It's been an especially hectic set of days since Tax Day, this past Thursday; a circumstance that left me unable to promptly take up and muse about events surrounding the recent Tea Party rallies.
I'd like to begin by explaining what allows me to call myself bohemian tea partier. (Besides one's inalienable right to call himself whatever he damn pleases, of course.) Logically, the term itself seems counterintuitive, if not outright contradictory. So let me spell it out: I'm a bohemian; specifically, in my case, an ethnic, contrarian weird, socially progressive, ganja-partaking liberal arts student of the (sometimes regrettably called) MTV Generation. But I'm also a self-declared proud member of the Tea Party movement teabagger. That is to say, I am resolutely against bailing out the financiers, and profligate government borrowing for stimulus packages (that aren't). In an era of immense ideological intolerance, my opposition to the prevailing liberal catechisms of a compulsory cartel health care system, the faith-based monstrosity of anthropogenic climate change, its resultant monster of cap-and-tax, and my general disdain for Barack Obama, have placed me at a point of common cause with conservatives and libertarians who comprise the preponderance of the Tea Party movement.
I feel, as Sarah Palin does, that this movement is a "beautiful" development. On a basic level it represents genuine, popular, populist uprising in an era of politics as Madison Ave-orchestrated hype and stale conventional wisdom. As a liberal still, I disagree with the deeply libertarian philosophical underpinnings of the movement, but mostly disregard the difference because we've arrived at kindred conclusions on the compelling issues of the day.
Having moved beyond that important prefatory stuff, I'd like to call your attention to an op-ed in Friday's New York Times. Charles M. Blow--that cool-lookin' dude up there--writes about the Tea Party he infiltrated in Dallas:
I had specifically come to this rally because it was supposed to be especially diverse. And, on the stage at least, it was. The speakers included a black doctor who bashed Democrats for crying racism, a Hispanic immigrant who said that she had never received a single government entitlement and a Vietnamese immigrant who said that the Tea Party leader was God. It felt like a bizarre spoof of a 1980s Benetton ad.
Blow does ultimately make a good point. This passage was cited to give you an example, however, of the sort of obnoxious elitist shit you have to wade through in order to get there. He continues:
The juxtaposition was striking: an abundance of diversity on the stage and a dearth of it in the crowd, with the exception of a few minorities like the young black man who carried a sign that read “Quit calling me a racist.”
The conclusive thought behind the piece is basically summed up like this:
I found the imagery surreal and a bit sad: the minorities trying desperately to prove that they were “one of the good ones”; the organizers trying desperately to resolve any racial guilt among the crowd. The message was clear: How could we be intolerant if these multicolored faces feel the same way we do?
To be sure, Blow is an average liberal elitist whose pen drips with an acute contempt for the subject of his little investigation. But as far as I'm concerned, he strikes an insightful chord when spotlighting Tea Party tokenism. It exists. Just as tokenism has always existed in the modern right-wing quarters; cognizant, for whatever reasons, of potently-levied charges of racial exclusion.
My experience at the Savannah Riverfront Tea Party was akin: I believe I was one of only four or five black patriots present. And I noticed the two black speakers were particularly bombastic; hitting the theme of Proud Black Conservative as stridently as possible.
Blow and I come together on the curious disproportion of black speakers and attendees but where he goes wrong is the automatically cynical verdict he thunders down because of it. He basically takes the presence of tokenism in the Tea Party movement as evidence of sinister manipulation on the part of the movement's (decidedly white, he dutifully reminds us) leaders. Not so. In my mind the frequent, and slightly condescending, attempts to promote the relatively few black faces in the movement is born of sympathetic defensive posturing. There's nothing inherently troubling about the paucity of black (or brown, yellow, or florescent beige) people in the Tea Party movement, and therefore, no need to overcompensate.
If Blow's screed is indicative of establishment liberal thought, we must note a possible shift. While they once remonstrated against the movement simply for its lack of black people, they now castigate the movement's leaders for deliberately--and boastfully even!--displaying its few eager black faces. Ironic how the new sin could well be a realistic description of affirmative action, tokenism's younger, 'roided-up brother.
Condescending, well-intentioned symbolism for me, but certainly not for thee... you racist!
