Life Sucks in Black Urban Communities? Blame the Tea Party!

Other than the Klan, is there a more useless organization in American than the NAACP? Violent crime in black urban communities remains unsettling, the learning gap between black and other students still exists, marriage is all but nonexistent among poor blacks, and all too many households are headed by single mothers.

So where does the NAACP level its attack? Beyond street crime, apart from dysfunctional communities, ignoring the skyrocketing rates of HIV AIDS, they say the real problem for black folks is … the Tea Party movement. Benjamin Jealous, the NAACP’s president, says Tea Party activism is “pushing the country backwards.”

But wait, the problems facing urban black communities pre-date the growth of Tea Party formations by a significant number of years. But facts aside, since the end of the 1980s, the NAACP has been completely unable to craft an authentic agenda dealing with the real issues facing black communities.

So what’s a stuffy, out-of-step civil rights group to do? It throws down the victim card and places blame for its organizational failures in odd places.

Last time I checked, most Tea Party formations are organized around issues like limited government, maximum individual liberty, free markets and fiscal responsibility. Issues of race have not been a featured part of any Tea party gathering in any place that I’ve been aware of.

But, facts to liberals are like kryptonite to Superman. And neither facts nor logic seemingly played a role in the NAACP’s decision to take up a resolution at its national convention condemning “The Tea Party”for”explicitly racist behavior.

This refers of course to the fact that some idiots have occasionally displayed offensive, stupid posters and banners at the edges of the crowds. But why should Tea Party organizers take responsibility for the irresponsible acts of a few clowns at the fringes of events? If I attend a Tea party event, stand at the back of the crowd and hold up an idiotic poster, does that make me a “Tea Party member?”

If we’re going to play that sort of “gotcha” game, why has the NAACP been silent about the racism and anti-Semitism of the so-called New Black Panther Party? One of its members was caught on videotape arguing for the “killing of white people” and “killing white babies.” Prior to this, two Panther members were videotaped outside of polling place in Milwaukee brandishing a nightstick and verbally intimidating voters during the last presidential election. Should the NAACP be charged with repudiating these black thugs?

However, the NAACP resolution charging the Tea Party with racism also trades on the old and discredited claim that Tea Party “members” spat on and hurled the N-word at several black members of Congress during debates over Obama’s healthcare bill.

There’s only one problem – like other urban myths, none of that ever happened.

Andrew Breitbart has offered the handsome sum of $100,000 to anyone who can prove the epithet “nigger” was uttered, or that anyone intentionally spat on the politicians. As I write this, that hundred grand still sits, month’s later, gathering dust, in Breitbart’s bank account.

Over the past several decades something interesting has taken place in the nation. Racism and its ideological superstructure have all but disappeared from our society. In case the NAACP was asleep during the last presidential election, the country elected a black president, and we have a black Attorney general as well. That hasn’t worked out real well, but that’s another story.

But somehow the folks running the nation’s civil rights groups, like the NAACP, seemingly have missed critical developments over recent years and continue to pretend that racial politics haven’t changed much since 1962. Victim politics are a hard thing to give up.

Here’s the bottom line. The NAACP is the nation’s oldest black civil rights organization. This once-proud institution took part in the strategic dismantling of Jim Crow laws and in-your-face white supremacy.

This is a group that has struggled – and failed – to maintain is bearings in modern times and now plays the sad role of an adjunct arm of Democratic Party politics. Seemingly the NAACP only exists now to promote the politics of Big Unions, Big Government and racial identity.

Would anybody really care, or notice, if it just folded its tent and slunk quietly away?