Not All Tea Partiers are Racist, But Some Racists are Tea Partiers

This month, the NAACP released a 94-page report outlining the links between the Tea Party movement and hard-core white supremacists.

The report, stating the obvious, makes clear that not all Tea Partiers are racists. As much as 18 percent of the adult population sympathizes with the Tea Party's message, but only about 250,000 people form the movement's core. These core members are those who sign up on websites, buy Tea Party literature, and play active roles in Tea Party events.

They also are, in some cases, white supremacists, Anti-Semites, or good old-fashioned segregationists, say researchers.

Tea Party rallies are attractive to white nationalist groups "looking for potential recruits and hoping to push ... protestors toward a more self-conscious and ideological white supremacy" says the document, which also points to Tea Party leaders who have direct ties to white supremacist organizations.

The advisor and media spokesman for a South Carolina Tea Party rally, for example, is also a board member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, the nation's largest white nationalist group. Vitriolic anti-immigrant vigilantes The Minuteman Project form the current leadership of TeaParty.org. And one of the Tea Party circuit's most popular speakers is a militia-style propagandist who's against the separation of church and state and has claimed that the NAACP "has done more to enslave Afro-Americans than all the southern plantation owners put together."

The folks crying Tea Party racism, though, are just liberals upset about the impending mid-term elections, says New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. Liberals just can't believe a band of right-winger activists are knocking Democrats around like leaves in the wind.

A recent study of Tea Party rally signs, says Douthat, found that at one particular rally, 5 percent of rally signs indicated something about Obama's race or religion, 1.2 percent said he wasn't a citizen ("Somewhere in Kenya A Village is Missing Their Idiot!") and 3.3 percent railed against immigrants ("Uncle Sam Wants You To Speak English!"). Racism in the Tea Party is mostly a myth, he claims. The Tea Party even launched a website showcasing their diversity, DiverseTea.

But the fact that Douthat is okay with almost 10 percent of rally signs either being either racially inflammatory or taking aim at people of color speaks volumes about the Tea Party's detrimental effect on U.S. race politics. Racially-tinged political messaging has seen an uptick with the rise of the Tea Party, and with white nationalists on speakers' lists and organizing committees, the movement’s relationships with communities of color remain perilous.

Photo Credit: Calistan