What the Tea Parties Really Want: A Return to "White Man's Country"

[marmar]

via AlterNet:




Black Agenda Report / By Margaret Kimberley

What the Tea Parties Really Want: A Return to "White Man's Country"
"We want our country back" is not just an anti-Obama call to action. It is a call to revive the idea that America should belong to white people.

August 9, 2010 |


After all is said and done, what much of the so-called Tea Party wants is a return to America as a White Man’s Country. There are a few obstacles in their way, including the U.S. Constitution, but that’s not insurmountable. “On a daily basis pundits and politicians rear their ugly heads to say that the children born of undocumented persons should no longer be given American citizenship.”

The founding fathers made one think perfectly clear when they ratified the constitution in 1787. Full citizenship rights were meant only for white men of property. Over a period of nearly 200 years, people’s movements guaranteed that those rights were extended to everyone regardless of race or gender, but the fact that the struggle literally took centuries should not be forgotten. It is tempting to snicker at the sight of today’s Tea Party members, grown men wearing knee breeches and three-cornered hats. Yet their costumes tell an important tale. They evoke an era still seen as the high water mark of American society, the days of the enslavement of one race and the extermination of another. This movement has captured the Republican Party outright and leaves even some Democratic politicians and pundits in a state of fear and/or awe.

The pull of that early history is ever present for many white Americans. No matter the degree of progress made, the adherence to the evils of America’s early days are never far from the surface. Simply put, there are too many brown faces for the liking of a majority of white people. Even the president has a brown face. His very presence has been a shock to the country’s system and to the mythology which says that only white people are truly American.

For decades, the presence of undocumented foreign nationals has been an accepted fact in the United States. Estimates of their presence run as high as 11 million. In the very recent past that presence was considered positive, a proof of America’s attractiveness to the rest of the world and a boon to industries dependent upon their labor. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/147781/what_the_tea_parties_really_want%3A_a_return_to_%22white_man%27s_country%22/

[Orrex]

1. That's been the rallying cry of Right-racists and Libertarians for decades

Nothing new there.

[starroute]

11. What's new is that they're willing to throw democracy under the bus

As long as they were comfortably in the majority, it was easy for them to pay lip service to the democratic principle of majority rule.

But now that the prospect of not being in the majority is staring them in the face, they're frantically trying to come up with ways to disenfranchise as many voters as possible.

Their particular targets are precisely those things that we were all taught in school were the greatest achievements of the expansion of democracy. The 14th amendment. Popular election of senators. The abolition of literacy tests.

And I suspect there's one other element in play -- a fear that if they lose control, a new non-white majority will bully and exploit them as mercilessly as they exploited minorities when they had the upper hand.

I think that's their own feelings of guilt speaking. I don't see any likelihood of it actually happening. But if they're projecting their own sins onto others, it would go a long way to explaining their absolute terror of seeing those others gain any share in real power.

[Orrex]

12. Ah, yes--good point

Much like the Right's notion of bipartisanship: when they're in the majority, bipartisanship means doing what the GOP wants; when they're in the minority, bipartisanship means doing what the GOP wants.

[tblue]

2. Yup. It's just not PC to come out and say it in that way

so they say it in every possible other way.

[BrklynLiberal]

3. Amazing that these a-holes forget that unless you are a Native American, you

MUST be the descendant of an immigrant to this country..
The presumptiveness and arrogance of these people is amazing.

I guess that the greatest irony here is those areas with the most anti-Hispanic vitriol, were originally
Spanish colonies, and some of those Hispanic families have been in America for centuries before some of those "white" folks.

[Submariner]

4. The republican teabagger party has just decided to take off their hoods

until now they hid in shame, now they just don't care with racist cheerleaders like Limbaugh, Fox noise and the rest of the hate radio and hate TV riff-raff leading them on to 'take their country back.'

[d_r]

5. I agree

But I honestly bet that most of them don't think of themselves as "racist" and I bet that most of them don't actively DISLIKE people of other races. I wish there was a new word. There is that hot, evil, loud, direct RACIST, and there is another type of racism. It is still racism, but it is softer, colder, based more on ignorance than on hate. They don't HATE people of other races, they just are clueless. So they THINK they aren't racists, because they don't HATE. But they are. I wish there was another word.

[izquierdista]

6. Dislike vs. Hate

This is one place where their slippery-slope arguments are valid. There was plenty of hate before the Nazis started rounding up Jews to send them off to the death camps, but it all started when they identified the Jews as a separate (and lesser) "race". All the racist needs is a little bit of success demonizing a race of people and he's off to the races (to use an appropriate turn of phrase). He doesn't want to stop, and vows that no one's going to keep him from his goal of purifying his surroundings of those polluting races.

Racism is a boiling pot. It can simmer quietly, it can be a slow boil, it can be bubbling over; but it is still boiling and can burn anything that comes in contact with it. The lid needs to be put on it, and the heat taken away, so that any expression of race-based likes and dislikes is socially unacceptable. They need to be conditioned to keep their preferences to themselves and realize that people from other cultures, skin tones, national origins, and sexual orientations have the same human rights as they do. If there is something that they dislike, they can keep quiet about it and exercise their right not to associate with those they don't want to.

[NC_Nurse]

7. Not just return to white people, return to white MALES. They want women to

shut up and sit down too. They consistently oppose equal treatment for women and reproductive rights. They want to party like it's 1899.

[sallyseven]

15. Right snd the sooner the better.

[mwooldri]

8. Should this "Children born to parents of undocumented status" be made retroactive?

Like maybe about 300 years or more?

Could someone please show me all of the founding fathers' birth certificates? I don't think they qualify for US citizenship...

[The Backlash Cometh]

9. I'm waiting for all of you to figure out what it is they're trying to protect.

They have already established themselves in certain counties, controlling all the law enforcement agencies, judges, lawyers. Through the chamber of commerce, rotary club and other assorted cliques, they wheel and deal, break laws and continue to get away with pilfering their own communities.

This is the advantage they're trying to protect. This is their way of life. They don't see the disconnect in calling themselves Americans and acting like carpet baggers.

[wisteria]

10. I don't think the idea of a apartheid like government in America is actually what these people want.

I think they are more driven by fear of what they don't understand and of what is happening in our country, and a need to feel someone is listening to their needs and concerns.

I don't support the Tea Party and I would suppose there are some prejudiced people involved in the movement-but to suggest their motives and goals are purely race related is just not right, and this article does nothing but stir up anger and resentment by simplifying something that is actually more complex.

[Jade Fox]

13. Their goals are not exclusively race-based....

but fear of people of color is clearly a huge, if sub-conscious, motivation for Tea Partiers.

That Tea Party types are frightened and confused is understandable, but they've got to take some responsibility for that themselves. Change happens. We cannot afford to sympathize with the Tea Party's gullibility and fascist tendencies. Plus, many Teabaggers strike me as people who've never given a single thought to the needs and concerns of anyone else. What do you do with people like that?

[The Magistrate]

14. Spot On, Sir!