Charles Blow, Back for More, Still Thinks You're a Racist

The New York Times is letting Charles M. Blow write again. They’re not doing him any favors. Here’s his lede:

Racist. Tea Party.

Are those separate concepts or a single one? Depends on whom you ask.

Probably best to stop reading right there, not only because — just as with the other Times regular columnists, each of whom has one or two little hobby horses they ride — you can pretty well predict the rest of the column, but also because it’s embarrassing to Blow. But let’s continue:

According to an article accompanying a Washington Post/ABC News poll released on Wednesday: “About 61 percent of tea party opponents say racism has a lot to do with the movement, a view held by just 7 percent of tea party supporters.”

This gulf of perception has left Tea Party organizers struggling to scrub the stain of racism from its image, but those efforts may fly in the face of the facts.

So let’s see: because in a new poll more than sixty percent of Tea Party opponents think that “racism” has a lot to do with the movement, the Tea Party has a problem? Well, sure. It has a problem with the famous “gulf of perception” that people like Charles Blow, his Times colleagues and journalists around the country are doing their best to widen — or even fabricate.

The Tea Party is a Frankenstein movement — an odd collection of factions, loosely stitched together, where the head, to the extent that it exists, fails to control the body.

It has attracted hordes of the disaffected with differing interests, including some who’ve openly expressed their dark racial prejudices and others who polls suggest harbor more subtle and less visible biases. Opposition to President Obama triggers a political Pavlovian response among some of these people, and they want to ally themselves with others around a common enemy.

Like many writers on the Times, it’s clear that Blow lives in a fantasy world in which malevolent racists disguise themselves as flag-waving grandmothers, and the dreaded “Christian Right” is always poised to strike at the urban ethnics on both coasts, although it never quite does.

There is no way to know how many Tea Party supporters — or supporters of any group — are motivated by racism, or to what degree. For instance, one could legitimately ask: to what degree is African-American support of the president motivated by racial pride, and when does that pride cross over into prejudice?

There are no easy answers, but blanket accusations and denials are worthless and disingenuous.

So why make them, then?

… widely cited polling, like the multistate University of Washington survey released last month, has found that large swaths among those who show strong support for the Tea Party also hold the most extreme views on a range of racial issues. The fringe theory is a farce.Their other strategy is to repress, deny and redefine. Following their logic, racial views not visible are nonexistent and those who raise the issue are simply projecting. It’s a fete of Freudian delusions.

Tea Party organizers may want to run away from the facts, but they’re not that fast, and the American people are not that slow.

Let me make sure I’ve got this straight: because Tea Party opponents think that Tea Partiers are racist, the Tea Party has a problem with the “stain of racism,” and although no overt racism is visible, it’s got to be there anyway, otherwise why would the Tea Parties have a problem with racism?

“Racist. Tea Party… It’s a fete of Freudian delusions.”

Oh well, one out of three ain’t bad.