REPORT ON RACISM IN THE TEA PARTY RELEASED BY NAACP/IREHR

So right about now the teabaggers are going insane over the report that the NAACP and the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights (IREHR) put out detaling the areas where hate politics is rearing its head amongst them. If how they responded to last summer’s call from the NAACP for them to repudiate their racists is any indication, they are more than likely not taking note of those particular details, only that the report was done in the first place, which in and of itself is an “outrage”. It’s not going to work. Not this time. The report shows exactly what everyone is talking about, and if the teabaggers don’t address it, the public most certainly will. But don’t get us wrong. There are some responsible Tea Party groups out there that will ante up and bounce the jokers out. Some, as NAACP President Ben Jealous noted, have actually made such moves. Hopefully they will this time. The report can be found at www.teapartynationalism.com.

One People’s Project

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in association with other civil rights organizations, held a teleconference to announce a report detailing the racism found within the Tea Party campaigns of the past two years. This follows the call by the NAACP during their convention last July for Tea Party organizations to repudiate the more racist elements within their ranks.

“For more than a hundred years, the NAACP has stood sentinel against racism and hate violence in the U.S.,” NAACP President Benjamin Jealous said. “We know that we have a moral obligation summarized succinctly in this nation’s in our country’s and America’s Pledge of Allegiance to oppose those who would seek to tear the U.S. apart by espousing hatred and calling for violence against any group in our country. We are one nation under God with liberty and justice for all.”

The Tea Party campaign is the latest incarnation of right-wing activism, much of it spearheaded by those who made up past incarnations, be it the evangelicals of the Christian Right, the anti-immigration activists or militia circles. The report, which can be found at www.teapartynationalism.com, details numerous examples of racist incidents, groups and individuals found associated with the Tea Parties. In addition, they show how certain Tea Party adherents have embraced individuals despite a dubious record on their part of racist and anti-Semitic activity. Report co-authors Leonard Zeskind and Devin Burghart of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights (IREHR) noted of the six main factions of today’s Tea Party campaigns, it is under the umbrella of two of them Tea Party Patriots, and Resist.net, where one will find the loosely organized smaller factions headed up by those engaging in racist politics. Burghart cited in particular Cuban-born Jose Garcia Quintana, a Tea Party organizer publicist in South Carolina who joined the board of the Council of Conservative Citizens, Tea Party Patriots member Karen Pack, who is an official supporter of the Ku Klux Klan while her husband has been a member, and Billy Roper, the former National Alliance Deputy Membership Coordinator and current chair of the group White Revolution who was working with Resist.net when he began to campaign for Governor of Arkansas. “I think it’s important to understand what’s going on isn’t simply a one-way street where white nationalists are trying to infiltrate the Tea Party,” Burghart said. “Even more disturbing to us is how it’s become a two-way flow of traffic between tea party organizations and white nationalist groups.”

Karen Pack is not the only concern regarding Tea Party Patriots. When congressional candidate Jim Russell, the Republican nominee in Westchester County, NY running against incumbent Nina Lowey, was reveled to be the same Jim Russell that edits the white supremacist Occidental Quarterly he was defended on the Tea Party Patriots website in a blog entry from Sept. 26 by a poster by the name of “Conservative Patriot” who termed the revelations of his racist activism as “the newest SHAM and SCAM being perpetrated by the DEMS.”

Zeskind noted further that the most stunning and unexpected development was the fact that the 39 of the 51 members of the Tea Party Caucus created by Michelle Bachmann earlier this year are sponsors of H.R. 1868, a bill to do away with the birthright citizenship clause of the 14^th Amendment. “It goes right to the heart of the 14^th Amendment, and that’s a concern for all of us.”

In addition to the NAACP representatives of civil rights organizations and unions were on hand to lend support to the report and the authors’ efforts, namely the Asian American Justice Center (AAJC), the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), and the Communications Workers of America (CWA). “There is not a place in mainstream politics and discourse for a movement that’s fueled even in part by bigotry.” Karen Narasaki, president of the AAJC said. “We call on leaders of the Tea Party movement and the candidates endorsed by them to use the findings of this independently researched report and expel the factions of self-appointed spokespersons who are connected to these more extreme causes.”

As he had in the past Jealous stressed that this report is not an indictment against the Tea Party campaign as a whole, and noted that there are even Tea Party members in the NAACP. He also noted that some organizations did make some steps to address or reign in some of the overt instances of racism, ranging from The Tea Party Federation expelling Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams after he wrote a racist mock letter to Abraham Lincoln in response to the NAACP’s original call, to Tea Party Nation – the one identifiable Tea Party group that participated in the June 5 rally anti-immigration rally in Phoenix, Arizona whose organizers were associated with white supremacists in Pennsylvania – issuing an anti-racist statement, to Freedom Works, an Tea Party group headed up by former Congressman Dick Armey, work to ensure that more people of color are represented at Tea Party events. “We’re hoping that by shining a larger spotlight that we see more action,” Jealous said.