water fountains with blacks, and one that Tancredo is obviously playing to gin up fears among whites fearful of having to share anything with desperate Mexicans.
What was shockingly hypocritical, though, was that the tea partiers – those self-proclaimed venerators of the Constitution – applauded him.
These are the people who claim that the basis for their movement is built around their concerns about the Constitution – a scared document that they claim Obama is savaging by trying to reform health care and by doing other things not thought of by the 18th century white men who wrote it.
But what apparently went over the Tancredo-applauding tea partiers’ heads is the fact that literacy tests are unconstitutional. The 1965 Voting Rights Act eliminated such tests, and in 1970, when the act was up for renewal, the Supreme Court upheld the ban.
Yet their applause of Tancredo after he expressed longings for an unconstitutional practice doesn’t reveal their deep ignorance as much as it reveals their true intentions.
And their intentions aren’t to preserve the Constitution. Their intentions are to preserve their advantage.
Those intentions always manage to show through – no matter how many American flags they try to cloak it in. What the tea partiers are doing, in fact, is a sad remake of an old film.
It’s the same film that segregationists showed in the 1960s, when Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists were pushing for the end of Jim Crow laws. King was vilified as a communist because that was the racists’ way of conjuring fears in white people comfortable with the status quo; people who were nervous about sharing bus seats and bathrooms with black folks.
Today, the tea partiers, like the segregationists, claim to be saving the American way of life by labeling Obama a socialist. Therefore, they no longer want to share the voting booth with the people who overwhelming voted for him.
Like the segregationists, who didn’t have a problem with government as long as it was used as a vehicle to preserve Jim Crow, the tea partiers only found their anger over taxes and government when a black president was put in charge.
And the fact that they cheered Tancredo’s odious remarks instead of condemning them reveals, once again, who the tea partiers really are. They’re people who like the Constitution as long as they get to apply the rights that it guarantees only to themselves.
And not to the brown and black people who dared used that power to elect a president who doesn’t look like the men who wrote it.
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Green can fetch my coffee
by
AWF
February 11, 2010, 9:04 am
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Can seven whine anymore?I think he needs a bottle and a pacifier.
by
AWF
February 11, 2010, 8:57 am
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WhatIThink, don't try thinking or better yet keep your thoughts to yourself, because from your comment you either retarded or a plant from redstate, get lost you are not welccome here teabagger.
by
Greenmean
February 10, 2010, 10:17 pm
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Well said, thank you Ms Weathersbee. Tancredo needs to keep his fat ignorant racist mouth shut he's only one generation away from having to carry his green card he's lucky his parents crossed the ocean or he may have had permanent red feet from stomping grapes to produce my dinner wine.
by
Greenmean
February 10, 2010, 10:02 pm
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WOW!!! Liberals are amazing. What does it say about T Weathersby opinion of black and brown folk that she automatically****umes them not able to “even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English”. Tancredo doesn’t****ign a race, ethnicity, or color in his comments. Like K. Olberman last night, Weathersby projects her perceptions of Blacks and Browns on others but calls them racist…when the views expressed clearly are her own. SHAMEFUL!!!!!
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