ANDREW BREITBART: IS HIS RACE-BAITING GOING TO BE CONDONED IN PHILLY?

We actually have to thank Andrew Breitbart in some respects because after the fun we had with him and his temper tantrums earlier this year when we busted his boy James O’Keefe at a white supremacist forum in 2006 (something that O’Keefe is still avoiding talking about), we have been non-stop going around the country using him to make our point. Thing is, if he is still able to cost a good woman her job on his say so because someone in the Obama Administration doesn’t have not the balls but the brains to tell him to go to hell, there’s more work to do. It seems that Saturday in Philadelphia, PA is going to be his next Teabagger event and that rally is significant because the organizers wanted this rally to show that the NAACP is sooooo wrong about them. Breitbart isn’t helping, and the black conservatives who are going to be on this stage kissing his behind are just going to make themselves look stupid. Not all of them though. While the “Uni-TEA” rally is phony in his mission to bridge those racial gaps, that doesn’t mean everyone participating is insincere. There are some folks who have issues with Breitbart’s presence, given what he did – and apparently still wants to do – to former USDA official Shirley Sherrod last week. Some may not participate. Some will in the hopes that it will help start something that will ease the shrill discourse. Sadly far too many of them will prefer that shrill discourse. If that’s the case, we have no problem playing along. That’s one thing Breitbart knows about us all too well!

One People’s Project

PHILADELPHIA, PA—Andrew Breitbart said he wanted to discredit the NAACP’s claims of racism within the Tea Party campaigns. So he smeared a black woman to do it.

Tea Partiers coming to Independence Hall on July 31 want to show that the NAACP is wrong about the racism within their campaigns. And they have invited Andrew Breitbart to speak.

The Tea Party Federation is the organization that ousted a racist from their ranks last week after a racist mock letter to Abraham Lincoln. They are also the organization that is sponsoring what they have called a “Uni-Tea” convention that is to include a number of black conservatives to diffuse the charges of racism seen during tea party rallies. Complicating things however, may be the inclusion of Andrew Breitbart as a speaker.

The vitriolic, race-baiting conservative propagandist has come under fire for using doctored video footage to charge Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod as a racist in response to the much-talked about NAACP resolution calling on Tea Party activists to denounce the racist elements within their ranks. That eventually resulted in her firing until the full video was reviewed and it was learned that Breitbart’s spin on the video excerpt he posted on his website was that of a racist Sherrod admitting to discriminating against white farmers in 1986 was not true. In, truth it was of her speaking about racial reconciliation.

In the days that followed, apologies have been made to Sherrod by President Obama, who has himself come under fire for not acting forcefully enough against right-wing activists, particularly the racist ones, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, who has also offered her another job in the department that she is currently contemplating, and even Fox News show host Bill O’Reilly who railed against her on his program. The same cannot be said for the channel itself, which allowed Breitbart to use them as a vehicle to promote the smear campaign against Sherrod, then once the truth came out took a rather disingenuous stance blaming others on the scandal, because they acted on their reporting on the video.

Breitbart meanwhile, although being the linchpin of the whole debacle, is also not apologizing to Sherrod for his actions. It was in truth, par for the course with him, as he has made a career of creating, and in many respects fabricating, evidence in an effort to attack people of color as racists in the name of defending white conservatives similarly charged. It has won him a prominent place among conservative activists, but his credibility has always been in question with others. And this time, it might cost him; Sherrod has suggested that she may file a lawsuit against him for his baseless attack on her. True to form, Breitbart and his cohorts respond on his various websites continuing to smear her with the discredited racist narrative. In one article on Biggovernment.com, Alexander Marlow opines that Sherrod was not on the Sunday talk shows following the episode because she was being “silenced”. And why? Marlow believes it is because “the mainstream media no longer feels allowing the public to get to know the real Shirley Sherrod advances their agenda.” That stance isn’t taking hold, however. Only Breitbart and the people who love him echo those sentiments. Others have taken more reasonable paths.

Although announced well before the issues with the NAACP, the Uni-TEA rally has garnered some press as TeaParty365 co-founder David Webb began to promote it as a “convention” celebrating what he has seen the diversity within the Tea Party campaign. The event is unique in the sense that it is heavily focused on the participation of people of color, most of the speakers being Black conservatives. Among the musical fare of the day will be a white rapper, a black country singer and New York punk band the Undead featuring former Misfits guitarist Bobby Steele. But as the rally date draws closer, a planned speaker made his position clear.

“I will not share a stage with Andrew Breitbart,” documentary filmmaker Janks Morton told One People’s Project.

Morton, best known for his motivational documentaries geared towards the black community such as What Black Men Think and Men II Boys, does not consider himself to be a part of the Tea Party campaigns. He saw the Uni-TEA event as an opportunity to build a more diverse political atmosphere, and while he has not pulled out of the event, he says he did not know about Breitbart participating and has expressed his concerns about him to Webb, a personal friend of his, in an email. “Either Breitbart is going to be on that stage, or I am,” he said.

There has not been any indication that Breitbart will be disinvited, however. Attempts to reach David Webb to inquire about the issue have been to no avail. Other speakers on the bill have spoken on the issue, however. An email from the National Association for the Advancement of Conservative People of All Colors (NAACPC) says that they view it as an opportunity, and their president, Franz Kebreau will still participate. “If the purpose of life we to cower at the sight of trouble then nothing would be accomplished,” the email read. “We at the NAACPC are using this platform to unite.  If others feel the Mr. Breitbarts’ presence would hinder that goal, then we would hope that the opportunity to bring people together would outweigh the opportunity for division.”

The organization still had issues with Shirley Sherrod however, maintaining Breitbart’s narrative against her. “We must remember that Ms. Sherrod did not disavow her charge that the man she was dealing with was acting in a racist manner,” the email continued. “She merely decided to change her evaluation of the situation from that of a racial issue to a class warfare issue.  She still ingratiated herself to the audience of the moment along racial dogmas.”

The NAACPC response was charitable compared to the one from Kevin Jackson of the blog Blacksphere. Not only did he defend Breitbart, like the NAACPC he also attempted to attack Shirley Sherrod, only with more shrill terms. “I stand firmly behin
d Andrew Breitbart and his attendance at the UNI-TEA,” Jackson wrote. “His ‘expose’ of the NAACP was appropriate. Though the entire tape showed Shirley Sherrod had decided to amend her racist treatment of whites based solely on color, rich versus poor, it was evident that her definition of the rich was ‘rich whites.’”

And therein lies the rub. Sherrod never said in the video that “rich whites” was her definition of the rich, but Jackson, who is himself Black, has a history of racial antagonism against other Blacks in the name of, as posted on his website, “his mission to expose the left’s ignorance and racist political escapades.” Such evidence would be his observations that the left abandoned Tiger Woods in his infidelity scandal “all because none of his mistresses were black” and Ironically, this effort has made him a part of one of the right’s most ignorant and racist escapades, the “Birthers” – conservative activists touting the notion that President Obama was not born in the U.S. He went after Obama along those lines in a op-ed piece on his blog when then-President-elect Obama was leaving the Senate for the White House where he declared, “everybody knows that Obama was born in Kenya.”

Not all of the Black conservatives participating in the event are coming from such an irrational and offensive position. One speaker is actually reaching out to live up to what it was said the spirit of the Uni-Tea rally was about. New Jersey School Counselor and blooger Vanessa Jean Louis is critical while not condemning of Breitbart and is in praise of Sherrod in her article “Lessons Learned from Shirley Sherrod”, found on the blog Afroconservative. She particularly writes on how today’s political climate has become so cold that such episodes like what Breitbart did to Sherrod has pretty much become the norm.

“We all need to just learn the art of respectful dissent,” Louis wrote.  “Even amongst ideological opponents, at the very least, let’s attempt to understand their perspectives. Let’s try to give one another the benefit of the doubt. The Tea Party Movement is against big government, and the NAACP doesn’t want the first “Black President” the target of irrationally emotive harangues from a movement that quite frankly, should have started long before Obama took office.”

Whether or not that will happen remains to be seen, but it is questionable if the Uni-TEA rally will be the vehicle for that. So long as Andrew Breitbart is given a prominent role in conservative politics as he pretends to fight the racism he actually peddles, and innocent people continue to be hurt by his antics, it will not matter how many conservatives of color are paraded in front of cameras to provide an alibi. The Tea Party campaigns will continue to draw fire from people who just see it as yet another disengenouis stunt from a bunch of people who want their country back – from those other, darker Americans.