Tea Party Racism Is Liability White America Can’t Afford

It looks like the mainstream media has finally decided to quit ignoring the rancid stench of race based hatred that fuels a lot of the anger behind the Tea Party movement. I guess the media thinks now that they deserve a pat on the back for taking an entire year to conclude what the blogosphere picked up on instantly—that the idea of a black man as the leader of the most powerful nation on earth has caused a vocal subset of white America to lose their minds.

If the media really wanted to make amends, it would give all the money it made from the increased viewership they got when they elevated this trumped up abomination of a political movement to center stage for months on end to HBCU’s. If the media really wanted to make amends, it would include minorities from diverse backgrounds, and not just their darker skinned fraternity buddies from Yale and Harvard and Columbia, at the editorial table, the place where the decisions are made about who should be covered, why they should be covered, and what slant should be applied to said coverage.

Even now, when the Tea Party representatives are being featured on cable news networks, not one program producer in the entire country can find the gumption and the hour or two it would take to get their staffers to put together a three minute video that alternates between photos of White Citizens Council protestors of in the 60’s and Tea Party protestors in 2010 that they could run for their Tea Party guests before asking for an explanation on camera. How hard is that? How hard is it to ask point blank questions? Did Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes have his style of questioning copyrighted so no one else in the media can badger an interview subject when the answers they give are weak or ridiculous, or totally refute reality?

There are still quite a few white people in this country who aren’t willing to accept a black man as their president. The black bogeyman, as we’ve seen this past year, is still one of the most powerful agitators in the business of politics. But the Tea Party leaders have finally had to come to grips with reality—with the fact that publicly hating black people for no other reason than they are different looking has been out of style for some time. By tolerating abject racial bigotry among its ranks, the Tea Party has forced white people with good sense to start thinking about how much of a liability it can be to be associated with them.

It seems to be the kind of liability white people with good sense cannot afford to keep in the new millennium.