Charles Blow infiltrated a Tea Party event in Grand Prarie, Tex., on behalf of the New York Times. But, apparently he wasn’t there to listen to the substance of the speakers’ speeches or to judge the content of the audience’s character, no, he was there because he is a black man and he was intent on doing a racial head count of the crowd:
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.
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.”
According to Mr. Blow, the “visual Op-Ed columnist of the New York Times,” the sentiments expressed on stage by the scheduled speakers were insincere, born from a quasi-neurotic state of mind. To hear him tell it, their mere inclusion in the program was a cynically veiled head fake from the organizers for past racial transgressions:
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?
How did Mr. Blow reach these conclusions? Well, according to him, his judgments had absolutely nothing to do with anything he actually saw or heard at the rally. If they did, he mysteriously left those elements out of his column. No, according to Mr. Blow, his conclusions about the real agenda and motivations behind the Tea Party were pre-determined by a CBS/NY Times poll that he probably read and committed to memory before he went to the rally, thus allowing him — like a good New York Times reporter — to fit the facts to his pre-determined conclusions:
It was a farce. This Tea Party wanted to project a mainstream image of a group that is anything but. A New York Times/CBS News poll released on Wednesday found that only 1 percent of Tea Party supporters are black and only 1 percent are Hispanic. It’s almost all white.
And even when compared to other whites, their views are extreme and marginal. For instance, white Tea Party supporters are twice as likely as white independents and eight times as likely as white Democrats to believe that Barack Obama was born in another country.
Furthermore, they were more than eight times as likely as white independents and six times as likely as white Democrats to think that the Obama administration favors blacks over whites.
The majority of the readers of Mr. Blow’s newspaper are male, educated and have an above average income, just like the Tea Party members; unlike the Tea Party members, an inordinate number of Times readers live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The Times‘s Media Kit does not provide a racial profile of its readers (apparently it was only relevant to the Times poll of the Tea Party members). But I used to live in New York and I know which people read which paper on the subway. I’m sure the readers of the Times appreciate Mr. Blow confirming all of the pre-conceived notions they had about the Tea Party.
Given the fact that Mr. Blow’s column doesn’t mention him actually asking any of the speakers any questions, or even talking to any members of the audience, and given he already knew what these people thought since he read his paper’s poll on them, one has to wonder why he even bothered going to the “minstrel show” in the first place.
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